My husband and I had a long-overdue couples’ night with two of our best friends, Jeff and Jessica, one recent Sunday at Origin Asian Bistro, a South Miami restaurant that was Miami New Times’s 2006 choice for Best Restaurant in South Miami-Dade. We love the place: The Malaysian roti is…
After years of working at Norman’s Restaurant, Chef Jeffrey Brana and his wife Anna have opened a place of their own, Restaurant Brana, in Coral Gables (see this week’s Cafe review). Riptide spoke with Jeffrey by phone and asked him a few questions about subjects not covered in the review…
Some people make it all look so easy. Whatever it is — dressing like a minx on a pitiful budget, whipping up a 30-minute layer cake for your spontaneous midnight party, remembering who ordered the tomato pudding and who had the iguana soup. I’m always in awe of the smooth…
I’m hoping my intuition about Spontané proves right: We have here a manageably sized restaurant owned by a pair of creative young chefs who have given themselves permission to mess around, auditioning dishes we haven’t seen before even while paying playful homage to the classics. I’m practically willing Spontané to…
A Fish Called Avalon, the long-running seafood restaurant on Ocean Drive, has issued a press release trumpeting its boycott of all Canadian seafood products to protest the clubbing of baby seals. “Canada’s fisheries sell lobster, snow crabs, cod, mackerel, scallops, shrimp, haddock, oysters, herring, perch, mussels, sole, yellow perch, sardines,…
The local media has been mourning the demise of Fu Manchu Chinese restaurant on 71st Street in Miami Beach, which shut its doors after a near record-setting 71 year run (only Joe’s Stone Crab has been going longer). Longevity aside, however, Fu Manchu was a pretty lousy restaurant over the…
Mystery Number One: With more than half a million Cubans living in South Florida, why is it almost impossible to find a cheap, decent dish of ropa vieja? Or, for that matter, a plateful of Cuban-style pulled roast pork for under a tenner? I’m talking about the kind of joint…
As the waiter put down our appetizers, one called “Balsa Pear with Sesame Oil” and the other a dish called “Beef and Lung in Special Sauce,” he warned us about the latter one. “Be careful. That’s very spicy.” Fuqi feipan, which translates as “married couple’s lung slices,” doesn’t have any…
I’m going to put my cards on the table: I’m not a big fan of steak houses. I have good friends who continuously scan the Internet for airfare deals to New York so they can make their biannual pilgrimage to Peter Luger’s; I know people who’ve stopped speaking over the…
Jorge Luis Fernandez calls himself “The Dali of the Kitchen.” The comparison makes sense, because Fernandez, the chef at La Barraca in Hollywood, is a dead ringer for Salvador Dali in his middle years, before the publicity-mad surrealist went nuts with the mustache wax and took to signing blank canvasses…
Until about six months ago, Chico’s Place (4819 N. Dixie Hwy., Deerfield Beach, 954-420-0088) was a Portuguese bar in the middle of Broward’s Little Brazil. With the addition of Chef Daniel Menezes, some white tablecloths, and a new menu, he and the owners have turned that one room into a…
It’s 10 o’clock on opening night at the Sunfish Grill, and the bar is hip-deep in ladies of a certain age. They’re gussied up in turquoise taffeta sheath dresses with matching purses, in sequined bodices and strappy sandals; they are corseted and perfumed. They’ve had their hair done; it matches…
“Handsome is as handsome does.” Somebody’s wise old grandmother said that. Not my grandma; she was too busy pounding back snifters of cognac and channel-surfing for the latest Ronco electric food dehydrator — and anyway, she was such a sucker for a pretty face. Sometimes, it takes a good many…
I grew up in a part of Connecticut where the favorite local pizzas were what we called Greek-style, a shallow-pan pizza with tangy sauce baked so well-done that the cheese would turn golden brown and toughen in a good way. Chicagoans will rhapsodize about cakey, deep-dish pizza, and New Yorkers…
The girl who serves us our sake is a Sexy Kitty. Her name is Tuesday, she weighs about 80 pounds, and she’s one of a stable of “burlesque” entertainers that West Palm clubtrepreneur Rodney Mayo and his right-hand man, Chris Johnson, have put together. The girls are called Sexy Kittys;…
50 lbs. cornmeal 10 lbs. bran (optional) 200 lbs. sugar 12 oz. yeast 200 gal. water In Eastern Tennessee, that recipe will mix you up 36 gallons of “artisanal” moonshine, a local, sustainable, slow-food beverage cooked exactly so for many generations. You can proof your liquor by adding a bit…
There’s something human beings really hate to do all by ourselves. We don’t like to dine alone. When we venture out to eat, let us have at least one other sentient being beside us at table even if, in a pinch, it turns out to be someone we don’t much…
About ten years ago, I lived in a bustling pan-Muslim neighborhood branching off a couple of blocks of Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. In a three-block walk, you would pass a café where old men would smoke hookahs and sip coffee, a café where young men would smoke hookahs and…
TGIMS! Or Thank God It’s Mango Season. Some heavenly creature long ago peered down at us suffering fools as we slogged through the swamps, swatting at mosquitoes and no-see-ums, dodging man-eating alligators and man-frying spikes of lightning, and blessed us with the only thing that could possibly make summer in…
In case you’ve missed the saga of Lauderdale Chef Steven LaBiner’s odyssey from riches to rags to riches in the past couple of years (feel free to catch the heart-wrenching audio slide show on the Sun Sentinel’s website), I’ll summarize. Hobo’s Fish Joint, Coral Springs. Nice gig, open ten years…
What do Palm Beach, Abu Dhabi, Madrid, Monte Carlo, Singapore, Mexico City, Dubai, Houston, Amsterdam, and Jeddah have in common? They’re cities where, when you’re feeling lonely, lost, far from home, and hungry, you can hie yourself over to a certain megachain and know exactly what’s on the menu. We’re…
A perfect martini goes a long way toward softening me up. Here’s my totally unprofessional confession: I’m inclined to love the food that follows it in direct proportion to the mastery with which my drink has been mixed. Terrible, isn’t it? Worse and worse, many a food snob would crucify…
