Stone-crab season in Florida opened to great hoopla three weeks ago. We have five months to chow down as many mustard-dipped forkfuls of claw meat as we can pay for. The game-over bell rings May 15: Then it’s a long, hot, stoneyless summer. Our native crab is one of the…
I must be the last soul in Fort Lauderdale to suck up a strand of spaghetti at Il Mulino. The joint has been around for two decades, providing heaps of homemade pasta as well as explaining why Tuscans and Milanese are getting as fat as New Brunswickians and Lauderdale Lakers…
Something is definitely afoot here. We stuck our snout in the air, took a long whooof, and smelled a trend. I’d say this funky perfume resembled a glass of French Bordeaux and seared filet mignon laced with the odor of a corporate kitchen’s deep fryer at the end of a…
Sometimes I wonder if, back in the roaring 1990s, all those black families who lived in shanty shacks and cracker houses and cement block apartments just outside downtown West Palm Beach put a hex on the city when they moved out. They’d been relocated, evicted, or strongly encouraged to sell…
Two restaurants, two shrimp dishes. The first is a tiny, chic, chef-driven bistro in Plantation, effusively praised by local dailies and the Zagat guide, open for dinner only on Friday and Saturday nights. The menu changes weekly, and it can veer toward the unexpected: Caribbean jerk-rubbed thresher shark with coconut…
You’d have to have steel cojones, or some mixture of naiveté and optimism, to name your first restaurant Nirvana. You’d be setting the bar in the stratosphere and opening yourself up to some expensive, cutting jokes if you failed to deliver. The word nirvana has a lot of meanings, including…
I’ve probably given about 30 seconds’ thought to Peruvian food in the past ten years. The culinary wonders of the Andes were totally off my radar. Yeah, I knew the little coastal country had thousands of genetically diverse varieties of ancient potatoes and corn. But spuds and maize do not…
To hear our waiter tell it, there’s no fish shortage in South Florida. You just drop your baited line or your net full of little pylon oysters off the nearest bridge, and before you can say “abracadabra, bring me some snappa,” you’re hauling in pounds and pounds of the hapless…
Watching Gordon Ramsey is making me violent. The three-Michelin-starred Scottish chef of the Fox reality show Hell’s Kitchen is the foulest-mouthed, most evil-tempered brute in a business with more monsters than a Ken Russell retrospective. Ramsey has the same effect on my testosterone as too many hours glued to the…
Ladies, watch your backs. Three-quarters of the single adult American male population is suddenly out there perfecting the magic art of seduction. They’ve learned their foolproof pickup techniques courtesy of a Boy George clone and erstwhile magician who calls himself “Mystery.” The guy, whose sartorial style runs to black fingernail…
You really have to wonder about Palm Beach Gardens — what the heck is going on up there? The city is attracting investment just as though South Florida’s economic bubble were made from bust-proof Dupont space fabric. Take Cantina Laredo. This “gourmet Mexican” restaurant, which opened a couple of weeks…
Most of us will put up with a lot so long as we’re well entertained. And reasonably fed. Just give us our bread and circuses — and “Mitt Romney” could be the name of an exotic entrée for all we care. It wasn’t only the Roman hoi polloi who were…
You think it’s all fun and games being a food critic, dontcha? “Oooooh, you’re so luuucky,” perfect strangers purr when they hear what I do. “I wish I had your job.” I have news: If you had my job, you’d be 15 pounds fatter and your cholesterol would be off…
Kevin McCarthy is sautéing chocolate-coated scallops. It sounds as if one of our favorite chefs has wandered into some gustatory la-la land, a Ferran Adrià/Wylie Dufresne-inspired nightmare territory where oyster sorbets topped with mudwort foams are already passé. Or maybe he’s working on something more sinister: a killer aphrodisiac? Not…
Looks like they had it right. The French. About Iraq, that is. Notwithstanding their new President Sarkozy, who seems to have all the rigorous intellectual sophistication of George Bush the Younger (Work harder! Think less! Speak English!), it appears that a culture built upon centuries of deep rumination and political-social-philosophical…
In every critic’s life a moment emerges when she realizes that her carefully refined opinions — judicious and elegant as they may be — aren’t worth doo-doo. The revelation hits with the force of a piano shoved off a third-floor balcony; you look down at those shiny, grand preconceptions in…
I’m not the kind of customer — being half-blind and chronically underdressed — that the St. Regis Resort would cultivate if it had a choice. The new Starwood Hotels enterprise has been open for business a couple of months now on Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard, a monument of swank that…
Cast your mind back to the dim recesses of, oh, I don´t know, the mid-1970s in South Florida. What did you do when you were hungry? You opened your mouth and screamed until somebody shoved a nipple in your face, right? OK, let me rephrase. After your mum and dad…
Fish balls. Fried crickets. Salted scorpions soaked in whiskey. Smoked catfish soup. Deep-fried beef gums. Snail curry. Hog plums. Bamboo grubs with green onions. Slivered pig´s ears. Gecko curry. Pickled mudfish. Barbecued pork salad. Red ant egg dip. Fried morning glory. Makes your mouth water, doesn´t it? They´re traditional dishes…
Palm Beach has always had a thing for Africa. In the several seasons that I temporarily trespassed in the hallways of the Dodges and Phippses and Pulitzers on my way into or out of some party, I often spied with my own little eye the smart set´s embrace of what…
Well, it´s all China all the time in the news these days, isn´t it? Between filthy tea, carcinogenic dried apples, and bacteria-laden swordfish imports turned back at our own squeaky-clean borders; the brouhaha over whether Americans should be eating (avian-flu-carrying?) Chinese chickens; the lethal pet-food scandal; and the no-quotas Climate…
I´ve had it with stratospheric restaurant tabs. Summer´s coming on, season of the dockside conch fritter, the chicken fajita, the mahi finger, the icy Corona with lime wedges. Grilled $3 burgers just taste better between June and September. Looking forward to hurricane season and calculating extra expenditures in canned beans…
