Читать книгу Food of Miami - Caroline Stuart - Страница 7
ОглавлениеPart One: Food in Miami
Every thing under the sun
by Caroline Stuart
The food of Miami and the Keys is as surprising, varied, and colorful as its inhabitants. Cubans, Nicaraguans, Argentinians, and other Latin Americans; Haitians, Bahamians and Jamaicans; former slaves; transplants from other states—all of these came together in southern Florida to contribute to its delectable cuisine.
Miami's dazzling white beaches and seductive semitropical climate have been attracting large numbers of visitors and settlers from diverse cultures since its birth as a city just over 100 years ago. A decidedly Latin beat sets the rhythm for the collection of cities, neighborhoods, and islands known as the Greater Miami area. Latin American settlers happily found themselves in a familiar climate with familiar ingredients, and dishes such as black beans and rice, arroz con polio (chicken with saffron rice), and garbanzo bean soup became the foods of Greater Miami.
New York transplants brought with them Jewish delicatessens that serve lox and bagels and traditional Kosher fare. Soul food can be found in homey barbecue joints that turn out racks of smoky pork ribs served with corn on the cob and collard greens. The region's early farmers contributed a blend of soul food and Southern country cooking that offers up dishes as popular as grits, hush puppies, and deep-frys that today have made their way onto the menus of city restaurants; Bahamians added steamed pudding and conch (pronounced "konk") salad.
In South Beach, fashion shoots take advantage of light and location while residents and visitors crowd busy outdoor cafes. Restaurants serve grilled fish, tropical fruit salads, and sorbets of every hue. International cafes showcase ethnic specialties from around the world, and hot spots serve Asian-inspired dishes with a local flair.
In other parts of the city, home cooks scour the markets for familiar seafood and local specialties, such as conch for fritters and chowder and, in season, clawless Florida spiny lobster. Locally grown produce, including wild sour oranges, pineapples, coconuts, bananas, sugar cane, mangoes, guavas, papayas, and avocados, contributes to the cuisine.
South of Miami, the Florida Keys float like pearls, with Key West the last on the string. The Keys are a fishing enthusiast's paradise, where tarpon leap out of the water and the delicate yellow-tail snapper is on everyone's list of favorites. Jimmy Buffett's song "Margaritaville" sets the tone for this laid-back area of Old Florida, the perfect place to savor the sunset along with the sweet-tart splendor of Key lime pie.
A Culinary History of Miami
Fish in the summer, Yankees in the winter
by Caroline Stuart The
Old-timers often declare that Miami and the Keys are not really a part of Florida anymore, but an extension of the Northeast and "the islands." Greater Miami encompasses a number of towns beneath its giant umbrella, but be it in Miami Beach, Coconut Grove, or Sweetwater, the flavor has gone global. You can find lox and bagels, Southern-fried chicken, Japanese sushi, Jamaican curried goat, and Cuban sandwiches within easy driving distance of one another. Grocery shopping, too, is international: an Asian market selling lemon grass may sit next door to a Latin bodega boasting an extensive selection of tropical tubers—and both may be just down the street from a supermarket selling sour oranges for authentic Cuban marinades.
The culinary history of South Florida is one of immigration and adaptation. Even the area's Native Americans, the Seminoles, immigrated from other parts of North America. They may have been the ones who first slit open the base of the cabbage palm tree to harvest hearts of palm (the delicacy known to locals as "swamp cabbage"), which is frequently found on South Florida menus.
Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon reached Florida's shores in 1513, searching in vain for the legendary Fountain of Youth. He arrived on Easter Sunday, "Pascua Florida" (Feast of Flowers), and named the land La Florida in honor of the holiday. Other European explorers also trudged through Florida's swamps searching for gold, jewels, and natives for slave markets. But all early attempts to establish settlements failed.
The United States acquired Florida in 1821 and granted it statehood in 1845. From other states, a few hardy souls braved the mosquitoes and hostile natives to farm under the bright blue skies. These early farmers and their modern-day descendants are known as "Crackers," perhaps from the cracking sound of their cattle whips, perhaps from the cracking of corn to make grits.
Timucua people inhabited the hanks of the St. John's River during the sixteenth century. Occasionally chiefs and nobles would gather to discuss important issues, and during these meetings, the men would share an infusion of dried casina leaves. Only those who were able to consume the noxious liquid without becoming ill were deemed resiliant enough to defend the tribe.
Grits, made from dried, hulled corn that has been finely ground and cooked into a gruel, is eaten as a breakfast food or as a side dish with meat and fish. Grits and cornmeal remain staples of Southern cooking on Florida menus to this day. Cracker cooking is simple rustic food that can be as quirky as the characters who claim it. It incorporates Southern country cooking and soul food and includes oddities such as alligator, which is often served breaded and deep-fried, not unlike chicken nuggets.
Florida's isolation, alligators, and Indians made it a destination for escaping African slaves in the nineteenth century, who brought with them their native foodways to create what is known today as "soul food." Okra, black-eyed peas, fried chicken, and collard greens, as well as chitterlings, or "chitlins" (the small intestine of a hog) and cooter (soft-shelled freshwater turtle) are just a few of the "soul foods" that have become an integral part of the Florida menu.
Southern food, soul food, and Cracker cooking are today the culinary cousins that keep the old foodways alive.
The early settlers of the Keys—known as Conchs (pronounced "konks")—were Tories and seafarers from the Bahamas and New England. Their two foodways blended into one of the early fusion dishes that is now part of every Florida cook's repertoire: conch chowder. Conch is a mollusk that must be pounded to tenderness before being transformed into fritters, marinated salads or the ubiquitous creamy chowder made of conch stewed with tomatoes and hot spices. From the Keys also came the state dessert: Key lime pie. This creamy pie dates back to pre-refrigeration days in the 1850s, when canned condensed milk was introduced to the Keys. Florida was still mostly a wilderness when Northern Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler extended his Florida East Coast Railroad to Miami in 1896. His trains carried carpetbaggers and speculators, the infirm seeking warm-weather cures and homesteaders. Flagler built lavish resort hotels to cater to wealthy Northerners.
This whimsical print from the late nineteenth century depicts a very real environmental hazard in the Everglades.
The pace of development accelerated in the 1920s, when a land boom made the area irresistible to Northerners lusting for fast money and seaside living. The boom inevitably went bust, but the lavish Mediterranean-style buildings it fostered left an enduring mark.
Miami kept its character as a resort town through the post-World War II era. Transplanted New Yorkers brought with them a taste for Jewish delicatessen items, such as corned beef sandwiches and lox and bagels, as well as an appreciation for the fine Florida seafood.
The arrival of Cuban exiles that began in 1959 sparked the transformation of Miami into a city of global flavors, and immigrants from all over Latin America joined Miami's great melting pot of flavors. Little Havana on Cade Ocho is the center of Cuban culture, but throughout the Greater Miami area, the population is nearly sixty percent Hispanic. You'll hear Spanish spoken as much as English on the streets, and it is easy to find and enjoy Cuban sandwiches (bread stuffed with pork, ham, salami, cheese and pickles that is usually pressed), moros y cristianos (black beans and rice), picadillo (ground meat, olives and capers), to-stones (fried plantains), and empanadas (fried turnovers filled with meat, fish, poultry or fruit). Little Haiti is where to find "Caribbean-style" chicken and plantains.
Here and there, especially in the laid-back Keys, word-of-mouth keeps track of the best barbecue joints and fish fry shacks, and old-timers may still be heard to say, "We live on fish in the summer and Yankees in the winter."
Time and again over the decades, Miami has been remade by waves of newcomers arriving from all over the world. But through it all, it has remained a mecca for visitors. Miami is second only to Disney World among Florida's many tourist attractions.
Miami is well-known for its cultural diversity and gustatory pleasures. In a photo from the Miami News, a Rabbi enjoys donuts, alongside the creator of those delicious confections, in a bakery on Miami Beach.
Today's sunseekers tend to be younger and more adventurous than in years past, more apt to order yellowtail snapper rather than sole, mango nectar instead of orange juice. Their worldly appreciation of fine cuisines has encouraged chefs in Miami and the Keys to make full use of the native abundance of tropical fruits, tubers, and seafood, transforming them into some of the most exciting fusion foods cooked in the United States today.
The melting pot that is Miami and the Keys continues to create a rich stew of cultures simmering in the tropical heat, a bold feast of international flavors constantly stirred by the hand of change.
The Florida Keys
Free spirit, good fishing great food
by Nancy Klinginer
The great opportunity for deep-sea fishing and snorkeling off the only live coral reef in the United States is just one reason visitors flock to the Florida Keys, a chain of islands that stretches for one hundred miles off the southern tip of Florida.
Key West, the last link in the chain, is the most famous of the dozens of islands that make up the archipelago. In the Old Town section, wooden houses built by sailors and fishermen still stand defiantly after more than a century of hurricanes, termites, and neglect. These days, most of the houses are sparkling again, painted pale yellow or peach or blue, showing off their unique mix of New England ancestry and Bahamian openness.
Many Key Westers take their cue from the laid-back style of the local architecture—shirts and shorts are the town dress code, lawyers and doctors commute on old bicycles and your bartender is likely to have a Ph.D. as well as a ponytail. The old island's free spirit, good fishing, and warm winter weather attract throngs of tourists each winter. The numbers have grown in recent years, but pilgrims to Key West are nothing new. Writer Ernest Hemingway wintered here all through the 1930s, and Key West is the setting for his novel To Have and Have Not. His Whitehead Street home is a museum today and one of the island's most popular attractions.
Tourism is just the latest in a varied line of livelihoods the Keys have drawn from the sea. Mostly, the waters have been generous, yielding fortunes in trade, fish and goods salvaged from ships that ran aground on the coral reef that parallels the islands.
The sea, however, also has punished the Keys. Hurricanes periodically roar across the Atlantic, blowing homes, businesses, and sometimes people out to sea. Even without storms, the subtropical climate, so soothing in winter, can be downright torturous during the still, simmering six-month summers. And isolation has at times brought poverty; the Great Depression was so dire in Key West that the federal government recommended closing the town and moving islanders. But the stubborn locals hung on; subsisting on a diet of grits and grunts," corn porridge and a lowly local fish.
Custom House and harbor, Key West. The term "keys" comes from the Spanish word for 'island," cayo.
Settlement of the Keys began in earnest in the 1820s; when John Simonton bought Key West from Spaniard Juan Salas. It was a strategic location for the U.S. Navy, then chasing pirates from the region, just as their successors in the Navy, Coast Guard, and Customs Service chase drug smugglers today. It was also a natural trading outpost for ships carrying goods to and from the Eastern Seaboard, Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and South America.
Early settlers came from the Bahamas and New England. Made of coral rock, most of the islands have only a thin skin of soil for planting, so, like their fortunes, the settlers' food was provided by the sea. The catch includes conch, of course, plus turtle, crab, kingfish, lobster, and crawfish. Early Conchs (pronounced "konks"), as descendants of the first settlers proudly call themselves, supplemented scarce fresh produce with avocados, bananas, pineapples, coconuts, figs, dates, oranges, tamarinds, guavas, and mangoes from trees they planted on Key West.
As Cubans rebelled against Spanish colonial rule in the late 1800s, Key West experienced a large migration from its neighbor island across the Florida Straits. Entire cigar-factory operations were transplanted, igniting a cigar-making boom that briefly made Key West the nation's wealthiest city per capita.
Almost a century before the Cuban diaspora transformed Miami, Key West became a truly Cuban-American city, electing Cuban immigrants to the state legislature and the judiciary. With Cuban culture came Cuban food. Thick, sweet Cuban coffee in small cups is still a staple for many Key Westers, who call it buche (from buchito, "to swallow"). Ice cream is another island favorite. Decades before the current gourmet ice cream craze swept the United States, Keys aficionados used local fruit to churn out papaya, guava, mango, and coconut varieties.
The most famous food of the islands is Key lime pie. Also called Mexican lime, the small, thin-skinned Key lime is yellowish (if you're served a piece of green Key lime pie, you know it's a fake) and has a unique tartness and aroma. Its juice also is the primary component of a salty Key West marinade called Old Sour.
Today, the Keys boast a host of upscale restaurants, from which the chefs are maintaining tradition by taking their inspiration from the sea and from the Bahamian, Cuban, Anglo, and Caribbean cultures that have touched these small islands, which barely rise above the warm waters of the sub-tropical sea.
This landmark diner on the corner of Fleming arid Duvall serves up sparkling seafood and a laissez-faire atmosphere.
Dining on salmon and crispy parmesan, littleneck steamers, shrimp rolls, and tuna carpaccio at Louie's Backyard in Key West.
Miami Beach Heyday
Society and glamour give way to tourist trade-then return once again-
to Miami's ever-changing shore
by Howard Kleinberg
Miami Beach has had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but the 1950s and 1960s stand out as a magical time of glamour, excitement, and rapid expansion. Each year during those two decades, a spectacular new hotel would go up: the Algiers, the DiLido, the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Casablanca, the Americana, the Deauville, the Doral Beach. Miami Beach was in its heyday.
In its fancy hotels and nearby clubs, big-name entertainers drew throngs: Frank Sinatra crooned, Mitzi Gaynor danced, Alan King knocked them dead— even Sophie Tucker found a few bars to belt. Muhammed Ali liked to visit, as did Hollywood stars. The place was bursting at the seams as more and more visitors joined the fun.
It hadn't always been that way. Slow to evolve from its roots as a mangrove-laced sandbar, Miami Beach did not exist as a town until 1915. Put on the map by an early 1920s real estate boom, it was, until mid-century, a place to simply bask in the sun, initially for the nouveau riche of the Midwest, later for the Northeast's middle class.
An enduring facet of the city's character was forged in the 1930s, when a large Jewish population began emigrating to Miami Beach, chiefly from New York. Originally limited by restrictive developers and landlords to the southern end of the city, the new community ultimately moved north, bringing with them their corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, their sour pickles and Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray tonic. From Wolfie's down on 21st Street to the Rascal House up in Sunny Isles, residents and tourists alike seemed to take delight in being abused by Brooklyn-accented waitresses demanding, "Yeah, watcha want?" as they slammed pickle and sauerkraut bowls on the table.
During World War II, Miami Beach was introduced to middle America by an unlikely promoter—the U.S. military, which commandeered more than three hundred of its hotels and apartment houses as quarters for Army Air Corps cadets. Thousands of young men (a full one-fifth of all who trained with the Army Air Corps) dropped their duffel bags in Miami Beach. Compared to pitching a tent somewhere in New Mexico, bunking in an oceanfront hotel must have been positively delightful. At war's end, many veterans, recalling their time in Miami Beach with fondness, boarded trains or planes with their families and headed back.
Tourists continued to swell Miami Beach's wintertime population, but by the 1950s their approach was less laid back. Now they came for much more than relaxation in the sun. They ate steaks and ribs at the Embers or up at Parham's, near Surfside. They dined regally at Gatti's on the bay side and lined up for hours for a meal at Joe's Stone Crab. They partied into the late hours, if not in the glitzy new hotels, then in the resort motels farther up the strip, where bawdy comics and brassy instrumentalists offered nighttime relief to sunburned parents who had finally gotten their kids off to bed.
Miami Beach lured visitors by perfecting the art of the "Come on down," first through a steady stream of oceanside cheesecake photos transmitted to the nation's mostly male newspaper photo editors, then through hugely popular radio and television programs. These included Arthur Godfrey Time, which began in the early 1950s, and occasional visits by The Ed Sullivan Show—one of them featuring the blockbuster first U.S. appearance of the Beatles in 1964. The long-running Jackie Gleason Show, which began broadcasting that year, warmed Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce hearts each week with its boastful opening, "From Miami Beach, the fun and sun capital of America."
A period of decay that began in the 1970s is nearly forgotten now, and the strip is again riding the waves of popularity. Today, Miami Beach is an upscale residential community with classic hotels and gourmet restaurants. Celebrities from many fields own homes here again, including Oprah Winfrey and singer Gloria Estefan. The Hollywood stars are back, as well, this time flocking to South Beach, along with supermodels, photographers, and fashion designers, echoing the glamour and excitement of glory days gone by.
The Hotel Astor lobby has been restored to the height of Ail: Deco splendor. Today, chef Johnny Vinczencz lures a chic clientele with his "new American barbecue" cuisine at Astor Place, situated within the hotel.
Renovation and Rebirth on South Beach
Art Deco gets a facelift
by Howard Kleinberg
By night, Miami Beach's Art Deco district's trendy restaurants and glittering night spots attract the famous and the curious. By day, fashion photographers set up their cameras on the streets and angular models preen and pose. Photos of its sleek buildings adorn the covers of travel and fashion magazines worldwide, and the rich and famous from all over the world have made it one of their favorite gathering spots.
Yet not very long ago, South Beach, or SoBe—the section of Miami Beach south of 20th Street—was derelict: a collection of empty storefronts and small, frayed hotels where retirees sat on porches gazing out at Ocean Drive. It was seen as a district to be razed rather than raised. But no more.
The unrelenting passion of a group of preservation-minded fashion designers and the gamble of a few ambitious investors have succeeded in resurrecting South Beach and have helped to restore to Miami Beach some of the old glory it enjoyed during its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s.
Today's beautifully restored pastel-colored hotels had their origins as chalky white buildings designed by architects in the 1930s in styles variously labeled Zig Zag, Streamline, and Depression Moderne. The architects were working in the idiom of classic Art Deco, a school of design that combined the flowery forms of Art Nouveau and Egyptian motifs with the geometric patterns of Cubism to create a form that embodied the ideals of the New Machine Age.
Classical Art Deco took a sharp detour in Miami, however, when architects decided to incorporate whimsical tropical motifs into their designs: the concrete "eyebrows" that shade the windows of the Hotel Astor from the sun, the porthole-shaped windows of The Tides, the seahorse and tropical fish bas-relief that graces the facade of the Marlin, the octagonal concrete medallions that band the top of the Delano's sweeping entryway and repeated in its pastel terrazzo floor.
In the late 1960s, the term "Art Deco" came to encompass the vintage buildings of Ocean Drive, and in 1979, they became the first twentieth-century structures to be included in the National Register of Historic Places. Today, scant blocks away, lofty condominiums hover above the low-lying, restored structures of the Depression years.
This remarkable resurrection has drawn increasing numbers of rich and famous visitors from Europe, South America and the rest of the United States, including Hollywood, European, and Latin American stars, as well as the cream of the crop from the realm of international fashion. Once again, Miami Beach has arrived.
South Beach, by Alexander Chen.
Cubans in Miami
At the forefront of a culinary revolution
by Maricel Presilla
They came by sea and by air in battered chartered planes and makeshift rafts and transformed Miami into a vibrant city with deep Latin roots. For Cubans are like the sturdy tubers at the core of their cuisine; they stay firmly in the ground and don't easily dissolve into their surroundings.
The first major wave of Cuban immigrants settled in the declining downtown area between Flagler and Eighth Streets, now known as Little Havana, in the early 1960s. Gradually they moved north to Hialeah, west and south of Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, and other affluent areas, and, most recently, east of revitalized Miami Beach.
South Florida's links to Cuba, however, go back as far as 1868, when immigrants and exiles transformed sleepy Key West into a prosperous Cuban enclave complete with cigar factories, social clubs, newspapers, restaurants, coffee shops, and schools. Key West also became a lively point of commercial exchange between Cuba and the United States. By the 1920s, entrepreneur Charles Brooks was shipping Cuban citrus fruits and avocados by boat to Key West and by train to points north. When a fierce hurricane destroyed the railway in 1935, Brooks planted citrus and avocados farther north, in Homestead, where his grandson, J. R., later founded Brooks Tropicals, Florida's largest shipper of tropical produce.
El Palacio de los Jugos (Palace of the Juice) is where Cuban Miami comes to shop for food.
A quarter of a century later, Cuban immigrants planted fields of tropical root vegetables—starchy yuca, sweet boniato, and shaggy malanga—as well as plantains and tropical fruits, alongside the old groves in Homestead. The magnificent mamey sapote groves were protected by barbed wire and watch-dogs, as if the leathery brown skin and sweet, salmon-colored flesh of the fruit enclosed gold nuggets instead of shiny black seeds.
Homero Capote, a farmer from central Cuba, is emblematic of the resilient wave of immigrants whose knowledge and toil fueled a culinary revolution that sustains Latin American cuisines in this country and provides the raw materials for some of our best Florida chefs. Capote began as a field worker but soon rented land of his own and experimented with the corn seeds and malanga corms his father sent. Over the years, Capote built up a thriving business of tropical tubers nurtured by hard work and commitment to his adopted land.
During the 1960s, Miami's once lonely and quiet downtown, its manicured sameness, also changed. The streets became crowded with small bodegas (grocery stores) and storefront Cuban restaurants serving fragrant black beans, hearty roast pork, and tender yuca doused in
mojo, a tart, garlicky sauce of citrus juice and oil. Juice stands sold batidos (shakes made with dozens of exotic tropical fruits), and Cuban bakeries turned out guava pastries and elaborately decorated cakes for the lavish fiestas de quince, with which Cuban families celebrate their daughters' fifteenth birthdays.
On weekends, Cuban families flocked to Key Biscayne with makeshift kitchens in tow. They filled the peaceful, tree-lined beach at Cape Florida with Latin radio music and fast-paced Spanish dialog. While the children swam, parents and grandparents cooked meals under the pine trees, and the tempting aroma of Cuban barbecue and rice and beans warmed the ancient stones of the lighthouse.
At the time, two kinds of restaurants catered to the burgeoning Cuban population: large, ornate Spanish establishments that appealed to their strong Spanish roots and the Mediterranean elements of their cuisine, and small cafeterias. The cafeterias were oases where people went late at night to eat Cuban sandwiches with cafe con leche (coffee with lots of milk) or during the day to meet and talk over sips of strong coffee from tiny paper cups.
Miami Cubans are like the coffee they drink: bittersweet, intense, and passionate, embracing their new home with the same ferocity with which they cherish their native Cuba. It is this paradoxical longing for what was lost and attachment to what is new that has transformed Miami into a hybrid Cuban city where even the old men playing dominoes on Eighth Street (Calle Ocho), nostalgic for Cuba, are among the most devoted of Miamians.
Each new wave of immigrants has refreshed the "Cubanness" lost by the previous, more assimilated groups. A virtual tidal wave of immigrants washed over South Florida in 1980, when Castro released 125,000 Cubans. In the years that followed, open-air markets that resembled chunks of Cuba—with pigs roasting close to the sidewalk, outdoor fruit stands, and people sitting down on wooden stools to drink coconut juice—sprouted in Miami. Once the most popular of these markets, El Palacio de los Jugos, is now a must-see for any food writer and tourist visiting the area.
There are several interesting cafes in and around Espanola Way serving a variety of Cuban staples.
Though Cuban coffee may look like espresso, don't he fooled by appearances. It is even thicker and stronger.
Drawn by the success of the Cubans, many other Latin Americans began settling in the region. Miami became the emotional and economic capital of the Latin American world, attracting many of its movie and television stars and pop singers. Today, 1.1 million, or nearly 60 percent, of metropolitan Miami's 2 million residents are Latin-American, about half of them Cuban. The Cuban population continues to grow as Cubans living elsewhere in the United States fulfill what seems to be their destiny: to end their days in Miami.
For Cubans and other Latin Americans, the road to Miami was built of shattered dreams and the mortar of new hope. At the road's end sits a great pot in which the flavors of all of Latin America simmer and beckon. You can sample Salvadoran pupusas (stuffed tortillas), Argentinian churrasco (grilled meat), and Nicaraguan tres leches ("three milks" cake). The town of Sweetwater has become the heart of the Nicaraguan community, where you can enjoy desserts in informal cafeterias and small bakeries and flavorful meats at elegant steak houses. Adding to the traditional bastions of Cuban fare, such as Versailles and La Carreta on Eighth Street, are newer, upscale restaurants, including Yuca and Victor's Cafe, offering an inventive, hybrid cuisine.
Part of the ongoing cultural replenishment of Miami is the merging of food and music. People go to restaurants where they can also enjoy shows by performers newly arrived from Cuba. This is the kind of lively night life for which Havana was once famous.
Every year before Lent, Miami explodes into the "Calle Ocho Festival," a huge carnival sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana to celebrate a community that has come of age. Its core is on Calle Ocho, where the first Cuban immigrants settled and where every block is crowded with kiosks, the smell of Cuban tamales, roast pork and black beans and rice mingling with that of Colombian arepas (corn patties) and Peruvian anticuchos (skewered beef heart). And then there is the music. Rhythmic and infectious, it captures the essence of those who move easily between two worlds and dance to one celebratory Miami beat.
Dining Out in Miami
Order a big dish of ropa vieja-and be sure to wear your best threads
by Kendall Hamersly
South Florida is a fusion of cultures, and South Florida dining is a fusion of cuisines—dishes from around the globe coming together in the same neighborhood, in the same restaurant, on the same plate. If you want to stamp a name on it, you can call it New Florida, New World, or Floribbean, but it is not so easily categorized.
The top of the dining pyramid is the domain of the Mango Gang, a loose group of innovators who invented New Florida cuisine, a casual fusion of the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Middle America. The big three are Allen Susser (of the elegant Chef Allen's in Aventura), rising national star Norman Van Aken (Norman's in Coral Gables) and Mark Militello (whose flagship Mark's Place has closed, but who now has the stunning and popular Mark's Las Olas in nearby Fort Lauderdale). These are the proving grounds and showcases for the best and most adventurous of the New Florida cuisine.
Yet the bottom of the pyramid, restaurants where you can dine for ten dollars or so, offers culinary adventures, as well. Little Havana, the neighborhood just west of downtown Miami, has the greatest concentration of Cuban restaurants in the United States, mostly rock-bottom budget places where you can gorge yourself on palomilla steak (sirloin marinated in garlic and lime juice, pounded thin and quickly fried), sweet fried plantains, and black beans and rice. A shining example (literally; just wait until you see the mirrors and chandeliers) is Versailles, where the tuxedoed wait staff applies the highest standards of service to the delivery of your six-dollar platter of ropa vieja (shredded beef in a savory tomato sauce).
Coral Gables' reputation for fine dining is the best in metropolitan Miami. In the heart of the Gables, a mix of charming Mediterranean architecture and futuristic office buildings, are dozens of superbly run restaurants with impeccable service and a dressy feel. In addition to Norman's, highlights include Giacosa, perhaps the area's best Italian restaurant, and The Heights, a spinoff of Pacific Time, Jonathan Eismann's bastion of Asian Rim cooking in South Beach. Where Pacific Time has a light, fish-oriented menu, The Heights takes a heartier, more Middle American approach.
Waiter from the Blue Door ready to serve.
A typical South Beach restaurant-very fun and noisy.
If it's down-home cooking you're looking for, one of the Gables' most popular eateries is the Biscayne Miracle Mile, a cafeteria specializing in Southern soul food. Put the Mile's 85-cent collard greens up against most $7.95 salads in a blind taste test, and you've saved yourself seven dollars and change. Nuevo Cuban cuisine has a major outpost in the Gables, though it's not a nuevo place: Victor's Cafe, founded in New York two decades ago and imported south, features dishes like red snapper in crunchy green plantain crust.
In nearby South Miami, Two Chefs Cooking's Jan Jorgensen and Soren Brendahl apply Mediterranean touches to hearty fare that one appreciative critic described as "nouvelle bistro." In Coconut Grove, The Grand Cafe at the Grand Bay Hotel dazzles visiting celebrities with its upscale menu.
The seafood hot spot of the moment in the Coral Gables-South Miami area is Red Fish Grill, a onetime beach house in Matheson Hammock Park on tree-lined Old Cutler Road. On a cool spring evening, you'll think you've died and gone to Hemingway as you dine outside on delicate, pan-seared sea bass. Farther down Old Cutler, at the private Deering Bay Yacht & Country Club, fish with tropical flourishes star on chef Paul Gjertson's menu. Along U.S. Route 1, you'll find the area's best family fish house, the Captain's Tavern, with an ideal mix of both simple fried fish and designer seafood. Also on U.S. Route 1, near the University of Miami, is the southern branch of downtown Miami's Fishbone Grille, where Chef David Bracha does a delectable Bahamian-style whole yellowtail with pigeon peas, rice and Scotch bonnet vinaigrette.
South Florida's best seafood is found, not surprisingly, in the Keys. Upper Matecumbe Key, which includes Islamorada and is roughly ninety miles south of downtown Miami, has nearly thirty restaurants in its three-mile span. At the picturesque Morada Bay, chef Alex Kaulbach mixes tuna steak with black beans and pineapple in Thai peanut sauce. At Atlantic's Edge, chef Dawn Sieber bakes dolphin in phyllo dough with spinach and balsamic glaze and cooks spicy orange shrimp in dark rum. For the seafood purist, the Islamorada Fish Co. offers up standards such as conch chowder, crab fritters and the absolute freshest of fish, served in a basket with coleslaw and french-fries, for less than ten dollars. At Louie's Backyard in Key West, chef Doug Shook is following in the illustrious footsteps of Norman Van Aken, who brought Louie's to the forefront of the then-nascent Keys fine-dining scene in the 1980s.
Although neons and pastels are the dominant colors in South Beach architecture, The Tides breakfast atmosphere is enhanced by the facade's soothing off-white.
Astor Place, the bistro-style restaurant at the Hotel Astor.
Today, the region's emerging fine-dining destination is affluent Aventura, in the far northeast corner of Dade County. Aventura is home to Fish, which features a 20,000 Leagues atmosphere, a bustling raw bar, and such elegant entrees as grouper with creamy leeks, French lentils, and wild mushrooms. And at the private Turnberry Isle Resort & Club, chef Todd Weisz is serving the upscale clientele an upscale take on Floribbean.
Flash south along the coast and east across Biscayne Bay to South Beach, or SoBe, the so-called American Riviera, where the Art Deco revival fostered a revolution in tourism, nightlife, and dining. The Beach scene has a reputation for high prices and indifferent service, and some of that is deserved, but there's a high degree of glamour at work here, too. Take the Blue Door restaurant at The Delano, a blindingly white hotel in northern South Beach. The restaurant is a bustling, chaotic, super-crowded, see-and-be-seen spot—you might even end up sitting ten feet from Calvin Klein or Madonna. The Delano has competition in the swank hotel department in The National, its neighbor to the south on suddenly exploding Collins Avenue. Refurbished and reopened to much fanfare in 1997, The National is home to the Oval Room, featuring one of the city's most sophisticated menus. Ocean Drive, ground zero for the SoBe revolution, is more oriented toward fun than food these days, with the exception of chef Christophe Gerard's elegant Twelve Twenty at The Tides Hotel. Two blocks inland on Washington Avenue, chef Johnny Vinczencz's Astor Place may offer the best combination of food and service on the Beach, with a menu that's all about fusion, from a fantastic Caribbean seafood soup to a cold sushi-plate entree. You can also catch his food at his nearby casual diner, Johnny V's Kitchen. Farther south on Washington is China Grill, an outpost of the wildly popular New York restaurant. The food is pan-Asian, excellent and expensive, and the wait can be forty-five minutes or more on a weekend, even with a reservation.
The crowds are just as heavy a few blocks east at Nemo, the Schwartz-Chefetz team's flagship restaurant, where Schwartz matches fish with exotic greens and adds Vietnamese spice to an excellent beef tenderloin. Across the street is their budget house, the Big Pink,
where the camp factor is so high that you can get a bona fide TV dinner on a compartmentalized tray. The food is homemade, though, and good.
North of Fifth Street, Washington Avenue is evolving into a strand of nightclubs and clothing stores, but it is still home to the Beach's best Italian restaurant, Osteria del Teatro. By and large, Beach sophisticates have moved north to the newly renovated Lincoln Road, a pedestrian mall that spans the island from ocean nearly to bay. Much of the eating there is done outdoors, and on weekend nights during the season, the walkways are packed.
Outstanding restaurants abound, not all of them expensive, and fans of Italian are especially well rewarded. Rosinella's, a tiny trattoria on the East End, features excellent homemade pastas, sauces and soups, with a full-meal ticket of about twenty dollars. Trattoria da Leo, farther west, has a similar menu and a surprisingly sophisticated decor and clientele (don't miss the world's best house salad).
The British invasion of Lincoln Road, begun by Michael Caine with his South Beach Brasserie, continues with Balan's, opened by a London-based group with a flair for combining hip sophistication with fine Thai-, Chilean-, and Moroccan-influenced food at a budget price. Fiery Jamaican food, cooled a bit to state-side tastes, is on display at Norma's On The Beach, where chef Cindy Hutson flies in many ingredients from the island. Cuban cuisine at its most sophisticated is served at Yuca, on the mall neighboring the Lincoln Theatre, where the New World Symphony performs. When the orchestra plays early on a Saturday evening, you can sit outside, sip cafe con leche, and listen in as the concert is broadcast onto the mall.
A symphony of flavors? Or better yet, call it a fusion. Bravo!
Bigfish Mayaimx located on the Miami River, purveys an eclectic mix of seafood cuisine and scintillating artwork.
