If you’ve ever seen the amazing Brazilian movie City of God, you probably recall the chicken chase whenever you think of Rio de Janeiro. In the opening shots, a group of starving street kids takes off after a fowl that’s barely escaped the raised cleaver at a fried chicken stand;…
A tortilla at El Tamarindo, perfectly round, exuding a pleasant, grassy-floral scent, has the appealing softness and density of warm skin, like the dusky feel of a burro’s neck. The only relation it bears to a Frito’s chip or a boxed taco shell is that it’s made from corn. And…
When I was a kid, my grandmother and grandfather fought their most vicious battles over scotch lowballs and plates of cannelloni at a Palm Beach Italian place called Maurice’s. He was an aging artist, she a lifelong floozy and tippler 25 years his junior, and their shrill skirmishes were part…
Downtown Hollywood makes me happy. I pretend I don’t have a clue about which developer is lining which politician’s pockets, what kind of crummy deals are being cut behind the scenes, who the corrupt lawmakers are. I see no evil. The cops who hover perpetually outside the doors of Spice…
For most of human history, meals have been shared. Today’s place-setting conventions — the individual serving plate, the personal spoon, the pristine wine glass meant for one’s lips alone — are pretty recent evolutions in finickiness. Time was, in just about every culture we scooped our meals with our fingers…
I hear if you’re going to travel anywhere these days and you’re interested in food, you’d better go to Saigon. As George Bush would have us believe, the city is one great, big U.S. success story and a lesson in our famous American patience (the Communist government, which adopted an…
In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce introduces hero Leopold Bloom with a description of the man’s appetites: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls… Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine…
The P.R. was relentless. Paradiso, the Lake Worth restaurant owned by Chef Angelo Romano, was celebrating its tenth birthday all season long with a dish of $100 risotto. This was almost more outrageous than the $100 burger recently unveiled at the Old Homestead at Boca Raton Resort, a much-ballyhooed patty…
When restaurants fail, they don’t always do it spectacularly. Sometimes it’s just a slow, gloomy slide into mediocrity, and if you happen to be sitting over dinner at one of these joints, the feeling is akin to the plummeting sensation you get at the track when your valiant steed not…
How you feel when you hear the words McCormick & Schmick’s depends a lot on context. If you’re engaged in a discussion with your broker about your stock portfolio, you’re probably going to feel pretty damned high, because the chain, which has opened more than 60 seafood restaurants since its…
You know the story. French author Marcel Proust is having tea one day. He dips a piece of cookie — a sugary, scalloped confection called a madeleine — into a spoonful of brew. The tea-cookie emanates molecules of scent. Proust tastes; he swallows. Suddenly, he’s there, a small child in…
News is trickling back from the Big Apple: The City That Never Sleeps has developed narcolepsy. Friends report emerging from an evening meeting in Manhattan with a powerful appetite for uni and rice wine only to find that all the joints have closed. And if Greenwich Village can’t satisfy our…
“Authentic Mexican? You’d be eating grubs rolled in a tortilla. Fried grasshoppers. Tripe.” Eduardo Pria didn’t think Norte Americanos were ready for that kind of “authentic” when he opened his Fort Lauderdale restaurant in 1993, even though some of the hoitier hotels back in Mexico City were already experimenting with…
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…
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…
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…
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…
