A Championship Season for Food?

Table 8 Coming to a plate near you David Bouley Evolution, the South Beach outpost of one of New York’s finest chefs, and Table 8, the South Beach outpost of one of Los Angeles’ finest chefs, have opened their doors, almost simultaneously, less than two blocks apart from each other…

Your Fish Is My Command

How you feel when you hear the words McCormick & Schmick’s depends a lot on context. If you’re engaged in a discussion with your broker about your stock portfolio, you’re probably going to feel pretty damned high, because the chain, which has opened more than 60 seafood restaurants since its…

Remembrance of Things Pasta

You know the story. French author Marcel Proust is having tea one day. He dips a piece of cookie — a sugary, scalloped confection called a madeleine — into a spoonful of brew. The tea-cookie emanates molecules of scent. Proust tastes; he swallows. Suddenly, he’s there, a small child in…

Late-Night Bites

News is trickling back from the Big Apple: The City That Never Sleeps has developed narcolepsy. Friends report emerging from an evening meeting in Manhattan with a powerful appetite for uni and rice wine only to find that all the joints have closed. And if Greenwich Village can’t satisfy our…

Dinner for Dummies

Please don’t try this at home. If your IQ rivals that of the season’s favorite feathered bird and you fear being able to fry one without inadvertently setting alight to your person, children, home, pet, and/ or relatives, listen up. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue staged a fiery little demo this past…

Thanksgiving Feasts

“Authentic Mexican? You’d be eating grubs rolled in a tortilla. Fried grasshoppers. Tripe.” Eduardo Pria didn’t think Norte Americanos were ready for that kind of “authentic” when he opened his Fort Lauderdale restaurant in 1993, even though some of the hoitier hotels back in Mexico City were already experimenting with…

Georgia on My Mind

Ah, beach food. Corn on the cob, hot dogs, freshly shucked clams. Pizza, burgers, and ice cream. There’s nothing better after bobbing in the ocean waves and baking in the sun for hours, is there? Along Hollywood’s Broadwalk, beach food also means tacos al carbon, Turkish falafel, empanadas, and French-Canadian…

Dirty Laundry

Side of infighting optional Brenda Khan, manager of Renaisa Indian Restaurant, was less than enthused over a recent review and hasn’t been shy about letting me, and my New Times editors, know about her displeasure. Her emails have objected to the way the write-up, a dual review of both Renaisa…

The Television Hi-Life

Once upon a time, I made a fool of myself on national TV. In the early ’90s, I appeared as a guest on CNBC’s tabloid talk show Real Personal, where I shared my experiences on the subject of “Women Who Do Something Because of Something” (you’ll have to bribe a…

What’s for dinner?

The Sneaky Kitchen is a lot like your grandmother’s house: full of recipe cards, Tupperware, and old stories. Its founder, Bess Metcalf, has lived in Miami for over forty years, likes to cook, apparently sells Tupperware, Fuller brushes, and Avon products, and has a lot of stories to tell about…

What Would Bruno Eat?

I should have been researching schnitzel and strudel recipes, but I got sidetracked by YouTube video clips: Sasha Baron Cohen’s fey-gay Austrian fashion-victim “Bruno” interviewing homo-hating Pastor Quinn of Little Rock, Arkansas, about the etiquette of showering in groups. Or Bruno torturing college wrestlers on Daytona Beach with faggy allusions…

Everything’s Coming Up Rosa

I planted four pepper plants last weekend — serranos, poblanos, sweet reds, and pequins. But my Mexican next-door neighbor, Roberto, tells me to abandon all hope. “The soil is different in Mexico from here,” he says. “No offense to you. But your chilies won’t taste like they do in Puebla.”…

Eat My Meat

A chic Miami Beach vixen, black-eyed and golden-skinned, maybe 20 years old and all of a hundred pounds, sits alone at El Rey Del Chivito. Menu in hand, she says something quick and cool to her waitress. The café is three-quarters empty at noon on a blistering Friday, the kind…

Diner at Eight

Completely against my better judgment, I’ve developed a grudging respect for Burt Rapoport. This is a guy I’d love to hate — he’s got a headful of big restaurant concepts and perpetual oodles of startup cash. His gigantic, overwrought restaurants — plunked down in bomb-proof shelters like Boca Center and…

Blog of the Day

wtf Dogma Grill? Critical Miami wants to know. The Miami eatery has successfully sued a hot dog establishment with a similarly punny name: Hot Dogma. The location of this weiner warehouse? Pittsburgh…

Texaco Transformation

The building at 9851 Kendall Drive used to be just another gas station, contending with the Shell station across the street and the Chevron on the corner. But intrepid entrepreneur Michael Touma saw opportunity when the skyrocketing gasoline prices and glut of competition overwhelmed the Texaco station. He removed the…

Blog of the Day

What is a real Grove restaurant?Coconut Grove Grapevine asks the question today: “If a tourist asked you which restaurant in the Grove actually says ‘Coconut Grove,’ which would it be?”…

Everything’s Coming Up Rosa

I planted four pepper plants last weekend — serranos, poblanos, sweet reds, and pequins. But my Mexican next-door neighbor, Roberto, tells me to abandon all hope. “The soil is different in Mexico from here,” he says. “No offense to you. But your chilies won’t taste like they do in Puebla.”…

Pizz-Off, Manhattan!

Boo-hoo-hoody-hoo-hoo. If I hear one more transplanted New Yorker whinging and sniveling about how there’s no good pizza in South Florida, I’m going to explode in a shower of marinara. It’s not enough that we give you people 363 days of brilliant sunshine, endless beaches, 15 varieties of mango tree,…

Grading Antipasti on a Curve

I’m getting bitch-slapped all over the place lately. I’ve gotten a slew of letters in the past couple of weeks suggesting I need to find myself another profession. I’m a mean-spirited misanthrope who wouldn’t know a gourmet dinner if she fell face down in it. If I write a negative…

Wawel-Va-Voom

Polish restaurant food is often taken for granted, the stuff of lunch counters and coffee shops, where you might get a cup of hastily-made borscht and a big plate of unremarkable stuffed cabbage and boiled carrots for little more than you’d pay for a cheeseburger deluxe. So it was the…

Sushi to Your Door — Maybe

We received very exciting news yesterday and we just had to share it with you. Now, we know that you Beach dwellers loathe leaving the island. Heck, you don’t even want to leave your condo, since you paid so much money for it and you now realize that with an…