I hear if you’re going to travel anywhere these days and you’re interested in food, you’d better go to Saigon. As George Bush would have us believe, the city is one great, big U.S. success story and a lesson in our famous American patience (the Communist government, which adopted an…

The P.R. was relentless. Paradiso, the Lake Worth restaurant owned by Chef Angelo Romano, was celebrating its tenth birthday all season long with a dish of $100 risotto. This was almost more outrageous than the $100 burger recently unveiled at the Old Homestead at Boca Raton Resort, a much-ballyhooed patty…

When restaurants fail, they don’t always do it spectacularly. Sometimes it’s just a slow, gloomy slide into mediocrity, and if you happen to be sitting over dinner at one of these joints, the feeling is akin to the plummeting sensation you get at the track when your valiant steed not…

How you feel when you hear the words McCormick & Schmick’s depends a lot on context. If you’re engaged in a discussion with your broker about your stock portfolio, you’re probably going to feel pretty damned high, because the chain, which has opened more than 60 seafood restaurants since its…

You know the story. French author Marcel Proust is having tea one day. He dips a piece of cookie — a sugary, scalloped confection called a madeleine — into a spoonful of brew. The tea-cookie emanates molecules of scent. Proust tastes; he swallows. Suddenly, he’s there, a small child in…

News is trickling back from the Big Apple: The City That Never Sleeps has developed narcolepsy. Friends report emerging from an evening meeting in Manhattan with a powerful appetite for uni and rice wine only to find that all the joints have closed. And if Greenwich Village can’t satisfy our…

“Authentic Mexican? You’d be eating grubs rolled in a tortilla. Fried grasshoppers. Tripe.” Eduardo Pria didn’t think Norte Americanos were ready for that kind of “authentic” when he opened his Fort Lauderdale restaurant in 1993, even though some of the hoitier hotels back in Mexico City were already experimenting with…

Once upon a time, I made a fool of myself on national TV. In the early ’90s, I appeared as a guest on CNBC’s tabloid talk show Real Personal, where I shared my experiences on the subject of “Women Who Do Something Because of Something” (you’ll have to bribe a…

I should have been researching schnitzel and strudel recipes, but I got sidetracked by YouTube video clips: Sasha Baron Cohen’s fey-gay Austrian fashion-victim “Bruno” interviewing homo-hating Pastor Quinn of Little Rock, Arkansas, about the etiquette of showering in groups. Or Bruno torturing college wrestlers on Daytona Beach with faggy allusions…

Completely against my better judgment, I’ve developed a grudging respect for Burt Rapoport. This is a guy I’d love to hate — he’s got a headful of big restaurant concepts and perpetual oodles of startup cash. His gigantic, overwrought restaurants — plunked down in bomb-proof shelters like Boca Center and…

A chic Miami Beach vixen, black-eyed and golden-skinned, maybe 20 years old and all of a hundred pounds, sits alone at El Rey Del Chivito. Menu in hand, she says something quick and cool to her waitress. The café is three-quarters empty at noon on a blistering Friday, the kind…

I planted four pepper plants last weekend — serranos, poblanos, sweet reds, and pequins. But my Mexican next-door neighbor, Roberto, tells me to abandon all hope. “The soil is different in Mexico from here,” he says. “No offense to you. But your chilies won’t taste like they do in Puebla.”…

I planted four pepper plants last weekend — serranos, poblanos, sweet reds, and pequins. But my Mexican next-door neighbor, Roberto, tells me to abandon all hope. “The soil is different in Mexico from here,” he says. “No offense to you. But your chilies won’t taste like they do in Puebla.”…

Boo-hoo-hoody-hoo-hoo. If I hear one more transplanted New Yorker whinging and sniveling about how there’s no good pizza in South Florida, I’m going to explode in a shower of marinara. It’s not enough that we give you people 363 days of brilliant sunshine, endless beaches, 15 varieties of mango tree,…

I’m getting bitch-slapped all over the place lately. I’ve gotten a slew of letters in the past couple of weeks suggesting I need to find myself another profession. I’m a mean-spirited misanthrope who wouldn’t know a gourmet dinner if she fell face down in it. If I write a negative…

Some people make it all look so easy. Whatever it is — dressing like a minx on a pitiful budget, whipping up a 30-minute layer cake for your spontaneous midnight party, remembering who ordered the tomato pudding and who had the iguana soup. I’m always in awe of the smooth…

I’m hoping my intuition about Spontané proves right: We have here a manageably sized restaurant owned by a pair of creative young chefs who have given themselves permission to mess around, auditioning dishes we haven’t seen before even while paying playful homage to the classics. I’m practically willing Spontané to…

Mystery Number One: With more than half a million Cubans living in South Florida, why is it almost impossible to find a cheap, decent dish of ropa vieja? Or, for that matter, a plateful of Cuban-style pulled roast pork for under a tenner? I’m talking about the kind of joint…

I’m going to put my cards on the table: I’m not a big fan of steak houses. I have good friends who continuously scan the Internet for airfare deals to New York so they can make their biannual pilgrimage to Peter Luger’s; I know people who’ve stopped speaking over the…

Jorge Luis Fernandez calls himself “The Dali of the Kitchen.” The comparison makes sense, because Fernandez, the chef at La Barraca in Hollywood, is a dead ringer for Salvador Dali in his middle years, before the publicity-mad surrealist went nuts with the mustache wax and took to signing blank canvasses…

It’s 10 o’clock on opening night at the Sunfish Grill, and the bar is hip-deep in ladies of a certain age. They’re gussied up in turquoise taffeta sheath dresses with matching purses, in sequined bodices and strappy sandals; they are corseted and perfumed. They’ve had their hair done; it matches…

“Handsome is as handsome does.” Somebody’s wise old grandmother said that. Not my grandma; she was too busy pounding back snifters of cognac and channel-surfing for the latest Ronco electric food dehydrator — and anyway, she was such a sucker for a pretty face. Sometimes, it takes a good many…