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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?”…
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.”…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
