I’m not going to lie to you: The place is a few doors down from Hollywood Spice Adult Books and the Discount Trailer Warehouse, tucked away behind a blank storefront on a stretch of State Road 441 where you can shop till you drop for auto parts. If you’re looking…
Owners of Italian restaurants must be blessed with a fierce risk-taking gene. Not counting pizza parlors and factoring out Olive Garden and Carrabba’s, there must be 300 Italian places scattered around Broward and Palm Beach counties. The competition is so cut-throat that if you’re drawing up a menu featuring chicken…
Have a hankering for some strawberry Pocky? Trying to find boiled fern for your favorite recipe? Where can you go to find such unusual items, you ask? OK, well maybe you didn’t ask, but you should still check out your local Oriental market some day. There, minerals, vegetables, and animals…
Some things just don’t go together well. Take, for example, liquor and red wine. Ammonia and bleach. Or Jacko and Lisa Marie. However, some things, strange as they may seem, make sense together, like Bowie and Iman, Woody Allen and Soon-Yi… even Martha Stewart and her jail cell. When it…
“I want to be the next Emeril, the next Wolfgang Puck, the next Norman Van Aiken,” Michael Blum says. Judging from his plans for a 5,000-square-foot space at 2000 Harrison St. in Hollywood, it may be only a matter of time. “We’re about food that’s in-your-face, Cirque de Soleil dining…
Himalaya, the West Broward Indian restaurant that opened in the middle of 2001, presents a problem peculiar (and challenging) to food critics and their readers. Three years ago, the small (ten booths, six tables) establishment received the customary rush of reviewers eager to taste and tell. Their opinions, full of…
Moby didn’t show. But a six-foot Dorothy in gingham dress and ruby slippers did. And then there was a shirtless hunk on a bicycle, an aging queen with a toupee and a walker, and Mayor Jim Naugle and his wife. There were also several hundred gay men in varying states…
Much like Dubya’s mandate, the popularity of Bonefish Grill has reached the degree that no self-protecting member of Food World can ignore it. On weekends, the lines of people waiting out front at either the Coral Springs or the Plantation locations are long enough to make the faint-hearted turn tail…
“Originally seen on the streets of Hong Kong, boba is not dangerous to man, though its appearance can seem threatening to the uninitiated. It’s not difficult to spot the boba, as its brownish tone makes it stand out when it swims in the pools of Easter egg-colored, milkshake-like fluids it…
Pissed off at Publix? Think you just can’t choke down one more slice of gummy, supermarket-nuked bread? Tired of settling for choice beef when your adventurous, poetic soul yearns for prime? Fed up with fish that smells like… well, you know what it smells like. A girl’s gotta take matters…
Opening a Vietnamese restaurant in Boynton Beach is the second-hardest thing Tom Nguyen has ever done. The most difficult was exiting his homeland 24 years ago. Back in 1980, Nguyen was standing on a beach at Nha Trang in Central Vietnam, waiting to board a rickety fishing boat with 82…
True or false? You know you’ve arrived at an Ocean Drive dining destination if: (1) a leggy hostess with a mocha tan and sunglasses on her head greets you on the sidewalk, (2) even though you thought you were going for a quiet dinner, you hear techno music thumping behind…
Could there be a more inviting place in town than al-Salam? Maybe, but you’d probably have to hop a plane to Jeddah to compete with the hospitality at this Saudi restaurant/grocery located on the northeast corner of University Drive and Sunrise Boulevard. The hostess, who doubled as a waitress on…
In West Palm’s posh Flamingo Park neighborhood, a young couple plants their backyard with rows of basil, rosemary, thyme, and Italian parsley. In Lake Worth, a Finnish grandfather bakes bread from old Scandinavian recipes — he’s been doing it every day in the same location for 50 years. Down the…
From the moment La Cigale opened in May 2001, foodists have had their tongues out for whatever drips from Executive Chef Jean Pierre Blouin’s brandished spoon. Only city ordinances have prevented some lifeguards of the larder from setting up tents under the canopy of this 185-seat jewel box in the…
In January, 2000, the Florida Citrus Commission made the historic move of approving the use of one of its licensing logos on a beverage other than orange juice. The logo? The Florida “Sunshine” tree. The beverage? Wine. No sooner than you could say grapefruit champagne, eight distributors of taste-twisting Florida-fruit-based…
Banana splits. Original Motown recordings. Diners. The Mickey Mouse Club. The martini. Perry Mason. The Thin Man series. The Hope/Crosby road movies. Did any of these American cultural benchmarks beg for reinterpretation? Nope. But they got it anyway. And now, the Red Star Tavern, the latest addition to the expanding…
Jamaican folks sing the praises of Devon House, a Kingston landmark and popular purveyor of island-style ice cream. But instead of booking the next flight on Air Jamaica to the island, head for the Highway 441 strip mall that offers a remarkable facsimile. At York Castle Tropical Ice Cream (61…
South Floridians will do almost anything, forgive almost anything, to eat on the water. They’ll suffer through mildew, service more inept than the Scott Peterson prosecution, and food no better than Denny’s to gaze in rapture at the Intracoastal Waterway or the ocean. Boynton Beach’s Prime Catch, the four-month-old venture…
Shuck’s on the Water is not on the water. It’s close, though — across a small parking lot from one of the more significant bends in the Middle River off Federal Highway south of Sunrise. What used to be Durty Nellie’s reopened three months ago as a bar-cum-fresh seafood spot…
Lunch can really hang you up the most. Especially when the outside air is the texture of angora. When you’re hungry and have a 30-minute lunch “hour.” When you can’t stand the thought of another desk-side scoop of chicken salad. Cheer up. Chin up. In downtown Fort Lauderdale, we now…
Around the time of Martin Luther, Germany — the land of Bach and von Braun — seems to have pretty much developed a cuisine and stuck with it. But the Teutons’ neighbor to the south, the Austrians, even at the height of their empire, had enough humility and good sense…
