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Best Tapas

Paella Seafood Grill

Those Spaniards really know how to work a room. Their idea of a good meal is something you can carry with you, all the better for movers and shakers who like to make contact -- or need to make a quick exit. At Paella, the tapas are a little hard to manage one-handed, but Wednesday night's flamenco floor show will keep you glued to your chair anyway. Dig into a Peruvian ceviche of marinated octopus, shrimp, tilapia, and mussels; tortillas espanol; omelets with potatoes and Galician sausage; paprika-spiced octopus in tomato sauce; spicy and soothing garbanzo frito with Serrano ham and Spanish sausage; grilled octopus; button mushrooms steamed in wine and olive oil; bacalao croquetas; and loaves of warm, crusty bread. You'll just have to set down your fork between bites to clap and shout ÁOlé!

Best Conch Fritter

Calypso

Candace West
Many people can catch a conch -- after all, these shellfish don't move so quick -- but rare is the soul who can cook one. At Calypso, the kitchen staff takes what looks like a shred of blown tire (the ones you're always swerving to avoid on I-95) and turns it into something not only edible but unforgettable. Here, you can have your conch grilled (seasoned and lightly charred) or cracked (pounded and fried) or marinated and tossed in a salad or spiced up and served in a stew -- but for an old-fashioned Florida treat, there's nothing like having it frittered. Frittering is an individual art, but anybody who's ever had the bread-heavy, greasy, conchless Ping-Pong balls that pass for the real thing in most joints will be agreeably confounded by Calypso's version. They come to the table hot and crisp, not oily, with a soft, pudding-like, melt-in-the-mouth interior that tells you you're getting the real deal -- studded with minutely minced green onion, red pepper, and carrot, and, of course, toothsome, bite-sized pieces of the giant sea slug you've learned to love at last.

Best Thai Restaurant

Tamarind Asian Grill

Liz Dzuro
Eaten enough pad thai to add extra padding to your thail? Now that tom yum has become the ubiquitous Asian equivalent of spaghetti with red sauce, Thai-aholics desperate for a little novelty will really appreciate the menu at Tamarind, where a skewer of grilled quail eggs yakitori is enough to file the edge off creeping Thai-dium. A plate of sweet boniato Thai fries breathes new life into the standard greasy chip: Sizzling and crisp, they're perfectly paired with the spicy peanut dipping sauce that comes with. A green papaya salad is tart and tangy enough to wake up jaded appetites. And while nobody will divulge the recipe for any of it, the Thai dumplings are a secret worth keeping -- ground chicken and shrimp with a fresh mélange of lime and garlic. Purists will also appreciate the fresh tamarind pods for dessert and a luscious nursery-style pudding of sweet sticky rice and black beans.

Best Key Lime Pie

Aruba Beach Café

Take in a key-lime-flavored double feature at Aruba Beach Café: The key lime pie martini ($8.50) is a smooth, decadent cocktail for folks who like their desserts in liquid form, created to match a late-afternoon mood. It's made with Licor 43 (a potent Spanish citrus vanilla liqueur), Rose's lime juice, and cream and served in a tall martini glass -- raise a toast for Day One of the rest of your newly laid-back life. This excellent medicine pairs nicely with a classic slice of key lime pie ($5.95), made exactly the way God intended, with lime juice, condensed milk, and fresh eggs on a buttery graham cracker crust. Meanwhile, the view from an outdoor table three sandy footsteps from Lauderdale beach is pink sky over turquoise seas, tan limbs under microscopic bikinis. Live reggae music is the whipped cream on your sweet.

Best Seafood Restaurant

Blue Moon Fish Co.

The list of seafood we can consume without compromising our nervous systems or the entire ecosystem has dwindled to a handful, but there's still enough to eat with pleasure and sans guilt from the menu at Blue Moon. Grab a table for two on the dock at sunset and order from the raw bar, where fresh oysters priced at $1.95 and dabbed with house-made lemon horseradish cocktail sauce are delightful little mouthfuls of political correctness. Gorge to your bleeding heart's content on fresh clams, Zataran spiced gulf shrimp, or Hawaiian spiked tuna poki, secure in the knowledge that the Environmental Defense Fund will never name you on their enemy hit list. Sea scallops with chipotle-tomatillo ratatouille get the green light from the Green Party, as does the Dungeness crab and Louisiana crawfish cake. And your crocodile tears can just dry right up over that plate of blackened mahi-mahi with giant sea scallops and jumbo shrimp forked with a little green apple-mango salsa and vanilla rum butter -- a sea-dwelling triumvirate that's still as theoretically sound as the dollar.

Best Waterfront Dining

Windows at Ireland's

Time marches on at Ireland's Inn Beach Resort, where the 60-room '60s hotel, undulating like a gigantic, pink tsunami, is slated for demolition in the next couple of years to make room for a 600-unit condo-hotel and what the owners hope will be a five-star restaurant. Ireland's third-generation proprietors, Andy and Kathy Mitchell, are thinking big -- but for the moment, the clock seems to have stopped at the hotel's restaurant, Windows at Ireland's. Fine by us. The dinner waiters still dress in tuxes, the menu and the décor have defied every trend you can throw at them, and those huge windows still look out on the 450 feet of beachfront the Mitchells own -- enough sand to fill an hourglass set for infinity. Breakfast and lunch are served on the outdoor terrace overlooking the Atlantic -- including 30-year traditions like eggs Benedict, grilled bangers and eggs, chicken shortcake, Waldorf salad, stuffed avocado, Ireland's seaside club sandwich, and a classic key lime pie. Dinner's a soothing affair accompanied by live piano music and personable, attentive service. The pan-fried chicken, served family style, and hearts-of-palm salad, with orange segments and yellow peppers, are just about unimprovable, and prices for a beachfront hotel (two can dine well for around $80) are stunningly reasonable.

Best Museum Café

Café 1451 at the Norton Museum of Art

In thematically seamless style, Café Chef Marc Benoit has whipped up a little something to pair with the Norton's excellent impressionism and Matisse exhibits this year, not to mention its stellar permanent collection of impressionists -- a menu of French-accented small plates, soups, and salads as varied as the many faces and moods of Monsieur Matisse's favorite model, Laurette. Nibble on paper-thin slices of smoked salmon brushed with crme fra”che and flecked with capers, explore a palette of assorted French cheeses with crusty bread, or apply a thick impasto of sinfully rich chicken liver mousse and port jelly to crostini. More substantial are a classic croque monsieur; a niçoise sandwich of tuna, olive tapenade, and roasted peppers; or full luncheon entrées including snapper á la Provençale, steak minuit, and omelette du jour filled with Comte cheese, French ham, and spinach. Add final varnish to a lovely meal with French roast coffee, a pear tarte amandine, or fallen chocolate soufflé cake in an atmosphere utterly conducive to the contemplation of beauty.

Best Place to Dine With Gramps

Brazilian Tropicana

Don't second-guess the old man -- he hates early-bird specials. And as long as his teeth and his nether parts are still in working order, he'd much rather eat grilled steak and ogle booty, thank you very much. There's hardly a better place to do both than Brazilian Tropicana, the oldest churrascaria in town, where the meats -- lamb, chicken, pork, sirloin tip, sausage -- are marinated and spit-roasted over a wood fire, then dished out by roaming gauchos who travel the semicircle of tables set up around the stage, slicing dripping meat off their "swords." It'll take Grandpa back to the days when men were men, damn it! And women weren't afraid to be girly girls! That's the second part of the equation: A post-dinner floor show begins with one slinky torch singer crooning Carmen Miranda favorites, progresses through semi-naked couples dancing romantic and body-contorting bossa novas, to a finale where the ladies come out wearing nothing more than G-strings, pasties, platform shoes, and ten-foot headdresses. Believe it, an hour of watching the most perfectly proportioned and muscled bodies in Lauderdale will make Big Daddy feel like a colt again.

Best Outdoor Dining

Ristorante Luna Rosa

The gravitational force exerted by this big pink moon upon the ocean waters directly opposite its outdoor terraces is roughly equal to the forces of attraction exerted between a plate of Luna Rosa's ricotta-stuffed ravioli and your mouth. Or between your giant South African double lobster tails and your dining partner's fork. Which is to say that, scientifically speaking, if you look hard enough for a good family-style Italian restaurant -- serving homemade pastas, sea bass with olives and tomatoes, and Super Tuscan vino by the glass -- that also happens to provide the sound of breaking waves and the smell of salt spray as a side dish, you'll eventually find it.

Best Place to Dine Alone

Lemongrass Asian Bistro

Feeling that hollow sense of emptiness deep inside? Are you alienated, cut off, isolated, disconnected from all meaningful human contact? Can't get a date because you're too (paralyzed/terrified/stoned) to pick up the phone? Got the post-Cartesian metaphysical blues? Well, here's a little pill to make you larger, friend: It's shaped like the homemade chicken wonton in a jewel-colored bowl of soup at Lemongrass Asian Bistro. We defy you to swallow this mouthful of nirvana and cling to your insecurity complex simultaneously. It can't happen. And after you're warmed up and relaxed a little, after you've maybe worked your way through a plate of tiny whole marinated octopus or Vietnamese summer rolls and you're starting to feel just a mite less misunderstood and rejected by the entire family of man, we suggest you take a look around and notice that there's stuff happening beyond the horizon line of your own damned navel -- like, f'rinstance, that trio of babes at the next table sucking on flash-fried, soft-shell crab legs.

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