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Best New Restaurant in Palm Beach

Bova

Forget it. You can't get in anyway. There are 150 guys ahead of you, and they're all a lot better-looking. Call right now and maybe the girl who answers the phone will put you down for a 5:30 p.m. reservation some Tuesday next month. Of course, you can always try just loafing around outside those elegant doors, pressing your nose to the glass, eyeballing the passing plates of "nuevo Italian" veal meatballs in brodo, the wood-oven-baked foccacia, the golden rotisserie chickens, and the hand-cut pastas, along with the artesian well waters and the hundred-dollar-plus bottles of Amarone. Maybe somebody at the front desk will take pity on your poor pathetic self and squeeze you into a single seat at the bar. And by the way, make a stop at the bank first to check that balance, because this is going to cost you. You'll be paying in frozen pizzas and TV dinners for weeks to come. Actually, come to think of it, you might as well go ahead and put that engagement ring on layaway, because chances are, you'll never get another shot. You've done nothing to warrant an experience this rich, sublime, and delicious -- any more than you've earned the love of a good woman or deserve to have her say yes. But you've always been a lucky son of a bitch, haven't you? It looks like your table is ready.

Best Pizza by the Slice

Sassano's New York Style Pizzeria

There are a few other victual options in the 1950s time warp that is the Riverland Shopping Center -- a Cuban cafeteria and a time-honored greasy spoon, for instance -- but Sassano's always has the perfect cure for midday hunger pangs. It's not just the superb, thin cracker-crust and home-made sauce at this family-run joint that make it so noteworthy, nor is it the pocket-change price ($1.60 a slice, ingredients only 35 cents more) but its location. Easy to find? Not unless you're lost and on foot. No bigger than a coat closet, with a painfully cramped kitchen and a counter barely large enough for two stools, Sassano's sits way back in an odd little cul-de-sac that's nearly invisible. It houses obscure oddities like a shoe repair shop and a tiny insurance agency. Howling winds get caught up in this weird little alleyway, spiraling and spinning leaves like that scene in American Beauty, beckoning you toward a well-kept secret that's perfect for that day you want to keep lunch under $5. Just like in the olden days.

Best Service in a Restaurant

SukhoThai

Tabatha Mudra
Good service doesn't have to mean a ma”tre d' with an accent, waiters dressed in dinner jackets, or a sommelier with a silver cup. You don't always have to shell out the shillings to be treated well either. At SukhoThai, owner Susie and her son Eddie hand out their smiles for free, hailing new and old customers at the door with familial warmth. Eighty percent of the clientele at the 16-year-old restaurant are regular customers -- people keep coming back to see Murphy's Law confounded: For one meal, at least, nothing that can go wrong will go wrong. Drinks, appetizers, entrées, and desserts arrive on an immutable, predictable schedule. Dirty plates are unobtrusively whisked away. There's never a meal auction: Your server knows who gets the Masaman curry and the pad Thai. Water glasses seem to refill themselves. And the cheerful, modest Thai staff has perfected the art of being there without seeming to be there -- always within sight, never hovering. "We're not perfect," Eddie says. "Servers have good and bad days like anybody else. But we tell our staff, treat everybody like a VIP. You never know who you're waiting on."

Best Wraps

The Daily Squeeze

Your temptation, when you enter this teensy shop downtown, will be to order everything on the sprawling palette of ingredients, but try to restrain yourself. Thing is, if you cram banana peppers and cherry peppers and pickles and olives and capers and jalapeños into the same wrap, all you'll taste is hot tang. Instead, go mild. Start with turkey or chicken or salmon or tuna. Then add sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, bell peppers, spinach, lettuce, fresh tomatoes, onions, sprouts, artichoke hearts, feta cheese, carrots, avocados. (Last year, the shop began stocking avocados after the owner, who works behind the counter, asked a patron whether his was the best salad ever. The patron hesitated, pondered, and replied that it needed avocado. So now you can get organic avocados on your wrap.) Top it all with a dash of oil and balsamic vinegar, for a bit of squish, and you're ready to roll. The whole mess will run you eight bucks, chips and a drink included. Save half for dinner in lieu of grocery shopping.

Best Pho

Pho Nam Do

The legendary 1985 cult film Tampopo searches for the perfect bowl of soup. A contemporary remake could easily find heaven in a bowl of pho at this tiny eatery that's staffed by a superfriendly, always-smiling family. The liquor-license-less joint serves a few other dishes besides pho, but we haven't sampled them in years -- once we became addicted to Pho Nam Do's perfectly appointed Vietnamese beef noodle soup, there was no reason to. A few other Vietnamese restaurants specialize in this radical meal-in-itself, popular as a hearty breakfast back home, but none does it better. The hearty beef stock with just a hint of star anise is unbelievably yummy, the flat, chewy noodles are never sticky, and the thin slices of beef (or tripe and tendon if you're an adventurous sort) are only-just-barely cooked to perfection by the boiling broth. Bean sprouts, culantro, basil leaves, and chili peppers go on top, and then you're set with the most nourishing bowl of goodness imaginable. Our climate doesn't always make hot soup a first-thought favorite, but pho fans are everywhere. Hear that slurping sound?

Best Restaurant Décor

Jetsetter Lounge

An unscientific New Times survey has revealed that a liqueur-infused strawberry sundae ($12.95) just tastes better when the nosher is curled up inside the cushiony interior of an exorbitantly pricey Eero Aarnio ball chair. The same survey has also found that it's far more exciting, a real adrenaline rush, to spoon up the last crumbs of a piece of red velvet cake ($4.95) when you're sprawled like a goddess on a $3,000, pristine, white-leather '50s-style sofa, preferably balancing an indelible cocktail in your other hand, something like Jetsetter's notorious Carnival in Rio ($8.95), made with grenadine and Pepsi. To really live, you have to risk it all! And if you fail, if it happens that you accidentally dump an entire plate of kosher pigs in a blanket with deli mustard ($4.95) all over the elegantly slipcovered cushion of your Knoll chair, not to mention on your vintage Mary Quant miniskirt, well -- at least you tried, right? Nobody will ever say you wimped out, least of all Mike Jones, the man who has gone to quite a lot of trouble to find the retro atomic lamps that shed the exact light under which you will always look unusual and interesting, even when splattered with sauce from your pizza di Roma ($5.95).

Best Chicken Fried Steak

Lester's Diner

Photo by Kristin Bjornsen
Two amazing facts regarding the chicken fried steak served at Lester's Diner: One, its 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week availability; and two, its sheer size. As long as something as inherently unhealthy as a battered and deep-fried piece of pounded meat is permitted to exist, it only seems right and fair to have it hot and ready for you at 2:30 a.m. after a night of binge-drinking. The voluminous mass of creamy, gravy-draped cow is so large, it handily chases away any uncomforting thoughts, as comfort food is wont to do. That you will also receive a pair of slightly-better-for-you vegetables means little at that point, as your bleary eyes adjust to the fluorescent lights, you settle deep into your Naugahyde booth, and you start devouring the one thing that you know stands between you and an Olympic-sized hangover the next morning.

Best Tea House in Broward

One Tea Lounge

There's an etiquette to drinking tea that one absorbs by osmosis, which is why you won't generally find tea house customers fiddling over laptops or screaming into cell phones. More likely, they're conversing in hushed tones over cups of liquid that smell like new-mown hay and jasmine blossoms. Or reading. Or just staring into space. Coffee hops you up, tea slows you down, and the Vietnamese proprietors at One Tea Lounge, Hoan Dang and Roger Tran, have made all the right moves to induce beta waves and belly breathing. The dozens of tea varieties purveyed here, from India, China, and Japan -- Chunme and Lucky Dragon, Russian caravan and Moroccan madness, Orange Blossom, Lichee, Rose, and Lapsang -- are good for body (full of antioxidants) and soul (tea rituals restore balance and equanimity). And then too, the stuff just tastes so good. Lap it up in surroundings conducive to cognitive breakthroughs.

Best Tea House in Palm Beach

Serenity Gardens

Anyone who's ever dissed British food has never sat down to an English cream tea, an entity exactly as decadent as it sounds, in a very proper way, of course. Or put it this way: An English cream tea makes you want to plunge your face directly into the dish of clotted cream, strawberry jam, lemon curd, and scones (a biscuity cookie-cake) and sort of, well, roll around in it. But you and the ladies who lunch at Serenity Gardens Tea House will have to keep your lascivious thoughts to yourselves, because the delicate frippery that decorates this old Florida house (the rosebud swags, the tea cozies, the demur, unmatched cups, the upholstered ball-and-claw chairs) would never stand for it. Nor would proprietor Sylvia Price, who has put together a sophisticated luncheon menu that ranges from Waldorf chicken salad and stuffed tomatoes to the full tea service ($17.75 per person, and you have to make a reservation) of petits fours, nibbles, and cucumber sammies. Price's array of teas, including organic greens and Earl Grey, is mind-boggling, but the one to try first is her homemade Chai, a wake-up call of a drink redolent of spices and orange rind.

Best Wings

Tarpon Bend

Michael McElroy
Like drag racers whose extreme speed sustains yet may destroy them, chicken wings live and die by grease. What are wings without it? Scalding orange lipids turn ordinary chicken into one of the great blessings our world has to offer. Yet who among us has not winced upon being served a plate of wings whose drippings could be mistaken for those in his oil pan? The wing should spark, the wing should burn, the wing should sting. The wing, however, should not pop like a boil between your teeth. The wings at Tarpon Bend, on their best days, hit this chord precisely. While they're not spicy enough to truly warrant the label "hot" (which rightly ought to mean "unpleasant"), they are crisp without oozing grease, fleshy without getting bland. They confer all the joy of spicy, buttery fowl fat without choking you on it. Bonus points for unusually flavorful celery sticks on the side.

Best Of Broward-Palm Beach®

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