Destination Dining: Michael's Genuine Food & Drink, Miami

The Yolk's On You

One of the perks of my job is that I get to travel all over the country dining and drinking in great restaurants--all in the name of research.  We are always looking for new concepts, potential chef partners, menu items we can steal that inspire us, etc.  I know I am lucky I get paid to indulge in my passion for food, but it does present a challenge maintaining this chiseled, slim physique. My secrets are small portions, no dessert, lots of exercise, and on occasion, a wee bit of purging. Easy Peasy!  I have a wonderful comrade named Joe who sometimes says "it does not suck being David Wood."  In all matters culinary, love, friendship and the two best dogs in the universe, I am in total and grateful agreement.

Suction Cups

This week was a long one away from home, with three days in Orlando and two in Miami.  Worse, I woke up with a rotten cold on Thursday, the day we traveled to Miami, and had to walk around with toilet paper purloined from public toilets in my pockets all day to staunch the tide.  So it is a testament to how truly fine Michael's Genuine Food & Drink is since it was one of the most memorable and enjoyable meals I can remember even though I was very sick and really tired.

We drank a couple of doses of medicine at the bar before dinner and I felt almost human.  We were seated at a small two top next to an equally small two top.  Approximately one inch of space separated the tables, but as in NYC, that inch apart creates a Berlin wall of isolation for each dining couple (as long as voices are kept in moderate, dulcet tones and you never, ever make eye contact.)  Our cheerful waiter welcomed us with a wide smile and asked if we knew what we wanted as he tap watered us.

Peaches On Pizza--
Who'da Thunk?

We had been studying the menu at the bar so we knew we were going to try a bunch of items.  The menu is divided into sections called Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large, and we had figured out that meant the plates, not the body size of the intended recipient.  (That medicine in the bar had obviously made us absolutely brilliant.)

We started off with a couple of Puffer's Wellfleet Oysters with classic mignonette, plump and briny, and a terrific item called Wood Roasted Double Yolk Farm Egg with cave aged gruyere, roasted tomatoes, chives and a sourdough crostini.  It came in a ramekin, and it was sort of like a cheesy omelet spread.  The gruyere had melted over the top of the vessel in the oven like you sometimes get with the best French onion soup.  We spread it on the crostini and sank our teeth into its gooey goodness.  I felt like taking two Crestor tablets and just eating the rest with a spoon.

Beet Me Up, Scottie

Loved the Beet and Quinoa Salad with grapefruit, mint, pistachio, heart of palm and zesty orange dressing.  (Quinoa is top trending at the moment, surmounted only by kale. Thankfully, the everything bacon and pork belly fad is quickly fading.)

Then a perfectly Chargrilled Octopus atop a salad of gigande beans, roasted peppers, tomato harissa, green olives, and torn herbs slithered out of the kitchen and suctioned onto our faces, like that scene in Alien. Yum.

Steamed Mussels were also perfect, if perhaps the least imaginative item we ordered. We finished up with a Salumi Pizza--what a great idea!  House-cured meats on Fontina with roasted peaches, red onions and arugula on a wood-fired blackened and blistered cracker thin pizza crust.  O sole mio!  I was too full to eat more than two wedges so I scraped the toppings off the crust and crammed them into my mouth with my fingers.  (Not really, but I wanted to.)

My grammarly sister saw my check-in on Facebook and scoffed that I was eating "real" food.  In this case "Genuine" food means authentic, free from pretense, affectation, or hypocrisy; sincere.  Those awful Kardashians are real but certainly not genuine.  If you find yourself in Miami, hie thee to Michael's, it's the real deal.

A Home Cooked Meal

I'm always going on about this restaurant or that cafe, reporting with remarkable clarity and unbiased insight into the artistry or failings of each place's culinary team, service levels and interior design while copping whatever snarky remarks I can sandwich in between to give my food blog journalistic depth tinged with a soupçon of sarcasm.

The Divine Ms. J

Our cherished, oldest most long-term friend J invited us out last Saturday night to her house to see her wonderfully redesigned and updated kitchen.  After retiring from a high pressure career where she ascended to lofty heights of executive level decision-making on topics ranging from greenhouse effects in the Grand Canyon to five star Ohio state campground accommodations, she moved to Dallas a couple of years ago to be closer to us, her nearest and dearest.  (Her daughter and grandchildren lived here, too, but that was a secondary consideration, I am sure.)  She "downsized" to a 15,000 sf house in an affluent suburb where she has been methodically replacing 1980's popcorn ceilings and dark paneled walls with sleek resurfacing and 74 different shades of white paint hand-applied by illegal immigrants whom she supervises with a critical eye softened by financial largesse.  Her twelve bathrooms sport trendy vessel lavatories and her landscaping triumphs have won so many "yard of the months" the home owners' association has retired her jersey and she now presides over the advisory committee, where she tries very hard not to seem dismissive of her neighbors' laughable attempts to duplicate her botanical brilliance.  This is a woman with formidable skills.

We had arrived with a spray of Dendrobium orchid blooms rising majestically on an impossibly tall,

Don't Forget the Fabric Softener

slender stalk, which we thought a perfect kitchen-warming gift.  It would have been had we not walked into the house and immediately spied 12 different gigantic arrangements of exotic flowers from six continents festooning every room.  She seemed genuinely thrilled with our thoughtfulness as she banished the orchid to her laundry room, firmly closing and locking the door behind her.  She gestured grandly to the vast array of appetizers set out on her Florentine marble island, inviting us to partake of the bounty but cautioning us not to ruin our dinner.  For the three of us she had spread out home-made hummus with artisan crisps, zesty queso with imported tortilla chips, fresh salsa, twelve kinds of cheese representing the finest udderances of goats, sheep and cows, fresh fruit from Argentina and a16-ounce jar of Vegemite.  We had an aperitif and caught up on world news and celebrity gossip (no Kardashians were mentioned--I said celebrities, not talentless sex tape opportunists) while singing along with an oldies station which was wirelessly piped throughout her thoroughly modern manse.

It was delightful.  No valet parking to contend with, no barbie doll hostesses, no hipster servers, no brash, nearby diners yelling about stock options and repealing Obamacare for the 39th time (unfortunately we live in a state that elected the Antichrist junior senator Ted Cruz, the scourge of intelligent civilization and common sense.  I found that totally embarrassing to begin with and then this week he was exposed of accepting $75,000 to say "no" to an up and down vote to consider requiring background checks for gun purchasers, which 90% of Americans support but which apparently the NRA can easily override due to greedy, amoral hypocrites like him.  It's enough to put one off one's feed.)

Here's the Beef

By this time J had effortlessly prepared a simple repast of 48-ounce rib eye steaks, fresh corn on the cob, Jersey tomatoes at the height of summer succulence, gigantic biscuits, home-churned butter, and salted, baked Idaho taters of a size that would make Mrs. Potato Head blush.  There were no sounds for a period of several minutes save the gnashing of teeth and audible moans of hedonistic abandonment.  I finally lifted my head from the trough and saw that my two table mates were slack jawed in a comestible coma so I lowered my head and finished their plates, as well.

Cleaning up afterwards was forbidden by our hostess, so we repaired to the drawing room for candy cigarettes and 112 year old brandy.  We laughed about old times and talked about all of our friends, mostly in a kind way.  I had forgotten how nice it was to spend a leisurely evening in a cherished loved one's home, and being catered to with devotion and humor and enough food to feed the French foreign legion.  Don't get me wrong, I still love to go out to eat and see what's new on the culinary scene.  But there is something really special about leisurely breaking bread with a beloved member of your chosen family in an exquisitely decorated domicile aside from not having to pick up the check.  (But that helped.)

Chips & Salsa

Just got back from a week in Puerto Vallarta, the quaint fishing village/sun-kissed paradise that was put on the map when Elizabeth Taylor accompanied Richard Burton there in the early 1960's when he was filming Night of the Iguana.  He played a drunk throughout most of the film and well-to-do Americans were like "that place looks beautiful and you can booze it up in town for cheap so let's go" and they have been flocking there ever since.

It is the most laid back place you will ever have the chance to visit, with a daily agenda that always starts with a relaxing Breakfast al Fresco.  That is to say if by "Breakfast" you mean "Bloody Mary" and "al Fresco" is loosely interpreted as "sprawling under a palapa on the beach wearing nothing but a Speedo and SPF 60 sunscreen". (Do yourself a favor and don't try to visualize me doing that.)

Imagine Hearing Waves Breaking and Seagulls Screeching, If You Can

Our favorite place is called La Palapa and it is one of the finest restaurants in town with the added advantage of being located directly on the beach so you can kick off your flip flops and bury your toes in the sand while being serenaded by a winsome Spanish guitarist whose soulful eyes reflect the flames of the torchlit perimeter.  The fish is incredibly fresh.  When you order it they throw a line into the sea and yank out your dinner and slap it on the grill before it has had a chance to say adios to its schoolmates. Seriously, the food rivals some of the best I've ever had and you can have a margarita and an appetizer and that line caught fish and a flaming coffee for something like $500 pesos which last week was about 42 bucks. That includes the propina (tip) and impuesta (tax). The guitarist was so overly gratified by the twenty peso bill I gave him (somewhere south of two bucks) that I gave him twenty more.  (I wonder how you say "sucker" en Espanol?)

Another awesome find was Joe Jack's Fish Shack, home of the tastiest fish tacos I've ever had the pleasure of devouring. Lightly battered and fried red snapper in home-made tortillas with cabbage slaw and tomatillo cream will improve your outlook on life dramatically. Coco's Kitchen has a ridonkulously palate pleasing smoked salmon and cream cheese omelette served with a weird Mexican biscuit.  (I've pretty much decided that all baked goods in Mexico are lardy yet strangely dry and tasteless so I avoid them unless forced on me by well-intentioned ex-pats who think I just need to develop a taste for them.  I don't think I will ever enjoy chewing faintly sweet, mealy dog biscuits, but I appreciate their encouragement and belief in my ability to change.) I'm a little embarrassed to say I love Fajita Republic, which I suspect locals loathe as much as I do Chili's or Chik-fil-hate, because I am positive an American wearing a sombrero and a fake droopy black mustache came up with the concept, which is kind of an On the Border across the border.

Have I mentioned Garbo yet?  It is a smart martini bar with live jazz or show tunes which the barman and owner, Hermann, presides over with gracious hospitality and a heavy pour. We love that place and usually throw back handfuls of Japanese peanuts while we are there.  (Not sure what makes them Japanese -- perhaps they are good at math and science, smoke a lot of cigarettes and live for karaoke.) Garbo also sports the most workingest a/c unit in PV.  Sometimes it is so refreshingly cold in there I have to throw a serape over my tank top.  All of my friends refer to it as Garbo's but there isn't really a Garbo so it doesn't belong to her but I never correct them until just now in this blog because I don't like to be perceived as a know-it-all.  (The universe just threw back its head and roared with mean-spirited laughter).

In conclusion, I would like to posit that Puerto Vallarta is an unrecognized, formidable force in the food world at which I would encourage anyone to vacation and dine.  I personally have never seen a decapitated body in a shallow grave anywhere near there so I am sure it is perfectly safe.  (Plus their commercially baked bread loaves are made by a company named Bimbo and seeing their delivery vans is always good for a juvenile chortle until I think of those awful Kardashians and then I am depressed and have no recourse but to head back to Garbo no 's.)

Hasta la vista, baby.  La cuenta por favor.

In the Pink

So we went to a pop/rock concert last Saturday night in one of those gargantuan sports palaces where thousands of citizens pay hundreds of dollars to rabidly root for teams whose players are not even from their own home town.  On non-sports nights such arenas schedule concerts, circuses and tractor pulls to maximize return on the investment required to build these vaulted shrines to sweat and steroids.  There are about three huge conglomerates which operate concessions in the majority of these venues and they all sell questionable foodstuffs for immorally high prices.

Knowing this, we would normally make plans to dine in an actual restaurant in the vicinity but a prior engagement had us sprinting from the parking lot to the AAC to catch an 8 o'clock start. (We needn't have bothered, the opening act was fronted by a poor man's Jagger whose few moves consisted of cheer leading type high kicks and the quiet desperation of a lead singer who knows everyone would rather he just stop shrieking for a moment and be quiet.)

We only had a few minutes until showtime so we scanned the brightly lit food stalls looking for something of sufficient nutritional value to assuage the growling beasts within.  Big Texas Hot Dawgs.  Um, no.  Gigantic Pretzels with Two Unidentifiable Dipping Sauces.  I think not. Burgers grilled hours beforehand now soaking comfortably in hot water awaiting their turn in a stale bun saddled with germ ridden condiments dispensed from convenient community kiosks.  Ugh.  As the least of all evils we settled on a hybrid:  Italian food with a Mexican name, Pizza Patron.  (This makes no sense to me whatsoever; it's like French Wiener Schnitzel or Chinese Pot Roast.)

High Degree of Radioactivity

There were no nearby tables so we huddled over a trash container whose flat top made a convenient resting place for our individual pan pizzas and frozen margaritas served in green plastic vessels shaped like beakers. (I thought it kind of rude that while we were eating, people kept coming up and tossing their refuse into our dining room, but in all fairness, I think they were equally irritated that we were bogarting the trash can.) The "pizzas" were round, room temperature spongy disks about an inch thick with what looked like processed cheese food and three limp slivers of nitrate-laden, cured organ meat congealing on top.  The pizzas tasted like something between communion wafers and feet. (BTW, aside from being a food preservative, sodium nitrate is also used to make fertilizers, smoke bombs and solid rocket propellant.) The "margaritas" were composed  of bilious green, frozen sugar molecules that had once been stored on a shelf next to a tequila bottle for half an hour or so.  Total bill for this fine dining experience?  $56.00

Si Si Senor

No wonder the French think we are barbarians.  You can walk down any small street in Le Marais in Paris and find a food vendor who will sell you a baguette avec jambon et fromage for a couple of euros and it will be the finest ham and cheese sandwich you have ever had the pleasure of masticating.  I believe that same street vendor would have gagged before swallowing one bite of the ill-prepared, overly processed junque we had for dinner that night.

How can we be the greatest country in the world with a globally envied standard of living and yet willingly accept such inferior provisions?  Are we so numbed by Chicken McNuggets and Canned Easy Cheese that we don't think twice about swallowing empty, greasy calories and paying through the nose for it?  Why don't we draw the line and refuse to accept month-old popcorn shoveled into grease-spattered boxes from 2 gallon garbage can liners? (And while I'm at it, when will those annoying Kardashians return to the inglorious anonymity they, and we, so richly deserve?)

Ironically, after the hideous first act, P!nk staged an incredible, athletic, imaginative, mind-boggling performance.  She was the essence of rosy-cheeked, American fitness with ripped abs and serious stamina as she danced and twirled and Cirque de Soleiled from bungee cords strung from high up in the heavenward rafters of the arena.  For two-and-a-half hours she fantastically  displayed the results of ingesting healthy food and exercising every day inside the sold out, 20,000 seat arena.

I'm fairly certain she didn't eat there before the show.