Restaurant Report, an e-mail newsletter, invites readers to post their opinions and experiences. It includes some great nuggets of advice for restaurant professionals. The latest edition, for instance, gives waiters and waitresses several tips as sterling as Oneida, including: “Servers are there to enhance the guest’s experience, not intrude on…
Ah, the hot dog. Robustly flavored and inherently bad for you, hot dogs have a unique and universal appeal. The other day I was at a birthday party for a one-year-old whose parents had hired a genuine hot dog vendor — ostensibly for the kids. For the grownups the hosts…
In Kitchen Confidential, the gastronomic tell-all that convinced many folks to stop eating out, chef-author Anthony Bourdain lists a few hard-and-fast rules: Never order fish in a restaurant on a Sunday or Monday, because it was probably delivered the previous Thursday. Don’t chomp down on bacteria-friendly foodstuffs like hollandaise sauce…
The creativity one can demonstrate with foodstuffs is astounding, and for once I’m not talking about cooking them. For instance, in his books Play With Your Food and How Are You Peeling?, photographer Joost Elffers exhibits the creatures he makes out of everyday fruits and vegetables. He turns okra into…
Every serious diner has an immediate, pertinent question he or she wants answered about any restaurant. My husband always wants to know about the specials of the house. My friend Meredith needs to be informed about the dessert list before she proceeds with ordering a meal. I like to be…
Mark Soyka has always been something of a pioneer. In Miami-Dade County his News Café jump-started Ocean Drive in 1988, his Van Dyke in 1994 became the first outdoor café with any real presence on Lincoln Road, and his namesake neighborhood eatery opened last year as the would-be savior of…
Hi-Life Cafe made a better impression on me than it had a right to. Don’t get me wrong, the food was quite tasty and well priced, the wait staff friendly, efficient, knowledgeable about the menu. The place is good-looking, too: a small, elegant, and understated dining room with seductively dimmed…
Ramada Inns don’t vary much from city to city. Sure, some are newer and spiffier than others, and the accents of workers will differ among regions, but a single corporate philosophy guides them all — and unfortunately their respective dining establishments as well. The philosophy is based solely on the…
The thesaurus contains relatively few synonyms for restaurant, and even those aren’t necessarily synonymous. An eatery is not a diner, which is not a café. A bistro isn’t quite a brasserie, and neither of those is anything like a trattoria. Even a seemingly generic word like place conjures up some…
Restaurants employ a variety of tactics to win customers. Mustang Sally’s, a four-month-old steak house in a desolate Flamingo Road shopping plaza out in cow country (a.k.a. Cooper City), is currently utilizing a time-honored method. No, it’s not exploitation of the Wilson Pickett song, the all-American car, or even the…
People make much of first impressions. You either believe in them or don’t, trust them or not. They’re always wrong, or they’re always right. You should base your judgments on them, or you shouldn’t. Why doesn’t anyone debate the merits of last impressions? When it comes to restaurants, these are…
A woman, one member of a party of six at Baredo Café in Boca Raton, got up suddenly from her table and began marching around the dining room, glancing pointedly at other tables and their parties. We knew she was a customer, but she looked for all the world like…
Diners often think that restaurant critics have elaborate systems for rating restaurants, and of course we have many complex reasons for admiring or disliking a particular eatery. But when all’s said and done — digested and written — I like to keep it real with one simple question: Would I…
A recent article in The New York Times’ dining section, entitled “Navigating the Bar When It’s Three Drinkers Deep,” offers the following advice on how to get a drink: “Seek out the shortest people and get behind them — same strategy as at a rock concert. Wave a large wad…
Wanted: Jack-of-all-trades for 24-hour-a-day, 52-week-a-year job. Must have knowledge of business management, interior design, and food and beverage purchasing. Required skills include accounting, cooking, and multitasking. Background in customer relations or human resources necessary. Large family and experience in damage control helpful. No telecommuting. Salary based on profits; benefits to…
It stands to reason that if you have a craving for barbecued ribs, you should seek out a joint that specializes in rib preparation. If you have a yen for some really fresh shrimp, stop in at a seafood shack. If you seek a high-quality steak, going to a steak…
If you look for a definition of oversolicitous in a dictionary, you might read that the word means excessively filled with anxiety, concern, or eagerness to please. But if you’re looking for a literal example in restaurant service, your best bet would be to head to Au-Bar, a five-week-old Mediterranean…
Summertime’s so slow ’round these parts, at least in terms of what restaurants are up to, that rumormongers have nothing else to do but jump to conclusions. Some of the gossip has panned out as truth: Café Arugula did indeed close. Both ZAN(Z)BAR and East City Grill were forced out…
In an industry that takes itself far too seriously, I admire any form of irreverence when I find it. I appreciate dry humor or sarcasm. I can even go for a touch of cynicism. Perhaps that’s why I like Johnny Vinczencz so much. Johnny V, the executive chef at Astor…
Though Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are logistically very close together, each county has distinct characteristics and inhabitants. So it takes a unique restaurant to draw customers from all three areas. Most of the eateries that have succeeded in doing so have been très upscale spots with celebrity chefs,…
How you view a cuisine in general often depends on your first exposure to it. Diners who have good experiences in restaurants exotic to them, like sushi bars, often become fanatically devoted to that type of fare. On the flip side, those who have the misfortune of encountering faulty ethnic…
Bless other people’s rudeness, for it often sets up an antimodel for our own behavior. Too proverbial a message? Allow me to illustrate. I was witness to an extremely unpleasant scene on a recent Friday evening at a small, perhaps two-month-old South American eatery called Los Andes in Pompano Beach…
