Navigation
Support Us
Search

Best Place to Boat to Dinner

Cap's Place Island Restaurant

The ferryboat to Cap's Place is interesting (think of a refurbished, polished, and well-covered African Queen), and it's free. It's not a long ride, just a nice jaunt across the Intracoastal, but once you get there, you're going back a long way. Meyer Lansky and other gangsters still haunt the place. In the bar you can almost still smell the unfiltered cigarette smoke and hear the dames giggling over their martinis. Cap's Place is all about South Florida history, full of rum, illicit gambling, hoodlums, and good times. Eugene Theodore "Cap" Knight, an unabashed bootlegger, opened the place in 1928. The restaurant is actually made from an old barge. Back then, it was called Club Unique, and you could visit for a fish dinner, a stiff (and illegal) drink, and a game of blackjack, roulette, or craps. But Cap had class -- drawing statesmen as easily as crooks. The list of famous patrons is too long to recount, though the fact that FDR and Winston Churchill dined together here should give you an idea. But that's enough of this story. Go out there, have a highball, and soak up some more tales. They're hanging on every wall, carved into every post, soaked into every floorboard.

Best Pub Fare

John Bull English Pub

When you say that this place is a trendy, traditional British pub, that's no bull -- and it's no oxymoron either. On the trendy side are salads -- such as the Tuscan garden with smoked turkey, comprising artichokes, roasted peppers, button mushrooms, and bacon-mustard dressing -- and main courses including fresh fish of the day with Creole rémoulade and toasted orzo pilaf. On the traditional side are appetizers -- cheese boards for two with aged cheddar and country bread -- and one-dish meals such as shepherd's pie or Saturday roasts with Yorkshire pudding. Trendy? An Undurraga Chilean merlot is the house red. Traditional? Bass, Newcastle, and Harp ales are all on tap. Trendy? The live jazz and rhythm-and-blues music. Traditional? The fireplaces (yes, in South Florida). This may not be your father's or grandfather's pub, but it will certainly be yours.

Best Relief Effort for Single Parents

Tout Sweet

In a time when so many restaurants reluctantly provide one highchair or maybe a booster seat, Tout Sweet is a godsend. Not only does this restaurant and ice cream parlor offer succor for adolescent dietary stress with an appealing kid's menu, it mitigates parental economic stress with "Kids Eat Free" on Sundays. Tout Sweet also runs generation-gap specials such as "Mom and Me" or "Dad and Me." The place is so munchkin-minded that the National Single Parents Resource center, located in Boca Raton, holds its events here, the profits of which go to creating programs to assist single folks in dealing with everything from infants to teenagers. Even better, the eatery, which serves light sandwiches, waffles, and homemade French custard ice cream, is right next door to the Regal Delray 18 movie theater, so solo caretakers can plan an entire evening's entertainment with ease. Talk about one hand washing the other.

Best Restaurant Brewery, Palm Beach

Brewzzi's

Restaurant breweries are about as hard to find in South Florida as wool sweaters. The dearth of handcrafted brews here isn't really that surprising, as subtropical climes tend to foster a thirst for icy, fruity drinks like rumrunners and margaritas. But we like beer, dammit, and that's where Brewzzi's comes in. Granted it doesn't have much competition (it's the only independent restaurant brewery in Palm Beach County), but it's still first-rate. Because the joint is located in western Boca Raton, you might assume it's a vile place -- snobs drinking snobby beers. You'd be wrong. The six microbrews, for one thing, are affordable, at less than $4 a glass. They are also award-winning and downright delicious, from the stout to the American pale ale to the brown to the blonde (though we aren't really partial to light microbrews). The service there is darn good, the food simple (lots of great pizzas and open-faced sandwiches) and tasty. By the time we pulled ourselves away, we'd had enough of their beer to make us a little wewzzi. Our date was so hammered, she started acting like a flewzzi. So, thanks to Brewzzi's, our night was a dewzzi.

Best Restaurant to Die in the Past Year

East City Grill

You could say it was a victim of greed. One of the most popular fine-dining restaurants on Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard and the eatery credited with revitalizing the area, East City Grill got unceremoniously kicked out of its space this past year. The landlord decided to sell the lot to a condominium builder. Goodbye pan-Asian/fusion fare, hello prefab apartments. No matter in the end, though. Proprietors Oliver Saucy and Darrel Broek will soon assuage our grief by rebuilding the Grill -- or opening something similar -- in Weston. Go west, young(ish) men!

Best Soul Food

Betty's Restaurant and BBQ

Candace West
Few places offer a taste of black Southern cuisine as complete and inexpensive as this place tucked between Sistrunk Boulevard and 22nd Road. Lunchtime brings local businesspeople together while Matlock reruns mime on two muted televisions and gospel classics rotate on the jukebox. The dining area is kept cool, and regardless of where you sit, you can't miss a big illuminated sign announcing Betty's as an NAACP sign-up spot. Menus aren't reliable as far as specials go, so ask your server what the chef has going. The menu boasts pig tails, catfish, fried chicken, and of course chitterlings. Try the oxtail with collard greens, pillow-soft cornbread, and candied yams (the last of which should be offered as a dessert), all for $7.99. Betty's also caters any size gathering and will customize the order according to your specifications.

Best South American Restaurant

Las Totoritas

Gustavo Rojas
You can't miss the place: An oversize red-and-white Peruvian flag, nearly always stretched taut in the breezes that whip across the North Perry Airport, perches atop the smallish storefront eatery, serving as a beacon for all lovers of the Andean nation's sophisticated cuisine. Inside the tiny, wood-paneled dining room, which is lined with medieval-style paintings of saints, this third outpost of the Las Totoritas chain (the other two are located in Miami-Dade County) serves up a dizzying variety of Peruvian specialties. The embossed-leather menus boast such stick-to-your-ribs fare as lomo saltado (sautéed beef with onions and tomatoes) and chicharrón de pollo (deep-fried yet delicately flavored chicken chunks), as well as numerous soups and appetizers. But of course any Peruvian restaurant is only as good as its seafood; by that measure Las Totoritas is fantastic. The jalea is a mouthwatering mound of gently fried squid, octopus, shrimp, and corvina (sea bass) tossed with red onions, tomatoes, and a handful of fresh cilantro. The same fruits of the sea show up in the cebiche mixto but are instead marinated in lemon juice for at least a day, giving them a tart tenderness perfectly complemented by the brightness of the onions and cilantro that accompany this dish, truly a (South) American beauty.

Best Steak House

Rumba's Latin Grill

Granted, the name of the venue is a little confusing. Formerly one of two West Broward places known as Parrilla's Latin Grill, the restaurant's neon sign still reads Parrilla's. But the billboard advertising the eatery now calls it Rumba's, since the Parrilla's partners split, each keeping one restaurant. And you might be a touch baffled by the menu, which lists a zillion dishes with a dozen different Latin-American influences ranging from Mexican to Argentine to Cuban. But you won't be a bit bewildered when the fare is served: Beef is the name of the game here, and the quality of the meat is uniformly excellent. Skirt steaks are marinated and grilled to juicy perfection, while vaca frita is shredded and pan-fried, then tarted up with a bit of lime and dressed with white onions. Looking for a little gringo action? Check out the ropa vieja potato skins followed by an inches-thick sirloin. Unlike most steak houses, Rumba's does not offer side dishes à la carte, which means that every enormous serving of meat is accompanied by red or black beans, a scoop of buttered white rice, and sweet, caramelized plantains. In the end there's really no question of befuddlement at all: Walk into Rumba's -- or Parrilla's, whatever you want to call it -- and you'll roll out in a carnivorous daze.

Best Subs

Monster Subs

Chris Bellus
Subs, hoagies, grinders -- call them what you will, the essence remains meat, cheese, veggies, and bread, over and over again, no matter where you go or whom you patronize. How then does one differentiate the good from the bad? It's the little things, really: the crisp sweet peppers and nutty provolone playing tag on your tongue, the lettuce shredded instead of chopped, the turkey breast sliced thick enough to be tasty but thin enough to provide that quintessential sub "mouth feel." By these measures Monster Subs are the best around. Hey, it says so right on the door, and who are we to argue? The stores may be Spartan, but subs have never been about fine dining. Monster sweats the details to bring you sandwiches that stand out from the rest of the submarine fleet.

Best Sushi

Kyoto Sushi and Sake Lounge

Sherri++Cohen
Chef+Lee+is+not+a+doctor%2C+nor+does+he+play+one+on+TV%2C+but+he+is+a+great+sushi+chef
Cookie-cutter sushi bars abound in South Florida. But if you took a picture of Kyoto's product -- some of the freshest fish around -- and compared it to the outputs of three other random sushi bars, you'd quickly notice that one of these things is not like the others. The reason is simple: Chef Lee, proprietor and master sushi chef extraordinaire, keeps his fish and shellfish iced down and refrigerated at all times. So even items on display at the bar itself are a comfortable number of degrees away from spoiling. Then, too, there's Chef Lee's fascination with eel. He offers more than ten rolls made with the slippery sea dweller, of which the roasted-almond-studded Nuts About Eel roll is particularly delicious. Kyoto also displays some more-innovative concepts when it comes to cooked fare, providing diners with items like the bonzai chicken, which is a rolled-up, deep-fried chicken breast oozing spinach and Gruyère cheese. And lest we forget the "sake" part of the name here, allow us to recommend that you imbibe as greedily as you eat. It's the Kyoto way.

Best Of Broward-Palm Beach®

Best Of

Use of this website constitutes acceptance of our terms of use and our privacy policy The New Times Broward-Palm Beach may earn a portion of sales from products & services purchased through links on our site from our affiliate partners. ©2024 New Times BPB, LLC. All rights reserved.
Do Not Sell or Share My Information
Powered By Foundation