• Fort Lauderdale, FL: Gateway 4
• North Miami, FL: Intracoastal 8
• Palm Beach Gardens, FL: BMC PGA Cinema 6
• Miami Beach, FL: South Beach 18

Food, Inc. presents a documentary-style look at the food industry of the US, and what exactly is happening behind those happy farms that provide us all with our food. From the movie website:

That sign was placed hovering above a selection of beans from (somewhere in) Florida and produce from California, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru and just a few bins down even some eggplants from Holland. I’ll let you savor the irony for a moment.

I understand some thing are not in season, but it just seemed that more than 70% of their produce stock was not local at all (unless you also count “USA” as local, but I’m not at this moment), with a fairly disconcerting sub-percentage being from Latin America. I mean, plantains from Colombia? Mangoes from Brazil? Seriously?

For the record, I did at least get two giant avocados from “Dade County,” a pound of Cubanelle peppers and a dragonfruit, these last two from Homestead. I wish I could have gotten a couple pounds of stone crabs to take to my friends, but I needed those packaged for a plane trip and this was not something they could do at the seafood counter, nor I at home since I cannot bring stone crabs into my kosher kitchen. Oh well.

Norman Brothers, if you’re gonna have this phrase as your official slogan (as featured on the front page of the website), you gotta do better than this. I’ll have to return to the store later on to see if this was a one-time fluke, so expect a follow-up post sometime down the road.

A couple of nights ago I had a chance to visit Grass Restaurant & Lounge in the Design District of Midtown Miami for my wife’s best friend’s birthday. Back in January when I (briefly) worked at Miami D&E Magazine (don’t bother looking for it, it folded) we ran a review and an ad for this place, so I knew of it. Now, understand this is not a review. I keep Kosher so there was nothing there I could eat, and even the drinks were problematic, so consider this more of an impression of the place.

Grass is an all-outdoor restaurant, featuring a large open area with a huge tiki-hut, a side area walled off with trellises (featuring rows of sculptured hands on the walls that only made me think of the helping hands in Labyrinth) and some more tables around the perimeter of the giant tiki-hut. You’d think that an outdoor restaurant in Miami would be hopping on a slightly-cold autumn night, in which case you’d be as wrong as me. We got there at 10:30 pm and the place was tumbleweeds-rolling-across-the-screen empty. The hostess mentioned it seemed the cold weather had kept customers away, so we got the entire place to ourselves. We picked a table near the bar, next to a stand-up heater which was never turned on (maybe if they had had these on people would have come in, perhaps?), and ordered some drinks. Fairly soon we were joined by the rest of our party, making us a total of 10, by far the most customers at the restaurant that entire night.

The service was excellent and incredibly prompt (no doubt due to us being the only ones there, but good service should always be recognized). My wife and I took a look at the drinks menu (I’d link it here except the menus available on the website are not the ones we had that night), saw a lot of very fruity drinks with lots of flavored liquors, realized that we could not be sure about the Kosher status of a lot of those (something we are used to), and simply ordered beers, Heineken for me, Amstel Light for her. The cocktails all were $14, not a bad price, but the beers, let’s just say these were the most expensive beers I’ve ever had, and I’ve had expensive beers before (like last week at Bayside), so skip them. Others in my party ordered some appetizers (I’m sure the staff was thrilled that this was all the food that was ordered) all of which were highly praised. 

All in all, Grass was a neat place to visit, and based on the menu that I perused and the opinions of the rest of my party, a great place to eat as well. Located in the newly refurbished Design District in Midtown, it is easily accessible via I-195. The parking situation is not the best; though we had no problem on a cold Thursday night, I can see how it would be problematic if the area gets even a bit livelier, given there’s at least two more restaurants on the same street, let alone other establishments around the block. The ambiance was actually quite nice, the music fairly interesting and not too loud (a bit more variety would have been welcomed), and the decor exquisite (except for the bathrooms, which are covered wall-to-wall in Astro turf!). Grass now adjuncts a new club called The King is Dead, though it was closed during our visit so that’s all the information I have to give. 

If you’re looking for a neat and different place to go eat or have a few drinks, especially if you also want to check out the fantastic new look of the Design District, by all means drop by Grass. Just be sure it’s not on a cold night (and if it is, make sure they do turn on the heaters as that’s what they’re there for).

Grass Restaurant & Lounge
28 NE 40th Street
Miami, FL 33137
www.grasslounge.com 

Check out some photos below (taken with my cameraphone, which explains the graininess).

Furthermore, it’s pretty hard to just out-and-out pan a Miami restaurant. The competition here is fierce, and most places you go to, if not actively great, are at least passively mediocre. If you go to any restaurant on Lincoln Road, you’re probably going to eat reasonably edible food that you’ll think is great after a pre-dinner cocktail and half a bottle of wine. Most restaurants in Miami do not go out of their way to offend each and every one of your many thousand taste buds and your intelligence.

That is not the case of the Lost and Found Saloon . It will offend both.

We went there in a group of about 8 people and all initially loved it. It’s located at 36th St and NE 2nd Ave, and looks like a nice, non-pretentious, hole-in-the-wall. My kind of place. And you gotta love the name. Inside, the decor was thoughtful and lovely – murals of western plateaus, lots of raw wood details, giant bull horns used for taps on the beer. Even a life-size, standing cut-out of John Wayne. Plus the waitress and the bartender(/owner?) were extremely nice and accomodating.

After the first impressions, it all went to hell.

The food was unspeakably, offensively bad. This was food that went out of its way to taste awful. Unfortunately for us, we were all pretty hungry and everything on the menu is cheap, so we ordered tons of dishes between pairs of us and shared. My eating partner and I had crab salad in endives to start. (Even though it’s a pretty big menu for a small place and they let you order from the breakfast section, they don’t actually have appetizers, so this dish appears as an entree even though it’s basically a handful of tiny lettuce leaves and some meager, watery crab salad.) At this point, I should mention – superfluously – that this is a “quote-un-quote” TexMex place. A TexMex place where nary a tortilla chip is offered or seen, I might mention. So the endives and crab salad were transformed into “fusion TexMex” by tossing in a few kernels of corn and whole lotta hot, red powder. No – not chili powder – wait for it … paprika. Yes. Paprika.

The rest is a fugue of awfulness so unmitigated that we eventually started to think it could only have been done on purpose. To screw us. Or, hypothetically, as a vanity project: the owner was screwing the chef.

The starter was followed by a surprisingly bland Mahi Mahi. I say surprisingly bland because it, too, was covered in paprika. The sides were unsurprisingly bland rice and equally bland asparagus. Keep in mind this is a TexMex joint, when I tell you that the only thing that redeemed the blandness was mashing everything up with the two slices of avocado on the plate and some generous dollops of sour cream and salsa verde.

We also shared some chicken enchiladas, which came out after the mahi mahi for some reason, and which we still – innocently – were holding out hope for. How can you mess up a chicken enchilada? I could go to Publix, buy one of their awesome lemon pepper rotisserie chickens, some bags of shredded cheese and lettuce, tomatoes, onions, tortillas and avocadoes and call it a day. Ta-da! Here are some awesome chicken enchiladas prepared just for you!

Well, the chef here should have used the Publix lemon pepper chicken, because inside this fried up tortilla there were what looked and tasted like colorless boiled cubes of skinless chicken. As in the previous dish, throwing the remainder of the sour cream and salsa verde over it was the only way to choke it down and stop the hunger.

I must mention here that we couldn’t really get up and leave at any point because we were there celebrating a friend’s 30th birthday. (Poor sap.) And he had picked the place out himself because it sounded cool.

So we stayed and suffered. And then came the ultimate shock when I read a handwritten sign posted up high and prominent behind the bar that read something along the lines of “Patrons will order one entree and one alcoholic beverage per person.” At first I thought this was one of those signs to keep the bathroom-using bums away. Like can’t pay, can’t pee or something. But the syntax was so odd, I decided to ask the waitress. Who confirmed that at this so-called restaurant everyone has to order an entree and a drink. No “Just a beer, thanks.” No “I’ll just have Miami water with that.” Both. You must order both.

In other words, for the privilege of sitting somewhere nice, in a cool neighborhood (right near the new downtown Target!) and having a beer pulled from the tap by a real long-neck horn, I have to pay for – if not choke down – one of their horrifying entrees. And if I were clueless enough to go there to eat, but was, say – a recovering alcoholic – well no service for me. And that would actually be a blessing. Not the recovering part.

And if that’s not a insult to both tongue and brain, I don’t know what is.