No doubt the name causes many people to do a double take: Sango Jamaican and Chinese Restaurant. Jamaican and Chinese? Does the place serve General Tso’s jerk chicken? Natty Dread egg rolls? What gives? A little history goes a long way toward understanding how national cuisines evolve, and in this…
A few years ago New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl postulated that because Italian restaurants are so common, new ones need an angle in order to attract customers. At the time she was reviewing yet another mediocre Manhattan caffe, this one attempting to distinguish itself from the other strands…
Just recently I was sipping a martini at the Deco Bar in the National Hotel during happy hour when a woman approached me, crossing over from the other side of the room to do so. “Is that your baby?” she asked. “Yes,” I answered with a smile, full of justifiable…
I grew up in the kitchen. It started with miniature cakes in an Easy-Bake Oven, which cooked by the heat of a standard light bulb. Inspired by a talented mother, I soon moved on to the real stuff. Most days after school I tied an apron over my plaid jumper,…
Something terrible has happened to Victor’s Cafe. I feel sick to be so blunt about it, but not any more nauseated than I was during a recent dinner at the restaurant. Since it opened on SW 32nd Avenue eight years ago, I had always considered Victor’s, the Miami outpost of…
I’m a little ticked off at Food & Wine. To celebrate the magazine’s twentieth year of publication, writer Jonathan Hayes chose what he considers the world’s top twenty food cities, including “culinary capitals” such as Paris, Rome, Bangkok, and Oaxaca. In a short paragraph about each city, he mentions premier…
These days it seems as though nearly every woman I know under the age of 40 is pregnant or just had a baby. I’ve even been asked to be a godmother for the first time. So far, however, I have resisted the urge to have a child of my own…
My husband has a problem with our relatives receiving medical treatment from residents (doctors in training). So when there’s an injury in our family — something that occurs more than you might think, given the fact that we’re all avid athletes — we avoid teaching hospitals such as Jackson Memorial…
I’m always sucked in by the aura of mystery that surrounds Miami’s Russian restaurants, several of which have popped up in recent years. Perhaps the cuisine — which seems exotic compared to the fare offered by the glut of Italian and Cuban-American places here — catches my fancy. Maybe it’s…
When a barbecue restaurant in Muskogee, Oklahoma, was recommended to writer Calvin Trillin, a true barbecue enthusiast, his first instinct was to ask whether it used plates. “Of course they have plates,” he was told, at which point Trillin lost interest. “I have eaten fine barbecue on plates,” he explained,…
Miami may be the kind of town where reader restaurant polls regularly cite hokey American-Asian suburban steak chain Benihana as Best Japanese Restaurant, but South Beach, at least, is on the cutting edge of the sushi knife. Between east-west outposts Sushi Rock on Collins Avenue and Yoko’s on Alton Road,…
The media’s relentless monitoring of the fire aboard the Carnival cruise ship Ecstasy had smoke coming out of my ears. For one thing, the live press conferences informing the public that the cause of the fire was still unknown — not exactly breaking news — kept interrupting my personal daily…
Perhaps the last person you’d expect to be running the Panamanian eatery Las Molas, located on the site of a former Nicaraguan restaurant in the Hispanic enclave of Sweetwater, would be a woman with the Irish surname McNish. But then this is Miami. You can’t necessarily tell someone’s nationality by…
In the past, the areas around the University of Miami have failed to cater to the undergraduate, live-on-campus student population, which numbers more than 8000. Defined on the east by busy South Dixie Highway and on the west by homes, the campus’s perimeter has always lacked a certain collegiate vitality…
For months I’d watched that banner flap enticingly above the Alton Road storefront. Bold red script promised Johnny V’s Kitchen would open soon, offering Killer Hoagiesª and vegetable wraps. Frankly, it was the wrap part that caught my attention. It seemed about time. After all, am I the only person…
A friend recently filled me in about the oily origins of bruschetta. It seems that official olive oil tasters roaming the Umbria region of central Italy years ago were getting a little nauseated dipping directly into huge vats of the pungent stuff, so they resorted to drizzling it onto pieces…
Tung Nguyen came to the United States in 1975, one of seventeen Vietnamese refugees sponsored by Kathy Manning through the St. James Lutheran Church in Coral Gables. Five years later the two women opened Hy Vong (which means “hope”) on Eighth Street. The place became renowned for solid home-style Vietnamese…
South Florida-based cookbook author Steven Raichlen’s office looks pretty much like you’d expect. Located in a rectangular cottage behind the Coconut Grove house he shares with his publicist wife Barbara Seldin Raichlen, the office features an entire wall given over to Raichlen’s cookbook collection. Galleys for his new book, The…
Balinese Fish Mousse Sates Sate lilit rank among the most exquisite of Indonesia’s sates. Their birthplace is Bali, where they are used in and served at religious festivals. To make them, delicate mousse is flavored with explosively aromatic spices, then enriched with coconut milk and grilled on fragrant lemongrass stalks…
France today possesses what is probably the most intelligent collective palate. [Whatever] France eats she does it with a pleasure, an open-eyed delight quite foreign to most people…. There is a gusto, a frank sensuous realization of food, that is pitifully unsuspected in, say, the … corner cafe of an…
Walk into the food court of your average mall and you can order fast Chinese, fast Mexican, fast Italian, fast Middle Eastern. There are certain cuisines, however, that have stubbornly refused to become fast. Indian cooking, with its intricate tapestry of spices and arcane cooking methods, has epitomized “unfast” food…
In South Florida chefs sometimes mimic the occupational track of major league baseball managers. Get fired from or quit one team/restaurant, hire on at another, then another, and occasionally even wind up back where you started. In 1996 chef-proprietor Robert Guerin sold his Coral Gables restaurant Louisiana — which he’d…
