Where can one find the answers to such diverse questions as: In what body part can you find the tarsal bones? How many wives has Mick Jagger had (so far)? And from what musical does the song “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” come? Not Jeopardy!, but at the Frog &…
And you think I’m cynical about fine dining? Check out the recent story in SmartMoney Magazine by Michael Kaplan called “Ten Things Your Restaurant Won’t Tell You.” His list, which is fleshed out by real-life examples of how restaurants have ripped off their customers, includes categories such as “Our Food…
No doubt it was bound to happen: Like Lincoln Road in Miami, Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard is no longer an unchained melody. The past two years have brought us Samba Room and Timpano Italian Chophouse, both national concepts owned by Carlson Restaurants Worldwide, a company that specializes in such…
What I learned from attending the 20th-annual Food & Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado: Festivals can make for some terrific all-inclusive minivacations. Once you pay for your travel expenses, lodging, and tickets to the events, you’re pretty much guaranteed no additional costs, simply because you’ll be so well-sated by…
I’ve been having an argument with a chef friend of mine. He was incensed because a reviewer had left his restaurant without eating dessert. Would I ever do such a thing? he wanted to know. Yup. I would, I have, and I will. I try not to make a practice…
“What if,” my husband began recently, “we both followed different diets — like, I could do Atkins and you could do the Zone or something — and then you compared them? Isn’t that a good idea for an article?” Let me think about that for a minute. Mmmm… no. Not…
When it comes to Spain, the average American mind conjures up a series of cultural images: old churches and cobblestone streets. A cup of gazpacho and a pitcher of sangría. Maybe even a bullfight or two, and a good shoe sale. But a strip mall and a rice plantation house?…
About five years ago, I was charged with what, at the time, seemed like a perfectly reasonable request: Find the ideal restaurant to review for the inaugural issue of New Times Broward-Palm Beach. The parameters were broad, somewhat general in scope. The eatery had to be relatively new. Untouched by…
I have always judged a dish’s quotient of spice by my father’s head. Balding for as long as I can remember, my dad, who enjoys a bit of zest now and then, sports a scalp that is a veritable litmus test for chilies. Mild? He might get a little clammy…
What is it with you and Chinese food?” a neighbor recently asked me. Apparently, he’d been observing the steady parade of delivery drivers from various local restaurants in our driveway and the takeout boxes of yang chow fried rice and moo shu pork in our refrigerator for the past two…
In the contact sport that is the restaurant business, the familiar athletic clichés apply, albeit in slightly modified form. For example, while it’s true that “winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing,” “how you play the game” is directly related to whether you win at all. And of course,…
Ah, the benefits of a music education. Now, I’m not such an advocate that I believe anyone can learn to play an instrument. I’m not so sure that Mozart makes you better in math. I don’t think that all babies are born with perfect pitch and that tone-deafness is only…
You know you’re getting old when bowling becomes vigorous exercise. And you know you’re getting desperate when you crave a dish that’s made in the restaurant of a bowling alley. Actually, I’m not a stranger to either sensation. I generally thought of bowling alleys as places to score cheap booze;…
You’d be forgiven if, just by reading the advertisement for the Palace, a two-month-old Indian restaurant on State Road 84 in Davie, you make some assumptions. You notice immediately the large type for the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. Your eye then is drawn to the box that proclaims that “banquet hall…
Rare hamburgers, fair warning: Your days are numbered as surely as those of cigarettes in restaurants. Many operators simply won’t serve you anymore — at least not without written consent. Thanks to the much-publicized proliferation of buddy bacteria E.coli and salmonella in worldwide supplies of ground meat, restaurants, especially chains,…
“We have rights too, ya know,” a would-be smoker grumbled as he was escorted directly past our table at the Gourmet Diner in Weston and out the front door. He shot a glance that could spark a match at my father, the tattletale who had first spied the other customer…
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that the three-month-old Cafe del Rio was a setup. Some kind of a test. Or maybe even a warning, the subtitle “True Tex-Mex” culinary code for “All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here.” The first of a Texas chain to open…
Here are some things I just don’t see in every restaurant: A new hire shadowing an experienced server in order to learn the velvet ropes. A waitress who doesn’t need for me to point out the wine I order from the list but rather nods in recognition at the name…
The alligator lay sprawled across the entranceway to the walking path at Shark Valley, as stopped and unmovable as a battery-dead wristwatch, absorbing the distant warmth of the winter sun. The only way around the six-foot creature, if we wanted to even start our stroll through this part of Everglades…
If I could sum up the newly opened Tarpon Bend in Weston with one onomatopoeic word, it would be a no-brainer: burp. And that’s not because the food at this month-old eatery is indigestion-inducing, though items like the Jamaican-style conch fritters, which were more like conch patties, needed a wrap…
The politicians and the service staff in South Florida seem to have one terrible habit in common: blind endorsement. In both cases, the perennial bluff has gotten so bad that it’s impossible to believe a recommendation that either makes. Local politicos no doubt can speak for themselves — or have…
The flamenco guitarist stands on a small podium between sidewalk tables at Café del Mar. The fingernails on his right hand resemble Lee Press-Ons, thanks to a talon-sharp file and a bottle of clear nail polish, and he uses them to pick complicated patterns while alternately holding the instrument over…
