Restaurants

This month’s issue of Food & Wine taps our very own Allen Susser, of Chef Allen’s in Aventura, for recommendations about where to buy great local foodstuffs in South Florida.

Welcome to the first installment of our weekly Friday game, WTF IS IT?!? Each Friday (maybe) we’ll put up a photo of some exotic and supposedly edible foodstuff. First reader to correctly identify the thing will win…. …the smug knowledge that s/he is an insufferable know-it- all. You’re naturally invited…

Mexican food is the fastest-growing trend in ethnic cuisine in America, probably for no other reason than the popularity of the Mexican grill. These days, you can’t say “Pass the salsa” without an attendant from Chipotle or Baja Fresh chirping in, “Rojo o verde?” And did we mention On the…

Jo Clark’s latest venture, Thai Jo, is set to open in West Palm’s CityPlace this summer next door to the new Taverna Opa.

Words of dining advice: Always ask how much the verbally recited daily specials cost. Or pay the consequences. For Peter and Neil, a vacationing couple from Danbury, Conn., the consequence was a nearly $300 tab for dinner at Rendezvous On The Beach (in the Beacon Hotel on Ocean Drive). They…

You can’t take two steps these days without running into somebody who’s been laid off — or is planning to be. Suddenly, we’re all transformed from grasshoppers into ants, and the only markets we’re betting on are the aisles at Costco. Some of us aren’t quite old enough to remember…

“In Israel, people came from all over the world,” Ilan Cohen says. “So they brought their customs and flavors and kitchen dishes from Europe, from Morocco, from Greece. My father is from Syria, and my mother comes from Yugoslavia, with some Greek background. When I was growing up, we had…

Back in the late ’80s, if you were looking to impress a date over a sophisticated dinner, there was only a handful of restaurants in Palm Beach County that could pretty much guarantee you a home run. On the island, there was the hoity Café Europe and the even-pricier Petite…

I just got back from a trip to Santa Monica, California, a place so foreign to my experience and sensibilities that I felt like Marco Polo encountering the Mongolians. The ways of the Santa Monicans are strange indeed, and wonderful; I came away with a few observations about the natives…

There’s only one country in the world that could take something so crude, a list of ingredients any bumpkin ought to have within reach — a bit of flour, egg, milk, and butter — and turn it into a foodstuff that encapsulates, at once, the historic marriage of Catherine de…

Del Vecchio’s Italian Fishery appears to be run by a mythic race of men who are just, well, larger than the rest of us. They’re the guys whose ancestors clambered up and down beanstalks reaching to the sky; who, like a certain Philistine felled by a sling shot, measured “six…

Hip, sexy, and sophisticated is how I would describe local restaurateurs Brandon Belluscio and Brian Albe… er, no, actually, I wouldn’t. I haven’t a clue how hip and sexy these two guys are; I’m just reading the news release. I do know the dudes are just a smidge past their…

Ask an American what he thinks of the Turkish people or Turkish food and, if all goes well, you’ll get a blank stare. What we don’t know about Turkey would fill the dome of the Hagia Sophia. Americans wishing to catch up could do worse than to begin with plates…

It’s a recent Monday night on Clematis Street, and the only restaurants doing much business after 9 are Cabana, Pizza Girls, and Pistache French Bistro. Not too long ago, West Palm downtowners liked to kvetch that the devil’s triangle around the library, at the eastern end of Clematis, had a…

There’s a little amusement you can indulge in at the Whale Raw Bar and Fish House in Parkland while you’re waiting for your basket o’ steamers. It’s like those snag-the-stuffed-toy things at bowling alleys. A tank filled with a half-dozen live lobsters is the kind of lure a gambler like…

We’ve evolved to protect ourselves from dangerous food. We have a genetic predisposition to find spoiled vittles repellent, and we must “acquire a taste” for bitter or stinky foodstuffs like coffee or Campari because weird-tasting food could be poisonous. On some level, perhaps the molecular one, we know that each…

Coral Springs isn’t exactly inundated with ethnic dining options — if the suburban west Broward community of young families and Fort Lauderdale commuters had an official restaurant, it would be Olive Garden, with Taco Bell a strong second. But in the past two years the chain-plagued city has seen a…

If you’re like Amy Winehouse, Rod Stewart, and Tony Bennett, you got married for the first or third time in May or June. That means your anniversary will soon be upon you like an anvil dropped from a cliff. And I’ll bet you haven’t done a damn thing to save…

Here’s a restaurant with volume set to “max,” 14,000 square feet of surround-sound at the Fort Lauderdale Grande’s new China Grill. From design to dames it’s all spilling over the top: Take the flocks of unescorted single girls, their ruby slippers clackety-clacking on tile floors inlaid with quotes from Marco…

Read anything about Mexican mole (pronounced MOLE-ay), a sauce so contrarian few have been able to define it, and you’ll probably run across at least two origin stories. One involves a 17th-century nun named Sor Andrea de la Asunción. Panicked about how to feed a visiting archbishop, the good sister…

What’s your favorite food? Whatever I’m eating at the moment. Whatever I just ate. Whatever I might eat tomorrow. Right now, faced with a cuisine you might call Austro-Mideast-global fusion (if that didn’t sound so ridiculous), with appetizers and entrées like conch schnitzel, escargots, fillet of kampachi with currants, Kurobuta…

The week they opened in downtown West Palm Beach, the staff at Forté di Asprinio (225 Clematis St., West Palm Beach; 561-833-3330) were happily startled when a small party spent $25,000 on food and drink and dropped a $5,000 tip. So too was it generally a relief for Clematis Street…