With my first paycheck from ‘The Midget’ …to clarify… it was a bar and restaurant in Key West I worked in … I sent for my then … girlfriend, Janet, who arrived a few days later on a Greyhound bus from Ft. Lauderdale where she’d been working as a maid in a…

A writer named Brook Larsen recently wrote in an online magazine named ‘Culture Trip’, “The Japanese and English borrow words from each other all the time. There is a whole subset of the Japanese language known as gai-rai-go (loan words), many of which come from English, including tabako (tobacco) for cigarettes and…

The first time I ever had a causa I was at the groundbreaking restaurant fellow future Mango Gang Chef Douglas Rodriguez opened. It was named Yuca for those who might not know. We were sitting upstairs and I was with a party of six or eight. Douglas was down in his kitchen…

When I was about 8 years old I made friends with the three brothers who lived with their mom and dad in a neatly kept home across the creek from us. Back at our house I was the single male between two girls. The much needed boyish shenanigans were calling me. And…

A number of years ago we were in Italy for a long delayed and much needed family vacation. I’m sure I probably looked just like so many others I was amidst as we ambled around the markets and then ate in the cafés and trattorias. iPhones had yet to be invented so…

There’s no secret to aguachile. The name, chile water, translated describes the dish just about perfectly. It is a study in simplicity … pulverized chiles in liquid, a few cut up vegetables … enough lime to pucker your lips and pickle some shrimp. Its creation is generally credited to the coastal northwest…

To hell with history here! When it comes to things like Chocolate Chip Cookies there are memories that are much more indelible than the shifting and … floury in this case … ‘footprints’ of time. My first memories of chocolate chip cookies came within months of my first awakenings of …other things…

The first time I heard the word mofongo I knew I wanted to use it on one of my menus! I didn’t even know what the dish was and … I almost didn’t care. I simply loved the word and wanted to use it for our guests to enjoy too. When my…

It was the best of time it was the wurst of times… That might be funny if you could read it… wurst being spelled w-u-r-s-t in this case. But I digress. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto reportedly had 13 pigs aboard when he arrived to the new world and docked near…

Despite our (we thought!), carefully planned strategy for a lunch of divine sushi… we were in for a shock as we slowed to pull on to the side street off the 79th street causeway. The shock was due to the line of even more prepared folks lined outside the still locked door…