These days, it’s not just a question of where to find fresh produce, meat, and fish. It has to be organic. Local. Ethical. One market might have juicy, just-harvested sugar cane or a stock of lemons as large and supple as a woman’s fist, but were the laborers paid a…
I don’t want to go all maudlin here, but what the hell happened to diners? Maybe they do exist still, like endangered pachyderms retreating ever farther into inaccessible forest; you might catch a glimpse of some gleaming, bullet-shaped shadow on blue highways running through Church Hill or Greer’s Ferry or…
One of the focal points of the elegant room at Ke’e Grill in Boca Raton is a pair of blue marlin mounted on a bamboo wall. The other is a sheet of floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking a tropical garden. But it’s the marlin, each the size of a Mini Cooper…
Castro resigns! I’m not old enough to remember a Cuba without El Caballo in the presidential compound, but in solidarity with those who are, we hied ourselves over to Little Havana in Deerfield Beach last week, wanting to absorb the flavor of the prelapsarian island metropolis. The closest I’ve ever…
People don’t want to cross the bridge to get here,” says Peter Wong. He’s talking about the little concrete blip that arches over the Intercoastal on East Commercial Boulevard in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, a clackety span you could just about hop over with a running start. Wong opened Noodle Box on Ocean…
It’s Friday night on Clematis Street, and the line for drinks at Rocco’s Tacos and Tequila Bar is four deep. I’m checking the wall of patrons for chinks so my buddies and I can nab a shot of El Jimador while we wait for a table. Suddenly, someone says, “I…
I got to know Japanese food intimately at Yoko, a long, thin strip of a restaurant lined with pleather-covered booths, smoked mirrors, and a sushi bar backed by oversized photos of bamboo. The place, always filled with regulars, was situated between Babies R Us and the Spy Store off Okeechobee…
The last time I’d stepped through the door at 2671 E. Oakland Park Blvd., I’d skirted under a neon martini glass and around an ashen-haired biker hobbling gamely on metal crutches. The biker, not as tough as he looked, was one of the trio of big shots who owned Ruggero’s…
They say we eventually come to look like what we truly are. Our inner selves transform the outer ones little by little, nudging our whole being into alignment, until we make a reflective house of our bodies the way a snail articulates its shell. Or maybe it’s the opposite: skin…
I’m waiting my turn in the assembly line-style queue at Sunrise Pita (2680 N. University Dr., Sunrise, 954-748-0090) when the line cook asks the woman in front of me what she’d like on her shawarma lafa. Her lips purse as she contemplates the options — tomato and cucumber salad, roasted…
I met Mark Ortell, owner of Amazonia Brazilian Churrascaria, over a Cuban sandwich last year. We were sitting at the bar at Crazy Cuban in Boynton Beach drinking beer when Ortell mentioned he had two restaurants in Aruba. When he said he planned to open two more, Amazonia and Aquamarine,…
Question, readers: How long are you willing to wait for your next glass of wine? In my family, it’s all about timing. If you’re a pro, you clamp your fist around the Rancho Zabaco bottle as you’re vacuuming the last whiff of Zin-infused air from your goblet. It takes planning…
When they wheeled the machine out on its cart, eight feet tall at least, an antique gewgaw of brass nozzles and gauges, pumps and spouts, like something you’d find in an 18th-century laboratory, she hardly knew what it was. She’d simply asked for a cup of coffee. Three liveried waiters…
What I didn’t know about chicken wings when I first set foot in Hurricane Grill and Wings would fill the corporate libraries of Tyson and Perdue. I didn’t know the things we eat today by the basket-load, a deep-fried finger-food that has conquered corner bars and corporate franchises, the dripping…
Last month we wrote about Dogma Grill (“Haute Dogs,” November 1), lamenting that Broward dog lovers can’t find a certain type of Los Angeles street-cart hot dog. The L.A. dog we were hankering for is wrapped in bacon and griddle-fried with onions, peppers, and whole jalapeños. Then reader Lety Lopez…
I’m not having an affair,” a woman sitting behind us asserts. I can’t tell if she’s defending herself from a lover’s accusation or rejecting the advice of a friend. But without craning around I can describe her: a white-blond, shoulder-length coif — platinum, like the jewelry she’s wearing. How do…
Spicy food has lots of benefits for hulking humans. That’s just one reason grown-ups acquire a taste not only for gin but also dark coffee and Tabasco sauce. The plants we think of as aromatic, that we use to liven up our dinners, contain volatile oils and chemical compounds. Those…
I just got back from Brooklyn, where street gluttons wait patiently in line 100 minutes or more to crowd into a dinky storefront parlor for the pizza at Di Fara. The old guy behind the counter, Dom DeMarco, is spry and focused; his Neapolitan hand is the only one to…
I’m not bragging, but if it weren’t for me, my parents would never try new food. When I first took them to a Japanese restaurant, Dad squirmed at the sight of raw toro; Mom wondered what reason there could be to eat something rolled in seaweed. Five years later, they…
A lot of people congregate at Tequila Ranch, the massive Mexican restaurant at Seminole Paradise, but they’re not flocking there for the guacamole and chips. TR is so relentlessly crowded — no, they don’t take reservations; yes, they hand you a beeper at the door — because it appeals to…
You could have knocked me over with a feather. If I hadn’t happened across it accidentally while surfing for Il Bellagio’s phone number, it never would have occurred to me that there could actually be an Internet forum devoted to — I’m not kidding you — kvetching about the goings-on…
We don’t mind celebrating the bounty of the fall harvest; we just don’t want to have to raise, chop, pick, gather, butcher, or forage for it. To say nothing of three full days of mashing, roasting, and baking. That’s why God invented takeout. And it’s why she created women like…
