One evening last week Hania and I went to the MASS District for dinner, the name standing for Music & Arts South of Sunrise. MASS and nearby F.A.T Village are the two most interesting neighborhoods in the city, filled with the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that high rents long ago banished from Las Olas.
We arrived early, so wandered over to Batch for cookies. As often, there was a line. We got talking to the couple behind us; they had driven up from Miami for some chocolate chips. We got one chocolate chip with walnuts and one gluten-free lemon blueberry cookie.
Then we walked a few steps to Heritage. Hania got the squash blossoms and calamari stuffed with sausage; I got a pizza. The man eating pasta at the table next to us told us he had driven down from Delray Beach. On a weeknight. For Italian food.
It was as incredible as it was heartening to think that Ft. Lauderdale – the MASS District in Ft. Lauderdale! – has become a South Florida foodie mecca.
Yesterday evening Hania and I went for dinner to Here and Now in FAT Village. It is not new – it’s having its one-year anniversary this coming Saturday – but we only recently heard about it. “This is what we get,” Hania said, “for not reading the Sun-Sentinel.” (I learned about it from a post by my successor at Fort Lauderdale Magazine.)
It sits tucked behind the Avenue Lofts on NW 1st Ave., which means it’s fronted by some of the Village’s rare trees. Inside, we found a deep dining room with well-spaced tables and comfortable chairs. A beautiful bar ran the length of the room – it’s famous for inventive cocktails – with two TVs showing NHL matches. Oldies, like “Good Vibrations,” played at a not overwhelming volume. It looked like the kind of fine neighborhood place every city should have, and FAT Village has long needed. In fact, it was like a more industrialized version of the old Joe Allen’s in Miami Beach’s Sunset Harbor.
Hania and I both got specials: duck for her, gumbo for me. Each was delicious, which was not surprising. A restaurant that opens at the start of a pandemic and is still in business one year later must be good. Hania walked to the open kitchen and complimented the chef.
I want Larry David to get a food show just so he can take a bite of some celebrated delicacy and then say, “Eh, not as good as I thought it would be.”
Yesterday I found on social media a list of things one should know about Tampa, host of this year’s Super Bowl. Written by a friend, it mentioned the city’s claim to be the inventor of the Cuban sandwich with the usual South Florida skepticism.
I was dubious too until I went to Tampa a few years ago for a story, which included an aside on the famous sandwich. Proving its place of origin is difficult; less problematic is recognizing the difference between the two versions: Tampa’s adds to the roast pork, Swiss cheese, pickle, and ham a slice of salami. While enriching the taste, it pays tribute to the city’s, or more specifically Ybor City’s, Italian population, which in the heyday of cigar making ran the grocery stores and produce shops. You can debate which is the better sandwich (though, what isn’t improved by the addition of salami?), or where it originated, but not which one is the more multicultural.
The front-page story in the Herald’s food section today is about the 100 best traditional foods in the world, as chosen by the website TasteAtlas. Number one on the list is the margherita pizza, number seven is saltibarscia, which the writer of the article describes as “a Lithuanian cold and tangy beet soup poured over shredded cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs.”
He seems taken aback by the soup’s appearance on the list, but Baltic peoples – not only Lithuanians but Poles, Latvians, and Russians (we buy a version of it at the Russian store in Hollywood) will be surprised only by his description of it – it’s poured over a hard-boiled egg half, but the cucumbers (and radishes and pickles and dill and maybe a few other things like crayfish) are firmly embedded in it. And he failed to mention its color – a brilliant fuchsia – that signals with great flair the end of grey winter. Colorwise, it’s as perfect a soup for summer as clear borsht is for Christmas.
Further supporting its worthiness on the list is the fact that the soup is probably one of the few foods there that’s memorialized in literature. Adam Mickiewicz, the great Romantic poet of Poland, who grew up in Lithuania, included a scene in his epic poem Pan Tadeusz of people sitting down to eat their soup with such gusto that conversation stopped:
Podano w kolej wódkę, za czym wszyscy siedli
I chołodziec litewski milczkiem żwawo jedli.
(Vodka was given, then everybody sat
And in silence Lithuanian chłodnik briskly ate.)
Driving down Coral Way last Saturday, a few blocks before the start of Miracle Mile, I spotted in a small strip mall the words Portuguese Bakehouse. Because of my affection for Portugal I went in and found many familiar foodstuffs – the place, named Majestic, doubles as a bistro – including pasteis de nata, the famous egg custard pastries with the flaky crusts.
Traveling you often discover foods that, when you find them back home, invariably disappoint. There’s something missing; the quality of ingredients can’t match that in the country of origin. Biting into my pastel de nata I had the opposite experience. I had enjoyed the pastry in Portugal but, because it was so ubiquitous, I had never found it all that special. Eating it in Florida revealed to me its true magnificence.