Category: Food Culture

Note: Thanks to The New Times and to Chris Malone for this article. Coconut Grove Arts Festival Recruits Emily Estefan and Norman Van Aken for This Year’s Programming CHRIS MALONE | FEBRUARY 6, 2020 | 8:00AM For decades, Coconut Grove has been a community rooted in camaraderie. The waterfront neighborhood is the oldest inhabited…

It all began with a conversation in an espresso house in New Orleans with my two great friends Charlie Trotter and Emeril Lagasse. They said, “You must go see “The Pope” with us”. I knew they didn’t mean the Holy Pontiff in Rome .. they meant Chef Frédy Girardet in…

A few weeks ago I sat down for an interview for a podcast named “Pan Con Podcast”. The person that the show stars is Chef Mike Beltran of Ariete Restaurant, (as well as a few other fine places in town). I first came to know Michael when he came to…

THE ASIAN CONNECTION AND ITS REVERBERATIONS One of the most intriguing elements in this evolving cuisine has come from the cooking of the people who came to the New World from Asia and of how the products of the New World have caused culinary reverberations throughout their countries. There are…

WHY I WROTE, ‘MY FLORIDA KITCHEN’ I wrote my sixth cookbook, “My Florida Kitchen” because I felt it was time for an update on our rapidly changing state. The last cookbook written on the whole of Florida was an excellent book written by Caroline Stuart and Jeanne Voltz titled “The…

To my great surprise I was offered the chance to write a cookbook in 1987. A vice-president for Ballantine Books, (a division of Random House) by the name of Risa Kessler came down to Key West for a getaway from Manhattan where she lived and worked. Fate (or providence) shined…

I am very happy to read this New York Times article about Mitchell Kaplan and his beautiful bookstores, “Books & Books”. I have admired them from the small original one in Coral Gables to the others from Miami Beach to Key West and beyond. I’m also very happy that on…

In Chicago in 1956 one of the welders at Weber Brothers Metal Works named George Stephen, made a grill by cutting a metal buoy in half. The Weber folks were already making grills. They’d begun to do that in 1952. But George Stephen made his with said buoy and a…