Entries tagged with 'Florida'
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[Image: butter-beer.com] Ever wondered what butterbeer and pumpkin juice would taste like? Well, next spring you can find out at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park slated to open at the Universal Orlando resort. According to Nation's Restaurant News, the Harry Potter wonderland will have two pubs, the Hog’s Head and Three Broomsticks, which will feature a menu of "traditional British fare and drinks." If you don't spend all your money on the gift shop's robes and Quidditch gear, you can also look forward to Chocolate Frogs and Bertie Bott's Every-Flavor Beans at Honeydukes, the park's sweets shop. Any other Harry Potterian cuisine they should include? Related Harry Potter and the Legend of the ICE Cooking ClassHarry...
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"Was it true? Had Florida really brought the water down from Brooklyn to make the bagels?" When my mom and I moved down to South Florida from Manhattan, we brought everything with us but the kitchen sink—and food. That, we figured, they’d have down there. Once we arrived, we dumped all our boxes in the garage, sat down, famished, and contemplated dinner. It was about an hour before we realized we’d left the only decent bagels, pizza, and Chinese take-out on the East Coast back in New York. Clearly, we hadn’t thought this thing through. “It’s the water,” my father told me. “You can't get a New York bagel outside of New York because you can’t get New York water...
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Photograph from cliff1066 on Flickr A story in this week's New Yorker (subscription required) points out that Florida is being beset by a nascent plague of invasive species. It's the consequence of a mid-'90s exotic-pet trend that fizzled out as overwhelmed python and lizard owners let loose growing and unmanageable reptiles. One such nasty-sounding beastie is the Nile monitor (Varanus niloticus): ...they are spectacular animals that make terrible pets. Up to seven feet long, with stout legs, tapered jaws, and skin that seems to be encrusted with semiprecious stones, Nile monitors are notoriously aggressive and ill-tempered. When cornered, a monitor will stand on its hind legs and hiss, inflating its body and lashing its tail like a bullwhip. What...
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To be named Kouzzina, the restaurant will feature "time-honored recipes passed down from my ancestors, as well as my favorite Greek and Mediterranean dishes that my family loves." It will be located on the Disney BoardWalk, between Epcot Center and Disney Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Florida. [Seattle Times via jcrisco]...
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sobefest.com/2009 The tents have been taken down, the chefs have all gone home, and South Floridians can now return to more pressing matters like spring training, but the memories of my first South Beach Wine and Food Festival linger for any number of reasons, even if I didn't see the pantsless Paula Deen fiasco. But what did I make of the main event? The Grand Tasting, a series of huge white tents right on the South Beach waterfront where extremely polite folks served up massive (unlimited) quantities of wine, spirits, and cocktails, and celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay, Tom Colicchio, and Emeril Lagasse drew in big crowds to answer questions, kibbitz, make jokes, and yes, even cook? I was...
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If you’re of South East Asian descent, you know that
being called a “potato eater” is a grave thing. It implies that you’ve rejected your culinary heritage of rice as the basis of, and main source of carbohydrates in, your diet. Instead, you’ve embraced the “white man’s” dietary staple of potatoes.
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Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine By John T. Edge | The Sheik on North Main Street, in business since the 1970s, is one of the six fast-food shops in a Jacksonville chain. Like the unaffiliated Desert Rider downtown and Desert Sand on Beach Boulevard, they serve sandwiches—club, ham and cheese, bacon and egg, that sort of thing—tucked into pita bread. By my count, a couple dozen or more sandwich...
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Fried pickles from Wintzell's Oyster House in Mobile, Alabama. When visiting a couple weeks ago, I was more excited for these than the actual oysters. To save a half-second, just call them "frickles." Snackable like French fries or popcorn shrimp, these deep-fried discs have the briney flavor of salt and vinegar chips and the addictive quality of, well, anything deep-fried. Apparently pickle spears can get too soggy, so most restaurants serve the bread-and-butter kind usually found on hamburgers. To cut the vinegary punch, orders are usually served with a creamy dipping sauce. See what restaurant kitchens are sizzling pickles, not just potatoes and onions, after the jump. Note: Frickle-making is especially common in a certain region of the country....
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You may be aware of the fact that
Jamaica was at one time a British colony, and as a result much of the country grew up enjoying English style afternoon tea. I didn't, and perhaps that bit of knowledge would have made finding a place like the
Pineapple Blossom Tea Room in Miami, Florida much less of a surprise to me than it was.
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If you are in Miami, Florida and looking to eat the "best sandwich," you'd be hard pressed (terrible pun intended) to find something better than a Cubano. Sliced pork, ham, cheese, mustard and pickles, ironed flat inside a French-style Cuban bread—it's a near perfect creation. I say near perfect because you will always find that person from Tampa who insists on salami, but in all my years growing up in Miami, genoa was something you got on an Italian sub, not on a Cuban. Salami or not, it's about as serious as sandwiches get. And yet, this past weekend when I was visiting Miami, I found myself craving a totally different pressed sandwich. A sandwich whose soul is about...
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