Mango Festival and Brunch This Weekend

International Mango Festival Date: July 12 – 13, 2008 Location: Fairchild Tropical Garden 10901 Old Cutler Road Coral Gables Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden invites you its 16th annual International Mango Festival featuring the mangoes of Africa. The weekend features, among many other activities and mango tree sales, the celeb-studded Ninth…

Spanish on the Fly

I came back from a trip to Guatemala last week with two missions: Learn Spanish. And plant some banana trees. Even before I left the States, my future course had started to take shape — 70 percent of my neighbors are Spanish-speaking. And I’d run into a guy at Les…

Denny’s Rolls Out Late Night Menu

Thank god for PR companies, because I really would have been bummed to have missed the news about Denny’s new late-night menu, served only between the witching hours from 10 to 5 in the a.m. At first, I thought I’d post the photo above in our weekly WTF Is It…

“Guard Your Secrets Because They Are Eagerly Sought”

Listen up, mes amis. Before digging into your next filet de sole bonne femme, consider that you may be spilling more beans than a drunken chef cooking cassoulet. A friend tells me that at the venerable and hoity Palm Beach French restaurant Chez Jean Pierre, there’s a little glitch with…

Big Sexy’s Sinful Sweets

If you’d told me that these New Age drug stores were legally selling pot brownies, nut mixes infused with hashish, and tea-laced Rice Crispie treats, I would have died laughing.

Game On

Welcome to the first installment of our weekly Friday game, WTF IS IT?!? Each Friday (maybe) we’ll put up a photo of some exotic and supposedly edible foodstuff. First reader to correctly identify the thing will win…. …the smug knowledge that s/he is an insufferable know-it- all. You’re naturally invited…

A Little Bellyaching

Jo Clark’s latest venture, Thai Jo, is set to open in West Palm’s CityPlace this summer next door to the new Taverna Opa.

Diet for a Broke Planet

You can’t take two steps these days without running into somebody who’s been laid off — or is planning to be. Suddenly, we’re all transformed from grasshoppers into ants, and the only markets we’re betting on are the aisles at Costco. Some of us aren’t quite old enough to remember…

From Israel, With Love

“In Israel, people came from all over the world,” Ilan Cohen says. “So they brought their customs and flavors and kitchen dishes from Europe, from Morocco, from Greece. My father is from Syria, and my mother comes from Yugoslavia, with some Greek background. When I was growing up, we had…

In With the Old, Out With the New

Back in the late ’80s, if you were looking to impress a date over a sophisticated dinner, there was only a handful of restaurants in Palm Beach County that could pretty much guarantee you a home run. On the island, there was the hoity Café Europe and the even-pricier Petite…

Give Bessie a Break

I just got back from a trip to Santa Monica, California, a place so foreign to my experience and sensibilities that I felt like Marco Polo encountering the Mongolians. The ways of the Santa Monicans are strange indeed, and wonderful; I came away with a few observations about the natives…

This Is Not a Pancake

There’s only one country in the world that could take something so crude, a list of ingredients any bumpkin ought to have within reach — a bit of flour, egg, milk, and butter — and turn it into a foodstuff that encapsulates, at once, the historic marriage of Catherine de…

They Might Be Giants

Del Vecchio’s Italian Fishery appears to be run by a mythic race of men who are just, well, larger than the rest of us. They’re the guys whose ancestors clambered up and down beanstalks reaching to the sky; who, like a certain Philistine felled by a sling shot, measured “six…

Jump Cut

Hip, sexy, and sophisticated is how I would describe local restaurateurs Brandon Belluscio and Brian Albe… er, no, actually, I wouldn’t. I haven’t a clue how hip and sexy these two guys are; I’m just reading the news release. I do know the dudes are just a smidge past their…

Cool Blue

Ask an American what he thinks of the Turkish people or Turkish food and, if all goes well, you’ll get a blank stare. What we don’t know about Turkey would fill the dome of the Hagia Sophia. Americans wishing to catch up could do worse than to begin with plates…

Immovable Feast

It’s a recent Monday night on Clematis Street, and the only restaurants doing much business after 9 are Cabana, Pizza Girls, and Pistache French Bistro. Not too long ago, West Palm downtowners liked to kvetch that the devil’s triangle around the library, at the eastern end of Clematis, had a…

Very Like a Whale

There’s a little amusement you can indulge in at the Whale Raw Bar and Fish House in Parkland while you’re waiting for your basket o’ steamers. It’s like those snag-the-stuffed-toy things at bowling alleys. A tank filled with a half-dozen live lobsters is the kind of lure a gambler like…

Cold Sake, Warm Heart

We’ve evolved to protect ourselves from dangerous food. We have a genetic predisposition to find spoiled vittles repellent, and we must “acquire a taste” for bitter or stinky foodstuffs like coffee or Campari because weird-tasting food could be poisonous. On some level, perhaps the molecular one, we know that each…

Marriage is Like Mushrooms

If you’re like Amy Winehouse, Rod Stewart, and Tony Bennett, you got married for the first or third time in May or June. That means your anniversary will soon be upon you like an anvil dropped from a cliff. And I’ll bet you haven’t done a damn thing to save…