Food is fashion: Halter tops and haute French one day, bling and sushi the next. American-Chinese restaurants began to fall from favor about the time men started wearing earrings, and nowadays the dark, stodgy interiors and tired, predictable cuisine are like mutton chop sideburns to the alluringly clean face of…
Chef/owner of Shing Wang, Sing Kelly, moved to Miami from Taiwain 36 years ago. She operated a Chinese restaurant here for 18 years, was out of the business for the past 15 years, and returned to open Shing Wang (meaning “lucky” in Chinese) a month ago. 1. Why did you…
“De sus amigos de ‘Taco Loco,'” reads the sign over the storefront window at Maya Grill. The Mexican restaurant opened six months ago on West Palm Drive in Florida City, but residents here have long been relishing Maya’s tacos, which were formerly sold from a Taco Loco trailer in various…
When a couple dined at a high-end establishment in the chivalrous days of yore, it was not unusual for the gentleman to be handed a menu with prices and the lady to be given one without. The idea was that because he was paying, she needn’t let numbers get in…
Eleven years ago, a pair of Danish chefs, Jan Jorgensen and Soren Bredahl, opened Two Chefs restaurant in South Miami. Bredahl returned to his homeland quite awhile back, but Two Chefs’ popularity has never waned — in part because Jorgensen has been a fixture there, making sure food and service…
Michelle Bernstein and Doug Rodriguez were recently announced as nominees for the James Beard Foundation’s best chef in the south award. The first name is no surprise, for Bernstein is one of South Florida’s most notable chefs. (She nabbed a nod last year but didn’t win.) The recognition for Rodriguez…
Something seemed amiss as soon as we entered Jason’s at the Harrison. The vaguely Vegas room, with black-and-white tiger-skin motif and thumping club music, didn’t gel with the Mediterranean/Asian/American comfort cuisine of chef Jason McClain — who just a couple of months ago, and with much fanfare, had taken over…
The intersection of 71st Street and Rue Vendome in Miami Beach is what many would call a “cursed location” for restaurants. The list of victims includes a Turkish place, a Russian place, and most recently Ouzo’s, a Greek/Med place that has since moved to South Beach. If this were a…
Does bad service negate good food? Not necessarily. Many restaurant recommendations come riddled with caveats explaining the place isn’t much to look at and the service is shoddy but the food is fantastic; I have never heard somebody tout an establishment by saying the cuisine was awful but the décor…
Mary Brickell Village still isn’t much of a village, with many of the storefronts as empty as the concept of a downtown urban mall. Think of it more as a quaint clustering of that rapidly replicating creature known as the casual-upscale restaurant chain. On the plus side, Brickell Village has…
The most utterly predictable comment from a New Yorker in a Miami pizzeria: “It’s not like a New York slice.” Culprits often cited are humidity, water quality, and brand of canned tomatoes. In fact, the real deal has been available for about a year and a half at Primo Pizza,…
“Fine dining” once conjured images of elegant salons, white-glove service, and the type of meals you would never, and could never, cook at home. Nowadays it is a label affixed to restaurants that charge a lot of money. Bourbon Steak is a contemporary American steak house, and as such does…
The 70th annual Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival gets under way Thursday. I mean seventh — it just feels longer because the whole shebang has gotten so big so fast. In fact it was only in 2002 that Lee Brian Schrager, director of special events and media…
Remember macadamia-crusted yellowtail snapper in mango sauce? And papaya salsa, yuca mash, and a single plantain chip rising Iwo Jima-style from the plate? Ah, the bad old days. Not that New Florida cuisine wasn’t a noble concept at the start, but it reached the point where you couldn’t enter a…
Few things are as dismaying as returning to a favorite restaurant and discovering it has slipped. Worse is when you recommend the place to a friend — a needless squandering of their money and your credibility. It occurs with large, corporate-owned ventures that possess the capital to overstaff the kitchen…
Brothers Gino and Fernando Masci come to Miami by way of their hometown of Abruzzi, Italy — with a 26-year stopover as owners of Greenwich Village’s renowned and star-studded Il Mulino. They had planned on retiring after they sold that venture five years ago (and before its new owners opened…
That the Miami Design District would soon be “the next big thing” was first suggested to me about two years into Bill Clinton’s presidency. I have heard the same refrain many times since, but whenever I’d venture into the neighborhood, it would display the sort of eerie quietude usually encountered…
Upscale-casual dining establishments compose the fastest growing sector of the restaurant industry. The best ones provide comfortable, attractively designed dining rooms; fresh, flavorful cuisine; cheery service; and family-friendly prices. That’s Bonefish Grill in a clam shell. Alas, there are no clam shells to be found at this new Coral Gables…
Big fat Americans like big fat food. That’s why God gave us The Cheesecake Factory. Michael’s Kitchen, a hit in Hollywood before its relocation last month to the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, is a step above that cheesy chain but shares the same cuisine-as-circus-act sensibility…
When Alice Waters recently appeared at Books & Books to tout her new book, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, she was asked if there were any restaurants in Miami that seemed to be following her organic canon. The prophetess of slow food…
So many things seemed to go wrong with the Miami dining scene this year. First there were the big-name closures, most notably Norman’s, Pacific Time, Chispa, David Bouley Evolution, and Johnny V South Beach. Then an onslaught of national chains poured in at a pace heretofore not seen in these…
It is, in short, a great time to be an eater.” So writes David Kamp in The United States of Arugula, and as his book’s subtitle suggests, “The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark-Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution” celebrates the availability of comestibles that far surpass anything “our grandparents…
