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Best Service in a Restaurant

L'Escalier at the Breakers

Great service in a restaurant is about making you feel as though you belong. Some dining establishments have an easier time of this than others. Diners, for instance, would seem the perfect choice to make you feel at home. They are informal, unpretentious, low intensity. But at the palatially elegant L'Escalier, the wait staff manages to treat every customer like a regular -- a regular member of royalty, that is. Dining here is like having your own personal butlers for a few hours. Food is placed on the table, and removed, with the quiet precision of a Swiss -- or Japanese -- watch. A master sommelier advises on wine with the assuredness that you'd like to experience with your stockbroker. Should you retire to the restroom, your chair will be dutifully pulled, your napkin crisply refolded. Service is smooth, sweet, formal, and thoughtful. Most refreshingly, no member of the wait team will ever interrupt your dinner conversation with a chirpy "How is everything?" It is assumed that if anything is needed, you'll let them know. Amazingly, this professional and elegant service is provided without a hint of pretension. Even the best of butlers have a hard time pulling that off.

Best Restaurant When Someone Else Is Paying

Cafe Boulud Palm Beach

Local heirloom tomato salad with herbes de Provence: $13.

Sirloin burger with foie gras and black truffles on parmesan bun: $29.

Truffle-braised snapper with Vichy carrots, pea shoots, and pommes croustillantes: $36.

Bottle of DeLille Cellars' Chaleur Estate Meritage, 2000: $140.

Warm upside-down chocolate soufflé with pistachio ice cream: $13.

Dinner at Cafe Boulud when somebody else is picking up the tab: Priceless.

Best Restaurant to Die in the Past Year

Hoot, Toot & Whistle

One of Delray Beach's most distinctive dining venues has hooted, tooted, and whistled for the final time. Built to take advantage of a location adjacent to railroad tracks, Hoot offered the Orient Express, an old-fashioned wood-and-tile "dining car" with large, comfy booths, life-sized picture "train windows," and a few choo-choos outside for added ambiance. The menu was a throwback of sorts as well, the juicy Delmonico steak and thick grilled pork chops a welcome antidote to the fussy Florribean fusions of today. Sadly, just as all things must pass, nostalgic replicas of all things must pass too.

Best Late-Night Dining

Sande's Restaurant

After a late night out on the town, it's hard to just say good-bye and go home -- especially when the sun's already well ahead of you. Plus, all that partying creates quite an appetite, and all that alcohol needs something to absorb it -- that is, unless you enjoy a hangover. You could go to Taco Bell; but remember, you're trying to avoid being stuck in the bathroom. You're better off heading over to Sande's Restaurant for a quick bite before you lie down for the day. Open at 6 a.m., Sande's has several breakfast combinations like the number one (two eggs, bacon or sausage, and hotcakes or toast, $3.50), number two (two eggs; bacon, ham or sausage; potatoes or grits; and toast; $4), or the number three (Western omelet with toast, $5.50). For groups, there's the Family Breakfast ($19.50), which includes eight scrambled eggs; home fries, hash browns, or grits; four bacon strips; two sausage patties; two sausage links; two orders of toast; two biscuits; four hotcakes; two French toast slices; and a bowl of sausage gravy. It's sure to soak up whatever alcohol lingers in your beer-drenched belly. While time may be the best cure for a hangover, a little greasy food ain't bad either.

Best Cheap Breakfast

Las Colinas

You know you're getting an inferior diner breakfast when you get the toast. It's dry and almost cold. Next to it on the plate are a couple of fresh-from-the-fridge butter patties. At Las Colinas, the bread comes straight from the iron sandwich grill -- la plancha -- with the butter melted inside the crusty Cuban bread. Hot enough to sting your fingers. Then comes the breakfast, an array of egg dishes served with fried potatoes and, the South Florida kickstarter of choice, Cuban café con leche. You can have straight-ahead ham and eggs ($3.50) or a variety of Caribbean-style concoctions. Our favorite is the Desayuno Las Colinas ($4.99, the most expensive item on the breakfast menu), a couple of fried eggs on a thin slice of steak, with a ladle of Creole sauce. The coffee is always piping hot, a little syrupy, and -- watch out -- highly addictive. (Just the coffee and the toast? $1.90.) Las Colinas ("the hills") is owned by Michael Park and his Nicaraguan-born wife, Maria. Opened three years ago, it's Latin-style, with nearly a dozen ceiling fans, wooden chairs and tables, and a stand-alone sandwich station that turns out all those iron-flattened Cuban delights.

Best Breakfast

Simply Delish

Forget the usual mega-brunches, with their prix fixe prices, "whatever"-service, and trips back to the empty salvers. Here in this two-room corner cafe that throbs with highly caffeinated conversation, major hallooing, and some of the wisecrackingest service this side of Rosie on a roll is yet more proof that the gay gene extends to the concept of brunch. On a late Sunday morning, it seems that wise straights have discovered this reasonably priced (average $8 per meal) little secret too. It all works thanks to the sensible kitchen, which turns the usual brunchly ducklings -- taffy-pull pancakes and omelets Firestone could patent -- into swans. The cook even gets the temperature of the food right, dish after dish turning up neither retro-warmed nor colder than winter in Murmansk. Helping it all go down is coffee as fresh as a slap. While eavesdropping on dialogue worthy of Carson on Queer Eye (tables are that close), admire the Liberace-meets-Auntie Mame décor. Rarely has more been better. Typical of brunch, timing is everything, and during peak hours, lines can form faster than a face-lift on Joan Rivers, but be patient -- the waiting ones disappear just as quickly, sucked into this happily spinning vortex of the well-toned and quick-tongued.

Best Double-Entendre

Sue and Lou's Restaurant

Does this lawyerly eatery have an impressive tort-quashing track record? Or maybe a helpful friend at the small-claims courthouse?

Best Finn Food

Scandia Bakery & Coffee Shop

South Florida is a long way from home for the several thousand Finns who spend the winters in Lake Worth. For a little taste of the motherland, many of them come to Scandia Bakery, which has become something of a city hall for snowbirds from the Helsinki hinterlands. They discuss news from the north over custard-filled Danish at breakfast, plates of meatloaf ($6.75 for a whole meal) for lunch, and cabbage rolls (two for $4) at dinner. Specials are written on paper plates taped to the back wall, and a shelf of goods displays all things Finnish, including bags of ultra-strong coffee that would make those Scandinavian winters bearable. After lounging for a few hours on the L-shaped couch under the front windows, you can buy a warm of Russian sourdough from owners Aune and Taisto Kaanto. And you'll be glad you did. All of it is a lot easier to digest than the Finnish language. Example: Thank you is pronounced kiitos. The place is open for breakfast and lunch but closed during the summer.

Best Outdoor Dining

Florida Tap Room Dockside Restaurant & Bar Readers' Choice: Dada

With 14 draft beer choices (among them, the 1988 British Grand Champion Old Thumper and a crisp, dry Shipyard Light Ale) and a no-strangers bar, the Tap Room defines itself as winningly as Charlize Theron negotiating the red carpet at the Oscars. While this may not be high dining, its score of tables hugs the Bahia Mar Marina. Just finishing its first year, the Tap Room can be proud of its have-no-fear menu, which accents appetizers such as crab cakes ($9.95), highly decorated burgers and sandwiches ($6 to $9), and a list of entrées ($16 to $19) that boasts a swanky piece of salmon served on a cedar plank. All of this good food, a sunset remindful of Key West's Mallory Pier, and the chance to rub elbows (and more?) with some of the owners of the 90-foot yachts docked a few feet away make this spot one of our favorite new dining additions. Best indication of the quality: Even the staff likes to eat here. Readers' Choice: Dada

Best Place for Intimate Conversation

Bistro La Tavernetta

About the same size as the cabin of an executive jet and as darkly intime as Antonio Banderas' eyes, this dinners-only slice of high dining has been enjoyed for 35 years by luxe Lauderdale. And it doesn't need to raise its voice to declare its utter suitability for proposals of any kind. You, however, may scream in delight over the 23-out-of-30 2004 Zagat rating, the wrinkle-erasing lighting, and the suggestive lapping of the waters drifting by your table overlooking the quiet canal. It's a high-priced-and-savagely-worth-it spread. Taken over by new owners a year ago from the Romano family that moved it from Brooklyn in 1970, La Tavernetta has a menu that leans more toward the tastes and colors of northern rather than southern Italy. And the wine list has expanded its breadth and depth (ah, those Chiantis!). But nothing else -- not even the easy-to-miss side entrance -- has changed here.

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