Flower Power

If you telephone Flowers restaurant early in the morning when nobody’s there, you’ll get an answering message. “Thank you for calling Food Amongst the Flowers,” a man’s voice intones, in the precisely articulated upper-crust British accents of, say, actor James Mason. “Our hostesses are presently busy assisting other customers. We…

Oh Phyllis G, Riddle Me a Riddle

Ten thousand food critics can’t be wrong. Seems like everybody who’s ever written a word about cuisine in South Florida has fallen under the spell of Phyllis G’s Enigma (2717 N. Federal Hwy., Delray Beach 561-243-6377). “Culinary adventures await,” blathers the Palm Beach Post. “Amazing…” crows the Sun Sentinel. “Deserves…

Future Looks So Bright

If you want to get inside the head of Mike Jones, the man behind Jetsetter Lounge, you need to fire up your time machine and travel back to 1965. That was the year that 6-year-old Jones visited the New York World’s Fair. And like tens of thousands of other space-age…

Bova, Get Ova Yerself

“Here’s something unique,” Michelle Soudry says. “Bova has a full water menu.” Soudry is director of public relations at the Gab Group, the boutique PR firm handling the explosive pre- and post-intelligence on Ristorante Bova in Boca Raton. “Um,” I say. “Like, they’re serving a lot of seafood?” Soudry’s tinkle…

Apres-Pai Gow

The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood is surrounded by small businesses that cater to the whims gamblers can’t meet inside the casino complex. On surrounding streets, you’ll find, for instance, tax-free cigarette shops, dozens of pawnshops, check-cashing stores, and a late-night eatery where you can go for…

Half-Naked Lunch

They are two perfectly round, flawless half-moons. And I’m temporarily mesmerized by what is truly the most beautiful ass I’ve ever seen. It’s un-Photoshopped, it’s almost entirely bare, and the girl this anatomical triumph belongs to is shaking it around with innocent abandon. Her body should be registered as a…

A Child Was Born in Hoboken

Screw Christmas. The hell with Hanukkah. December 12 was Frank Sinatra’s birthday, and did a single city hall even bother to drag out a likeness of Ol’ Blue Eyes for the occasion? Or were they too busy bickering over their stupid crèches? Half the baby boomers in America were conceived…

The Great Outdoors

New Year’s Resolution: Spend more time outdoors. Parenthetical: Between November and April. “No, scratch that,” I said. “Make it ‘spend more time eating outdoors. ‘” My spousal equivalent had a notebook on her lap, and the pages were ruffling in the breeze off the harbor. A boat festooned entirely in…

The Grape Escape

‘Tis the season to totally lose it. Some people crash and burn on sugar cookies. Others max out their credit on flat-screen TVs. But if you’re like Jay Simpson, your weakness is for $200 bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal champagne. Simpson and his partner, Cindy White, are hoping a lot…

Love in the Time of Teriyaki

I used to know a bunch of gay South Florida ladies who took biyearly treks to Atlanta in search of brides. Fed up with Palm Beach slim pickin’s, they’d pack up the car with a week’s worth of bait (massage oil, patchouli-scented candles, CK One cologne, Ani DiFranco tapes) and…

Dream On

Dream Dinners is to cooking as: a) Tom Cruise is to Godliness. b) “Burgundy cooking wine” is to French premier cru. c) Abu Ghraib is to romance. d) All of the above. You don’t go to Dream Dinners, the newly opened franchise in Sunrise, to learn anything about the culinary…

Hail, Bretagne

The streets of Quimper, an ancient city in northwestern France in an area known as Cornouaille in Brittany, are better-suited for motorcycles than for SUVs — and in some areas of the old town, cars are forbidden anyway. The roads are crooked and cobbled, as likely to end in cul-de-sacs…

Pie in the Face

Who bakes pie from scratch anymore? We’re more likely to be served a slice of an oversized five-dollar apple or pumpkin pie from the local supermarket. At diners, pies defy the laws of physics. Six-inch-tall chocolate mousse pies; pale, brawny slices of apple pie with a filling that somehow stays…

The Bargain Bhaji

London in the mid-1980s was a crash course in East Asian culture for a girl like me. The universe was Thatcherite; the city reeled under economic stagflation, an AIDS crisis, and a resurgence of neo-Nazi extremism. But there was one bright side: Every corner minimart had a pile of samosas…

That Old Blackened Magic

You know you’re getting close to Red Rock Coal Fired Pizza (50 NE First Ave., Boca Raton, 561-361-6655) when, a block or two away, you catch a whiff of burning coals. That scent tells you you’re going to sit down to the kind of pizza that has generated a good…

Rice Recovery

In his famous essay La Duende, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca tells the story of a flamenco dancer, well into her 80s, who trounces her younger, prettier competitors in a contest. “Competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water,” he says, “[she] carried off the…

Winging It

At least a few residents on North A and B Streets in Lake Worth think a tornado ripped through their neighborhood on the afternoon of Monday, October 24, right in the middle of Hurricane Wilma’s second wind. When they finally emerged from their battered houses, Our Savior Lutheran church on…

The Switzerland of Pupusas

Since it’s neither Salvadoran nor Honduran, Fort Lauderdale’s Guatemala Restaurant (3673 Davie Blvd., 954-792-9737) is not the first, second, or 19th place that most people would look for pupusas, but the tiny establishment with just five stools and a bit of tiled counter gets them right. Order one as a…

Columbus Day Unplugged

When the International Federation of Competitive Eating polled 1,000 “eating athletes” for its Columbus Day pasta poll in 2003, it discovered that in matters fettuccini, there’s a woeful historical ignorance among our pasta-eating elite. Only 43 percent of the mostly male respondents, weighing in between 151 and 200 pounds, correctly…

Come Sail Away

Once, I was a queen… I parked my fat white ass in a deck chair while impoverished brown people from Third World countries scurried around to satisfy my every whim. Caviar? Champagne? I had only to waggle a pinkie. And if, during my five-course dinner, I wanted another filet mignon…

Prime-al Scene

While we Palm Beach downtown-watchers weren’t watching, something weird happened. West Palm Beach, with all its pomp and hubris, its master plans, mayoral specifying, scads of money, and fancypants developers, went precisely nowhere. Meanwhile, the little town that could, Lake Worth, a few miles south, took off like a high-speed…