Le Provencal

Miami has perhaps an exaggerated reputation as an international city; while we certainly have our share of visitors and émigrés from Latin America – indeed, in vast expanses of the county English is greeted with confusion if not scorn – you have to work a bit to overhear, say, Chinese, or Hindi, or… well, Continental […]

Matsuri

Until you’re running late and stuck behind an abuelita looking for parking at Gilbert’s, you have not yet tested the true limits of your patience.  The parking lot on Red and Bird is one of the area’s worst, because something about Milam’s stores of Gilda cookies, Walgreens’s discounts on violet water, and the bottomless pastelitos […]

Strada

Anyone who has had the misfortune of calling himself my friend for any considerable length of time has heard my complaints about the Grove’s restaurants. Some spots, like Greenstreet and Lulu’s, aren’t really meant to be restaurants at all, and any attempt to criticize their food is about as naïf and beside-the-point as that curious […]

MIAMI CITY BALLET

Not too many years ago, one of Alicia Alonso’s ballerinas ran a school in the Gables. For decades, right up to the time Martha Mahr died, young girls would swarm out of her studio every weekday afternoon on the hour, their mothers and maids and boyfriends clogging Giralda Avenue to whisk the dancers away. I […]