Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
A year as a dining critic? Here’s the dish
People ask what life is like as a full-time professional eater. Sometimes I feel like a great white shark, because I am always on the move with mouth open, hunting for food. Other times I feel like the universe — constantly expanding.
It’s a fattening job, but someone’s got to do it. At least that’s what I tell myself. A year ago I traded my news columnist’s notepad for a dining critic’s fork. It has been an enriching experience. Just ask my arteries. Miraculously, thanks to the marvels of modern medicine, my cholesterol level has remained below 200.
My weight has not been so fortunate. I have spent my career asking impolite questions, so it is only proper that I answer the one I hear the most these days: How much weight have I put on? Thirty-two pounds. I try to look on the bright side. The year before taking this job, I went on a health kick and lost 37 pounds. So I can still say I have lost five pounds in the last two years. Now I just need to get back to the gym.
But who’s got time? Consider, for example, this past week included eight restaurant meals, personal and business, and a dash around town eating hot dogs. I took my daughter and her friend to Flanigan’s in Hallandale Beach, had dinner at trendy Kiki on the River in Miami with South Beach Wine & Food Festival director Lee Brian Schrager and his friend Ana Navarro, ate review meals at Blue Ginger Steakhouse in Miramar and Eddie’s Thai in Cooper City, ate lunch with passionate Burger Beast blogger Sef Gonzalez at Smoke BBQ in Fort Lauderdale, and was asked to critique dishes at one of my favorite restaurants, KYU in Miami, at a preview of chef Michael Lewis’ upcoming James Beard House dinner in New York.
Pinch me, because I’m living my dream job. When readers ask, “Don’t you miss your old column?” I simply look at the headlines from Tallahassee and the Twitter feed of @POTUS and think, “Not for a minute.” I have also heard, “What makes you qualified?” I never went to culinary school and worked at a restaurant for about two minutes in college. But I have been exuberantly eating my whole life, exploring places highbrow and low during travels to five continents, and I know how to report and write.
The results, I’m happy to say, have been well-received by readers and
others. I hate to blow my own horn, but I was proud to score two major journalism awards in recent months, first place for specialty feature writing in the national Society for Features Journalism contest and first place for criticism in the regional Green Eyeshade Awards, which honors journalists in the southeastern U.S.
What have I learned on the Eat Beat, aside from gratitude to the inventors of stretchy pants? Some lessons and thoughts from a year of eating indulgently:
Always note whether the tip is included in the check, or you might inadvertently double tip. I understand why some restaurants in tourist-heavy South Florida have begun automatically adding 18 or 20 percent gratuity to all tabs, but there is no excuse why servers cannot clearly announce this when they leave the bill. This is my biggest pet peeve dining out.
It is tough to work within a four-star rating system in a five-star world. Dining apps and Internet sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook and Google all have five-star scales. Ours has been a four-star scale for decades. “When my wife [the chef ] saw 31⁄2 stars, she was so upset,” one restaurateur told me after I gave a glowing review. “I had to explain to her that it was OK.”
In 65 formal dining reviews, I have awarded four stars four times (6 percent) and 31⁄2 stars 10 times (15 percent.) I have given one one-star review, to a Thai restaurant in Miami with attitude problems that would not let me order more food.
The state of dining in South Florida is strong but uneven. It seems most exciting restaurants are opening in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Broward has wonderful diversity and many good modest ethnic restaurants, but lacks top-flight dining destinations. There are many talented chefs running smaller places with delicious food in Broward — Bubbles & Pearls in Wilton Manors leaps to mind — but few grand stages that put together all the elements of food, service and setting.
I’m still seeking my first four-star Broward review. Three of my four have been in Miami-Dade — KYU, Plant Food and Wine and Bazaar Mar by Jose Andres – and the other was in Palm Beach County: 32 East in Delray Beach. Palm Beach County dining correspondent Claire Perez awarded four stars to two restaurants in the past year: Lindsay Autry’s Regional Kitchen and Public House in West Palm Beach and Ouzo Bay in Boca Raton.
I recently had a text exchange with Paul Castronovo, BIG 105.9 radio host and South Florida gourmand, who gushed “Woweee” after eating at Bazaar Mar. “Miami is solid, plenty of world-class places to dine,” he wrote. But he wondered about Broward. “Can you name any world-class places up there?”
I’d say Giovanni Rocchio’s
On the bright side, Broward does comfort food and ethnic food well. If you want good Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, New York deli, Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian, Cuban, Peruvian, Argentinian, Brazilian, Colombian, Chilean, Honduran, Mexican, Venezuelan, Iranian, Italian, burgers, barbecue, pizza, pub grub, sushi or anything else, it’s out there. An Internet site ranked the Fort Lauderdale area in the top 10 for dining diversity in the U.S., above Miami (18th) and New York (10th). We
They work long hours, miss family time on nights, weekends and holidays, have an adrenaline rush during crunch time and can get 100 things right but never hear the end of it if they do one major thing wrong. And even if they do an outstanding job — putting out a great dinner service or writing a great story — they have to wake up and do it all over again the next day. And the next and next. I’m not sure why these masochists put themselves through this sort of grind, particularly in an industry where so many restaurants fail in their first two years. But when I eat something that is sublime, and leave with a big smile and full belly, I thank heaven that they do.