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Best Prepared Food

Fernanda's International Gourmet Foods

Tabatha Mudra

Home cooks, foodies, wine aficionados, sandwich lovers, party-throwers, vegetarians, marooned Manhattanites, and second-generation Italians far from Mama's kitchen all know where to find the magic missing from their lives: Fernanda's. To purchase a slice of mascarpone torta ($29.99 a pound -- bliss doesn't come cheap) and eat it right from the box in your car, without ever leaving the parking lot, is as close to pig heaven as most gluttons are ever likely to get. If the torta's too rich for your belly and your pocketbook, an array of sautéed vegetables like caponata Pietro ($9.99 a pound), Italian roasted peppers ($9.99), broccoli rabe with lemon ($8.99 a pound), roasted eggplant ($12.99 a pound), marinated mushrooms ($6.99 a pound), garlic mashed potatoes ($4.99 a pound), and macaroni and cheese casserole ($4.99 a pound) make for more wholesome chow. Fish lovers can sink a line and reel in Pietro's seafood salad ($12.99 a pound), Maryland lump crab cakes ($4.99 each), grilled swordfish pistachio ($16.99 a pound), or a tin of beluga caviar (market price). And culinarily challenged bachelors or bachelorettes can put together a multiculti party of Fernanda's breaded veal cutlets, sausage and peppers, meatballs, fried tortellini, proscuitto pasta salad, stuffed grape leaves, mushroom pirogues, spicy chicken wings, and fresh foie gras (24 hours' notice on the goose liver). If you're planning a picnic, Fernanda's dozen varieties of black, green, and stuffed olives, plus their selection of 18 sandwiches (all $7.99, from the Muffeletto to the "Don Quixote" with thin-sliced Serrano ham) sure beat that standard loaf of bread and jug of wine.

Best Alternative to the Prices at Whole Foods

Village Marketplace

You're kicking yourself for not investing in Whole Foods five years ago -- you could be retiring to your villa in Provence right about now. Here's a tip: A little independent operation called Village Marketplace is the dark horse that's going to give Whole Foods a run for its money. Owner Joseph Macchione is making his mark in the grocery biz in South Florida with a midsized market -- smaller than Publix, bigger than the corner deli -- that sells gourmet chocolates, organic half and half ($3.29), Guatemalan coffee ($8.99 a pound), fresh produce, prepared foods, specialty cheeses ($3.77 for a wedge of ricotta salata), imported wines, tuna (a can of Ortiz is $4.99), and olive oils. But that ain't all. Bathroom tissue, frozen pizza, muffin mix, tomato sauce, and strawberry jelly are for sale too. It's one stop for your ravishing bouquet of lilies, your Gardenburger, and your Bounty paper towels. Macchione cut his teeth on jobs with Wild Oats and Fresh Fields; he's clearly taken the best ideas of both. The original Marketplace in Plantation closed this year, but only to retool; Macchione says they'll reopen in Lauderdale, possibly in another location, at a more manageable size. They're steadily adding organics as they see what sells and what rots on the shelves; they're already selling free-range chickens from Ashley Farms. A small café turns out wholesome lunches. The cheese and charcuterie sections offer enough variety for a year's worth of antipasti; a yummy, whole-grain bread ($3.49 for a loaf) comes from their bakery; and bottles of wine and sake boast Wine Spectator ratings. Macchione says he's committed to keeping prices fair. Sounds like a great marketing concept.

Best Food Court

Restaurants at Seminole Paradise

Don't be stupid enough to jump on the mechanical bull at Tequila Ranch after polishing off oak-smoked ribs at Renegade Barbeque Co., chili fries at Johnny Rockets, sushi at Tatu, oysters at Bluepoint Ocean Grill, and a pretzel from Wetzel's ($2.55). What may spring from deep inside you will make others run into Hooters for the distraction of surgically enhanced bustlines. Instead of bull riding, enjoy all those delicacies on successive nights of the week and follow them up with some java from Bad Ass Coffee Co., Chunky Monkey ice cream ($2.78, cup or cone) at 2 a.m. from Ben & Jerry's, and some Pepto from CVS on your way home. You'll be OK. We promise.

Best Wine List

Harrison's Wine Bar

Red wine is full of reservatrol -- a potent fighter of cancer, high blood pressure, strokes, and bad cholesterol. This is one reason the French can smoke packs of unfiltered Gauloises, eat two pounds of butter daily, and stay thin and mean as minks. For optimal cardiovascular health, ignore the puritanical U.S. recommendations (One glass of red wine a day for women? Puuleeeze!) -- European doctors prescribe a moderate three glasses daily for the ladies and four for the guys. Drinking alone isn't good for you, however, so a place like 3-year-old Harrison's Wine Bar, very European in style and sensibility, is an excellent locale for a good workout. There's a wine list of more than 100 bottles here. The Santa Emma merlot from Chile is $8 a glass; Silver Oak cabernet is $150 a bottle (presumably spiked with extra reservatrol at that price). So you won't ever have to stick your tongue in the same bottle twice, owner Richard Duncan is committed to mixing things up: Lately, he's hot on the Stonehedge zin, a Mont Gras cab, and a Bearboat pinot. Harrison's tapas and cheese menu will give all that wine something to work with.

Best Brunch

Boulevard Café

Sunday, of course, is a day of reflection. It's when one takes time to look inward, to contemplate the meaning of good and evil, to reflect upon sins, and finally, to become grounded in family and community. Let us all come together, then, at Boulevard Café, to drink of the Blood of the Mary beginning at 10 a.m.; to join with fellow brethren and sistren of our holy rainbow community. We shall join hands and give thanks over bowls of spinach artichoke dip with four cheeses and chips ($8.75); we shall break toast together over the three-egg scramble served amongst home fries and fresh fruit ($6.75); the lions shall sup upon filet mignon Benedict ($12) and then go home to lie down with lambs. And we shall know that we are righteous and good because we did not pretend we never received our complimentary mimosas. Let us contemplate at length the many sins of our exes, who paid for phone sex with our American Express Card and let us struggle to come to terms with the meaning and necessity of evil: How many bumps of Tina it takes to send you-know-who into orbit. And if we raise our voices in unison, it shall only be to wonder at the mystery of a God who creates roommates who walk away with our best Ralph Lauren cashmere crewneck. On a Sunday morning on Las Olas, to forgive is absolutely divine.

Best Coffee

Kamzaman

To hunt for the perfect cup of coffee is to separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the NBA from your neighborhood pick-up game. There's a lot of crap out there. Mediocrity, really. But rest assured, at Kamzaman, there's no frou-frou soy, decaf double lattes. Instead, you'll taste the richest, smoothest Turkish coffee of your life for the ridiculously low price of $3. The caffeine elixir is brought to your table in a piping hot vessel, which you then poor into tiny ceramic cups for you and your guests. And what goes as well with good coffee as tobacco? Luckily, Kamzaman is a spacious smoke shop in a strip mall north of Sunrise Boulevard that's become a hotbed of Middle Eastern shops. Its walls are a continuous mural of scenes of Saharan life. For $8, they'll deliver a hookah to your table, and you can choose from among 15 types of tobacco.

Best Key Lime Pie

River House

A reasonably bright chimpanzee could be taught to make a faultless key lime pie: There's one immutable method, and it allows for no deviation. The recipe involves a can of condensed milk, a couple of eggs, a box of graham crackers, a stick of butter, and a handful of key limes. To see so many reasonably bright human beings in local restaurant kitchens floundering around with meringues and preformed crusts, Persian limes -- or worse -- bottled lime juice, whipping cream, and God-knows-what-all, is to witness the awful human compulsion to fiddle with what ain't broke. That being said, exceptions do exist. The pie-in-the-sky concoction dreamed up by pastry chef Gus Hernandez at River House is certainly one. His "key lime pie baked Alaska" is a delicious joke composed of a Brazil-nut graham cracker crust, a tower of sweet limey mousse, a rakish chapeau of browned Italian meringue, and many decorative swivels and swirls of berry coulis. That you can sit outdoors at a table under the stars to eat this pie between the glittering lights of two august mansions and the lazy New River makes variations like this one seem necessary.

Best Desserts

Johnny V

Michele Sandberg

Thirty years from now, when you're a full-blown diabetic jabbing your beleaguered index finger to test your blood sugar for the fourth time in a day, bemoaning your descent into infirmity and disease, you will think back. You will remember, with morning-after regret, the diminishing returns of those Pepsi refills, the cheap half-thrill of real sugar in your espresso, a lifetime of licking whole whipped cream off strippers' netherquarters. Then you will remember Johnny V's tiramisu martini, its spiced pumpkin mascarpone steeped in chocolate liqueur and antlered with ladyfingers. You will recall a warm mango tart soaked with the nectar oozing off a dollop of cinnamon sorbet, the sweet burn intertwining with the sugary sour. You will hark back to a mound of soft-centered chocolate cake that guttered an intoxicating syrup-sludge onto the chocolate-covered strawberries of the chocolate sampler plate. It was all worth it, you'll say, even at $8 to $10 per dessert. It was all worth it.

Best Milkshake

Emack and Bolio's

Brian Miller spent 20 years in Boston selling computers. Sometimes, he stopped in at the Cape Cod Emack and Bolio's for a couple of scoops of Twisted Dee-Light and Deep Purple Cow. Then he moved to Boca to open an ice cream store of his own -- every nerd's fantasy. Emack and Bolio's started out 30 years ago as a late-night hangout for rock 'n' roll types; it was owned by entertainment lawyer Bob Rook (hence the ice creams nostalgically named for '70s and '80s bands). Today, there's plenty to keep the tykes occupied (like 100 flavors), but a new line of milkshakes, glad to say, is for grownups. They're called "frappes" these days, of course -- gotta change with the times -- and five flavors ($5 each) are designed to keep you up all night bangin' head to your old Twisted Sister discs. Choose from Irish Coffee, Italian Coffee, Dirty Monkey, Caramel Thriller, and Nutty Monk, all made with ice cream, a good splash of French roast coffee, a dash of the appropriate flavoring, and a cap of homemade whipped cream. Miller says he's adjusting just fine to the life of an ice cream man -- long "hours of boredom punctuated by moments of panic." Sounds kinda like the way we remember those old Deep Purple records. "Smoke on the Water," anyone?

Best Ice Cream

York Castle Tropical Ice Cream

There must be a lot of folks who were hopping mad to see York's Tropical Ice Cream pack up and move south from Washington, D.C., to Broward County. They've probably spent many a lonely, ice-creamless night wondering how to satisfy their jones for rose-flavored ice cream. And those hooked on grapenut, jacknut, cinnamon, tamarind, and lychee or accustomed to a regular fix of papaya, ginseng, or black walnut, not to mention the mild alcoholic fizz from a scoop of Guinness, are likely out of luck too. Their loss is clearly our gain. What we lack in political culture and great art museums, we now more than make up for in soursop, in decadent high-butterfat chocolate chip, and in R-rated rum raisin ice creams. Jamaican proprietor Cal Headley makes the stuff in a Lauderdale Lakes location, trucks it over to the store daily, and sells it for $2.50 a scoop or $5.70 a pint as he doles out sample spoons of the most luxurious fresh banana ice cream from here to Kingston.

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