Alegría Café, Empanaditas…………………..$6

Ensalada Alegria……………$10

Grouper criolla……………….$24

Arroz con pollo…………….. $17

Yuca frita………………………..$5

Pudin de pan………………$5.50

Jinja Bar and Bistro, 700 S. Rosemary Ave. Open for lunch and dinner Sunday through Thursday from 11 a.m. till 11 p.m., Friday Saturday till midnight. Call 561-296-7373

The revolution in experimental, deconstructivist, “molecular” gastronomy was over before it began in South Florida. If we’d hoped the surreal culinary high-jinks of chefs like Ferran Adria — the half-mad Spanish genius of El Bulli, whose favorite ingredient is liquid nitrogen (he’s been known to serve parmesan-scented “frozen air” as…

Evidently, Starwood Hotel & Resorts is bullish on our little burg. Thumbing their noses at pesky, persistent rumors that the southern tip of Florida will eventually be as completely submerged as the Lost City of Atlantis, the optimists at Starwood have debuted two luxury resort/residences here in the past month…

You’ve really got to feel sorry for the wait staff at Latitudes Beach Café. They’re trying so hard to make the best of things — these adorable 20-somethings with their Eastern European accents and their cheery good looks. I wish I could wave my magic wand and transport them elsewhere…

It was Friday the 13th. What better night to plan a long drive out of town? I figured if I put some distance between myself and my usual haunts, I could foil the Gray Lady of Doom — she’d be shuffling through South Palm raw bars, fingering the Blue Point…

If you catch Joseph Boueri on a slow night, say a rainy Tuesday when only a few regular customers are hunched over steamy bowls of Prince Edward Island mussels and buttery nests of shrimp parpardelle, you probably won’t need to exchange more than a couple of sentences before he beckons…

What’s a hungry girl to do about her meat? Rich or poor, we’re getting kicked where it hurts — right in our growling stomachs. Every meal is an unhappy meal. First, it’s foie gras; now it’s KFC. I was on the verge of sending away to PETA for my “free…

My “father-un-law” was in town, and I wanted to take him to dinner. Not that I needed to impress him. Here’s a guy who drove his battered 1978 Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon — the kind with faux wood-grain siding — until it finally coughed and ground to a permanent…

Have you heard this one? A rabbi and a psychologist walk into a sushi bar… Hell, I always screw this joke up. The rabbi and the psychologist own the sushi bar. Oh, crap, it’s not a sushi bar either. It’s a “kabbalistic lifestyle lounge and café.” Emunah Café: an organic-kosher…

He’s a star, Nick Morfogen. And I love him the way I love Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet: purely, deeply, from afar. I have Dennis Max and Burt Rapoport to thank for bringing Nick into my range; that Unique Restaurant Concepts power couple, throwing open contemporary California-style bistros with fanatical…

The Palm Beach Post critic was in here this week,” John Suley says. “Charles Passy. They ordered a lot of food and had us split up the plates in the kitchen, so everybody got to taste the same thing.” Suley, who has stopped at our table to introduce himself, is…

I have a problem. I should be teasing out the subtle distinctions between the Classic Boca Bitch and the Nouveau Gardens Gamine — there’s a shimmering, bodacious table of 16 of these ladies celebrating a raucous birthday party practically at my elbow — but I can’t focus. Maybe I need…

I ate my grilled marinated quail with long beans and a palm sugar-lime dressing sitting in a pool of ice water. I was in the ice water, not the quail. If you’ve never had freezing liquid poured into your lap while dining, I recommend it just for the frisson of…

Make a fist with your right hand. Then make a fist with your left and put that on top of the right. Now put your left foot on top of the two fists. Congratulations, you’re a yogi. You’ve also made a freeform shape roughly the size of the pile of…

“You’re sure you’re very hungry?” our waitress says. “Because the Lobster Monster is really big.” She eyes us with skepticism. Or it’s a look that mingles skepticism (“they’ll never eat all the food they’ve ordered”) with politely concealed disgust (“these horrible people might eat all the food they’ve ordered”). Our…

If you’ve ever seen the amazing Brazilian movie City of God, you probably recall the chicken chase whenever you think of Rio de Janeiro. In the opening shots, a group of starving street kids takes off after a fowl that’s barely escaped the raised cleaver at a fried chicken stand;…

A tortilla at El Tamarindo, perfectly round, exuding a pleasant, grassy-floral scent, has the appealing softness and density of warm skin, like the dusky feel of a burro’s neck. The only relation it bears to a Frito’s chip or a boxed taco shell is that it’s made from corn. And…

When I was a kid, my grandmother and grandfather fought their most vicious battles over scotch lowballs and plates of cannelloni at a Palm Beach Italian place called Maurice’s. He was an aging artist, she a lifelong floozy and tippler 25 years his junior, and their shrill skirmishes were part…

Downtown Hollywood makes me happy. I pretend I don’t have a clue about which developer is lining which politician’s pockets, what kind of crummy deals are being cut behind the scenes, who the corrupt lawmakers are. I see no evil. The cops who hover perpetually outside the doors of Spice…

For most of human history, meals have been shared. Today’s place-setting conventions — the individual serving plate, the personal spoon, the pristine wine glass meant for one’s lips alone — are pretty recent evolutions in finickiness. Time was, in just about every culture we scooped our meals with our fingers…

In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce introduces hero Leopold Bloom with a description of the man’s appetites: Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls… Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine…