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Best Takeout Chinese

Dragon Gate

So your sizzling Latin mate is in the mood for a spicy dinner, the couple on the couch across from you are vegetarians, and your visiting sister and brother-in-law won't try anything they haven't eaten a thousand times before. Give Dragon Gate a call and order piquant beef in garlic sauce and Szechuan soft-shell crabs for your better half, vegetable egg foo young and fried tofu with red pepper sauce for the noncarnivores, subgum chicken chop suey for the in-laws. Add some hot-and-sour soup, the meatiest of barbecue pork ribs, and moo shoo pork for yourself. The bill will be outrageously affordable, the food fresh and delectable, the guests occupying your living room sated so that hopefully they will merely thank you profusely and leave you alone with your grateful mate. Just pray they don't return an hour later for more.

Best Dim Sum

Toa Toa

It's a good thing when you go out for authentic ethnic food and the restaurant is packed with families of that ethnicity who are laughing and eating happily together. This is what you should expect when you arrive at Toa Toa, home to a genuine Hong Kong-style dim sum since 1989. Translated as "to touch your heart," dim sum is the Chinese equivalent to 'round-the-clock brunch, just without the mimosas. Toa Toa has a full menu complete with pictures to guide the novice. There is a variety of small plates of appetizers including sticky shrimp dumplings, fried scallop cutlets, a number of different rice pastes, and even marinated chicken feet -- scrawny, bent-pipe-cleaner-shaped things covered with red gelatinous goop. Brave virgins should just close their eyes and point their fingers at the menu, a good way to ensure variety. Top off whatever you land on with a baked custard bun and a pot or two of tea. Toa Toa is inexpensive (from $2.85 for a small dim sum to $6.95 for silver noodles) and tasty too, a bona fide culinary field trip. Even better, you can get dim sum there all day every day but Wednesday.

Best Soul Food

Betty's Soul Food & Bar-B-Que

Candace West
Yes, Betty's turns up on winner's lists all over the place, and yes, it might be great to find a new champion, but who can argue with the royal richness of the Red Velvet cake or that reasonably priced ($8.25) but unreasonably good fried chicken (done up in heart-conscious canola oil)? Then there's the fun of the three televisions staging channel battles in various corners of the room and those waitresses who can still sashay while bearing four orders of superb biscuits and sweet potato pie ($2.50 for all desserts). These are only a few of the reasons Betty Taylor's 20-year-old, ten-table-plus-lunch counter watering hole still reigns as the queen of the fast-emerging Soul Food corridor along Fort Lauderdale's Sistrunk Avenue. Some others? It opens for breakfast at 6 a.m. (closing's at 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, midnight on weekends), the neighborhood doesn't make a white man jump, and there's a jukebox with selections that may give even you rhythm.

Best Result of Gentrification

Shizen

Diss the oncoming condo parades if you must, but if saturating downtown with monied, sushi-hungry aristocracy allows more restaurants like Shizen to open, then sunsets be damned. Bring on the noblesse and their concomitant garish high-rises. How else are you going to find a proper rainbow roll ($9) at 1:30 a.m. served in a stylish and chill joint? The servers at this 6-month-old restaurant are gracious, and the owner, Tom Kamioka, sometimes makes the rounds, even quite late, to introduce himself and welcome diners. Consider it fine Japanese dining without snobbery. Heck, after midnight, some morsels are two-for-one. Now who's feeling conspicuously wealthy, eh? Another round of spicy tuna rolls and sake already!

Best Roti Shop

Joy's Roti Delight

Chelsea Scholler
A fascinating cultural collision plays out daily at Joy's, a bustling East-meets-West Indian restaurant tucked in a corner of the Lauderhill Mall. Delicious curry goat would be the standard (and most popular) option at $7, but chicken, oxtail, shrimp, conch, beef, and veggies are also available, rolled up in paper-thin Indian flatbread. At only a buck, you gotta try some of the other tasty items on the menu: aloo pie is a puff-pastry filled with potatoey goodness, for instance. Or have a go at a plate of phulowrie, battered balls of split pea and saffron. Shout out your order over the booming sound system and take a number. Regardless of whether you grab a roomy booth to enjoy it there or get your food to go, you'll have plenty of time to down a bottle or two of Carib (Trinidad's favorite beer) or a shandy (half beer, half ginger ale) while you wait. After all, you're on island time, mon. The place has seven comfortable tables. So relaaaax.

Best Sushi

Sushi n Thai

At first, it seems that very little about this unassuming, pedestrian, but perennially popular strip-mall eatery is outstanding. The Thai dishes are good if unspectacular, and most of the cooked Japanese fare is just perfectly... adequate. However, the raw fish served at Sushi Thai is unbeatable. No fancy places, no jam-packed out-the-door place, not even your favorite tried-and-true neighborhood standbys can possibly match the simply spectacular off-the-boat freshness of S-T's sushi and sashimi. Artsy presentations, innovative preparations, and obscure oddities are available all over South Florida. Go ahead, knock yourself out at the conveyor-belt place where the sushi travels to you on a plastic boat and the chefs wear silly hats (and the fish tastes like dry cat food). But raw-fish eaters who demand a consistently perfect product will not find better than Sushi Thai. Master Sushi Chef Sevee Mongkolsin is adept at the most crucial aspect of the sushi trade -- selecting the very finest fish available from wholesalers. Years of studying the sashimic arts have proven that the salmon, tuna, yellowtail, and scallop (did we say salmon?) sold here beat the competition fins down. Best times to visit are Monday and Tuesday nights (5 to 10:30 p.m.), when dollar specials on sushi and items like gyoza make it fun to indulge.

Best Spanish Restaurant

Café Seville

Chelsea Scholler
The traditional Spanish regional cuisine at Cafe Seville is cooked to order, which means you may have to sit awhile in the quaint dining room, sipping one of the restaurant's excellent wines, perhaps snacking on tapas or a cold platter of Spanish Serrano ham, manchego cheese, chorizo, and stuffed olives. Soon enough, your patience will be rewarded with mouth-watering dishes like a bright rendition of Andalusia's renowned gazpacho; roasted leg of lamb, leg of pork, and rabbit with rosemary; corvina swimming in a sauce sharked with garlic, parsley, cilantro, lemon juice, and white wine; a bold cazuela de mariscos, duck, veal, chicken, or steaks. Then there's a paella so well-stocked with shellfish, chicken, and pork that it's not quite right to call it a rice dish. The robust cuisine, crisp service, and charming Old World ambiance suggest an extravagant bill, but Seville's prices are moderate, with just about every entrée under $20.

Best More Than Mexican Restaurant

Tipico Cafe

Tabatha Mudra
Smack in the middle of what may be the hippest little shopping center in South Florida (if we need to tell you the name, you're over), Tipico boasts a menu that says it all: "American Style -- Mexican Flavor -- Spanish Flair," with selections that jitterbug from Mexico to Cuba and on to Kansas City (cheeseburgers, caesar salads?), flaunting a catholic sense of cuisine as confidently as do all the other local Mexican-and-more places. Milton has his version of paradise. This is ours, with a $9.95 chili relleño in place of an apple. The light streams through the lace café curtains onto the polished wooden floor; the white-shirted staff smiles at you with something other than dollars in their eyes. There's hep-cat '80s rock on the sound system, and you're scarfing down a Veracruzana combo (chicken tostada, cheese enchilada, beef taco for $10.95) so spunky and fresh, you'll swear the Central American chef knew you were writing this. Churrasco steaks ($11.95), carnitas ($9.95), arroz con pollo ($9.95), and the wonderful campeche burro ($8.95) are highlights. Open most days from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., the $10-average prices don't make you feel like you're paying by the square foot, but during peak hours (7 to 8 p.m.), you may want to trade in your Navigator for an Escort when wrangling for a parking place (try the street behind the shopping center). Don't be discouraged. La comida es perfecta!

Personal Best

John Zieba & Cliff Mulcahy

Ages: 36; 35

Hometown: College Park, Maryland; Weymouth, Massachusetts

Claim to fame: Co-owners of Hamburger Mary's Fort Lauderdale, a premier hangout in Wilton Manors for the gay community.

What they've done for us lately: The restaurant, which opened in 2002, seats 225 but regularly has a wait.

What it takes: "A tremendous amount of teamwork, all different backgrounds and age groups. We have a great mix of gay and straight, old, and young. We both work 60 to 70 hours a week. We try to make a lot of changes. It takes a lot of patience. The most fun thing we've done was a Hamburger Mary look-alike contest... She really is a trashier Dolly Parton... Dolly out of a trailer park."

Best French Fries

Ronnie B's Taste of the '50s Diner

Within the pink walls of this 1950s-style diner, it's not just about the French fries themselves (although those are available in straight-cut or crinkle-cut and get sliced up in the kitchen from fresh potatoes). It's also about what you can get on them. Gravy! Chili! Cheese! Chili and cheese! Cheese and gravy! Prices begin at $2.95 for plain fries and are a bit more with chili and cheese. The waitresses -- costumed in old-fashioned pink dresses -- can also serve you fries in a waffle cut or cut from a sweet potato (those types arrive frozen but get cooked to crispy perfection). The staff also whips up a mean mashed potato, for which there's a secret recipe. So, settle onto a stool at the old-fashioned ice cream counter, put some doo-wop on the jukebox, and hope the buttons don't pop off your poodle skirt as you scarf down fries beneath the omnipresent pictures of Elvis and James Dean.

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