Restaurants

Resplendent in polished wood, Italian marble floors, Biedermeier furnishings, and silk damask drapery, the 126-seat Bizcaya restaurant exudes the classic Ritz-Carlton refinement, comfort, and taste. The space is divided into two similarly decorated dining rooms, though the one closest to the entrance has prettier salt and pepper shakers, and votive…

The nice thing about reviewing chains, even small three-shop operations like Tarpon Bend Raw Bar & Grill, is that they come packaged with a mission statement that makes evaluation more facile. Tarpon Bend number three opened in January on Miracle Mile, following the splash of the first two fish-themed restaurants…

Island Delight is a delightful island. It’s not actually a patch of land but rather a small generic space in a huge generic shopping mall. To get there you brave not the sea but the sea of cars that rises up to swamp the streets of Kendall with teeth-grinding regularity…

Since its inception on Brickell Key in 2001, Azul has been a gastronomic gem glimmering alongside the exquisite Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Miami native Michelle Bernstein helmed the Mandarin’s signature dining establishment from the start (the underrated Café Sambal is located downstairs), and though she had held executive positions at Red…

The Henry Hotel is a seedy little South Beach venue on Washington Avenue just north of Fifth Street. Still, Sport Café did a brisk business while situated there between 1992 and 1999, which is when it moved to classier digs up the block on the corner of Sixth and Washington…

It’s only a block west of Brickell Avenue’s glitzy skyscrapers, but the strip of old-fashioned storefronts that houses Indochine has, historically, managed to maintain a rather raffish, river-pirate air; it feels as if you’ve tumbled through time into a pioneer-era den of debauchery. And in a way, you have. For…

Guinness introduced porter and stout beers to the world at the turn of the Nineteenth Century (the former named after porters from London’s fish and vegetable markets who preferred a potent brew). In the current century, ten million glasses of Guinness are consumed worldwide every day. On a recent afternoon…

There are a few types of restaurants that are virtually impossible to find here in Miami-Dade County, including: (1) a Chinese restaurant featuring a tank filled with swimming seafood that diners can eat, not just watch; (2) any place with genuine Ipswich fried clams, whole specimens with that marvelous contrast…

If an Israeli and a Honduran were to open a restaurant together, what kind of cuisine would they serve? If you answered hummus in coconut shells or gefilte fish ceviche, nice try. But the correct answer is Italian — or at least that’s the case with Moshe Petel and Spurgeon…

The problem with Christmas, it has always seemed to me, is that once it’s over people seem compelled to take down the decorations. Is it some leftover Puritan influence or what? Here we have all these festive, twinkling, low-wattage lights that make our abodes feel like there’s a party going…

In an old New Yorker cartoon, two men stand in front of a luncheonette with these words emblazoned upon the window: “COOKED FOOD.” One man turns to the other and says, “It was the first theme restaurant.” Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking,…

So I suppose I’ll see you at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival’s “Tribute Brunch” this Sunday at the Loews Hotel. It’ll be great — Francis Ford Coppola in the flesh to accept recognition for his esteemed Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery, and we, sampling those luscious wines while enjoying Tuscan…

Few restaurants are more associated with their chef/owner than Crystal Café was with Klime Kovaceski. The Macedonian-born charmer somehow managed to work the kitchen and dining room simultaneously — all night, every night, six days a week. For ten years. On Mondays, when Crystal was closed, he’d come in and…

It was literally only days after Lime Fresh opened last spring that people began asking me what I knew about it. This was surprising for a number of reasons, not the least of which was its location in one of Miami Beach’s jinx spots. Several quite respectable little eateries (including…

For lovers of authentic Southeast Asian cooking, discovering that Vatcharin Bhumichtir is chef at a neighborhood Thai restaurant in North Beach is akin to learning that Emeril Lagasse just opened a gumbo shack in Overtown. It’s not the caliber of the food at relatively humble places that’s in question. It’s…

When Andre’s Steakhouse on Marco Island changed its name to Tara Steak & Lobster House last year, it was a strategic gesture in advance of a planned expansion to at least four other outlets in South Florida. The basic steak-house formula is simple enough to replicate, which is probably why…

The word tinello, according to Tinello Cucina Italiana’s menu, translates as a “cozy dining room where friends and family get together.” There might be some positive adjectives we can summon for this place, but “cozy” isn’t one of them. The sparsely furnished, 70-seat restaurant sprawls in rather stark fashion across…

For people born toward the end of Twentieth Century, who are familiar with Lebanon mainly through horrific photographs of wartime Beirut’s bombed-out rubble, it’s difficult to imagine that not so much earlier (during a twenty-year French occupation between World War I and World War II) Beirut was known as “the…

Cocopelli Café is a curious name for a French bistro, not much better than calling your brasserie Vinnie’s Diner. An outdoor deck leading to the café is a concrete mess, with a few tables and some scraggly shrubs surrounding the periphery. The awning looks to be about twenty years old,…

Most restaurant reviews take no more than a couple of weeks to complete, even here at New Times, where the (responsible) policy is for critics to make at least two visits before making a judgment. This review has been in the works since last spring, about seven weeks after Harrison’s…

A deluge of rain cascaded over our car as we drove toward the Spanish restaurant Costa Mar. We were approaching Rascal House, which tempted me to pull over, grab some shelter and corned-beef sandwiches, and try Costa Mar another night. But we were just blocks away, and so continued past…

Pho! Phabulous pho! Phinally! Okay, apologies for being cute, but true phans of pho (pronounced like the French feu) will understand. Mediocre versions of this addictive Vietnamese beef-noodle concoction are so much the rule here in the Americas that when you come upon a worthy pho it seems to call…