Approximately two decades after it hit New York City, the great cupcake baking trend appears to have finally made its way to Miami, the bottom of America’s funnel. While the editorial staff at New Times are partial to the vegan creations of staff writer Tamara Lush (who modestly deflects credit…
Make a fist with your right hand. Then make a fist with your left and put that on top of the right. Now put your left foot on top of the two fists. Congratulations, you’re a yogi. You’ve also made a freeform shape roughly the size of the pile of…
No trans-fatty fries allowed The Miami Dade School Board voted last night to become the first district in the nation to ban trans fats in food – not that you would know it by reading this morning’s Herald, which buried the news in the last graf of a story on…
“You’re sure you’re very hungry?” our waitress says. “Because the Lobster Monster is really big.” She eyes us with skepticism. Or it’s a look that mingles skepticism (“they’ll never eat all the food they’ve ordered”) with politely concealed disgust (“these horrible people might eat all the food they’ve ordered”). Our…
“We’re paying for their exorbitant rent!” my uncle Al bellows whenever I take him to dine in a pricey South Beach restaurant. Obnoxious, yes, but he’s got a point. The Ghetto Gourmet is a counterpoint. The Oakland-based group is, in essence, an underground supper club, meaning they find hip spaces…
Producers pf the uber-popular reality TV show Top Chef were in town recently looking for a few good cooks to compete for a $100,000 grand prize in their next season. And one local chef looks like he could be a prime candidate. Mike Sabin, 36, executive chef of South Beach’s…
If you’ve ever seen the amazing Brazilian movie City of God, you probably recall the chicken chase whenever you think of Rio de Janeiro. In the opening shots, a group of starving street kids takes off after a fowl that’s barely escaped the raised cleaver at a fried chicken stand;…
Come back, Jeffrey! “It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor’s great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor’s lap and pee on dignitaries’ shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or…
A tortilla at El Tamarindo, perfectly round, exuding a pleasant, grassy-floral scent, has the appealing softness and density of warm skin, like the dusky feel of a burro’s neck. The only relation it bears to a Frito’s chip or a boxed taco shell is that it’s made from corn. And…
That stuff will kill you If there is anything worse for a restaurant than having one of its customers contract food poisoning, it is having that stricken diner be in the process of reviewing the establishment. The good news for Rotelli Pizza Pasta Perfect, at 501 E. Atlantic Avenue in…
When I was a kid, my grandmother and grandfather fought their most vicious battles over scotch lowballs and plates of cannelloni at a Palm Beach Italian place called Maurice’s. He was an aging artist, she a lifelong floozy and tippler 25 years his junior, and their shrill skirmishes were part…
“You’ve reached what was previously known as Madiba Miami,” says the recorded voice on the telephone. “We are now open for private parties and catering only.” And so we bid farewell to this hip import from Brooklyn, which had seemingly settled in comfortably on the west side of South Beach…
Keep Out! Someone recently regaled me with too many details concerning a bout of food poisoning she suspected having caught at the raw bar of a waterfront seafood restaurant in Coconut Grove. I hear such tales quite often, and as one who dines out multiple times weekly, can sympathize with…
Downtown Hollywood makes me happy. I pretend I don’t have a clue about which developer is lining which politician’s pockets, what kind of crummy deals are being cut behind the scenes, who the corrupt lawmakers are. I see no evil. The cops who hover perpetually outside the doors of Spice…
For most of human history, meals have been shared. Today’s place-setting conventions — the individual serving plate, the personal spoon, the pristine wine glass meant for one’s lips alone — are pretty recent evolutions in finickiness. Time was, in just about every culture we scooped our meals with our fingers…
Lots of restaurant deaths to report in the Miami dining world these days. For those keeping score: SouthWest NY didn’t last a New York minute in the Dolphin Mall. Maybe it’s because the menu read like a fast food Tex-Mex joint (“with French and Latin influences”) — which is not…
I hear if you’re going to travel anywhere these days and you’re interested in food, you’d better go to Saigon. As George Bush would have us believe, the city is one great, big U.S. success story and a lesson in our famous American patience (the Communist government, which adopted an…
In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce introduces hero Leopold Bloom with a description of the man’s appetites: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls… Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine…
Always hungry Barton G. Weiss of Barton G. The Restaurant is South Florida’s most ambitious restauranteur, constantly working with his chefs to develop outrageously clever menus and eye-popping presentations, only to revamp and start again the next season with newly brilliant concepts and concoctions. So it seemed like a perfect…
The P.R. was relentless. Paradiso, the Lake Worth restaurant owned by Chef Angelo Romano, was celebrating its tenth birthday all season long with a dish of $100 risotto. This was almost more outrageous than the $100 burger recently unveiled at the Old Homestead at Boca Raton Resort, a much-ballyhooed patty…
Where’s the beef going? “I didn’t want to change it,” Isaac Starkman told me a few years back when asked about his strategy for renovating Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House. “I wanted to perpetuate it.” And for good reason, as during one thirteen-year period alone the landmark delicatessen in Sunny Isles…
When restaurants fail, they don’t always do it spectacularly. Sometimes it’s just a slow, gloomy slide into mediocrity, and if you happen to be sitting over dinner at one of these joints, the feeling is akin to the plummeting sensation you get at the track when your valiant steed not…
