Here’s a restaurant with volume set to “max,” 14,000 square feet of surround-sound at the Fort Lauderdale Grande’s new China Grill. From design to dames it’s all spilling over the top: Take the flocks of unescorted single girls, their ruby slippers clackety-clacking on tile floors inlaid with quotes from Marco…

Read anything about Mexican mole (pronounced MOLE-ay), a sauce so contrarian few have been able to define it, and you’ll probably run across at least two origin stories. One involves a 17th-century nun named Sor Andrea de la Asunción. Panicked about how to feed a visiting archbishop, the good sister…

What’s your favorite food? Whatever I’m eating at the moment. Whatever I just ate. Whatever I might eat tomorrow. Right now, faced with a cuisine you might call Austro-Mideast-global fusion (if that didn’t sound so ridiculous), with appetizers and entrées like conch schnitzel, escargots, fillet of kampachi with currants, Kurobuta…

The week they opened in downtown West Palm Beach, the staff at Forté di Asprinio (225 Clematis St., West Palm Beach; 561-833-3330) were happily startled when a small party spent $25,000 on food and drink and dropped a $5,000 tip. So too was it generally a relief for Clematis Street…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…