I had lunch yesterday in a restaurant many Fort Lauderdalians don't know exists.
The 11th Street Annex is tucked away on - you guessed it - 11th Street - a few doors west of Andrews, across the street from Trinity Lutheran Church. It occupies a little cottage hidden in foliage.
Inside, two small rooms have been turned into one small room scattered with tables and chairs and, at lunchtime, lawyers, city officials, office workers, and other people in the know.
Jonny Altobell and Penny Sanfilippo make about three dishes each day. Yesterday the specials were: a chicken and Greek salad wrap; a ham, cheese and pineapple panini; and mom's macaroni and cheese. I got the wrap and it was remarkable: not just the generous filling but the wrap itself, which had more in common - in texture and taste - with a fresh tortilla than with the usual papery enclosure. It was accompanied by a side of unexpectedly delicious macaroni salad (definitely not my mom's) which seemed to be studded with feta crumbs. It's the kind of place that almost makes me wish I had a job with a lunch break.
Yesterday I wrote about my dining experience Monday night at the wonderful restaurant Cacao, which it was - up to a point.
That point came around 9 pm, just when the tables started to fill. Soft graceful Latin songs were replaced by techno music. It was not deafening, so we could still hold a conversation, but the repetitive pounding took its toll. One of the men at our table, who lives in Alaska, said it was starting to give him a headache.
The problem is not new. In his book Those United States, published in 1912, the English novelist Arnold Bennett wrote of dining on his ocean liner to the strains of an orchestra. "That ragtime, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-intentioned if banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over the whole universe of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of the sensitive but evidently to the joy of correct diners. ...And yet you never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agree and even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageous nuisance!"
I think today few Americans would complain about soft music in restaurants, but the vast majority would veto techno. I suspect that it is played in an effort to get people to eat quickly and to increase turnaround. Noise in the service of the almighty dollar.
Last night, dining in Coral Gables, I came across a new social unknown. We were a group of six, at the wonderful restaurant Cacao, waiting for our dinner. The plates arrived two by two, and each person who received his or her plate politely waited for the other people to receive theirs. This was the proper etiquette that I had been taught growing up. Then, when all the plates had arrived, one person at the table was still busy texting. And I wondered: Should I wait until he's ready to start eating, or should I pick up my fork, stab one of my shrimps, and flick it over onto his BlackBerry as a sign that it's time to address the food? Any suggestions?
Of the great breads - focaccia, naan, bialy, pao de queijo - there's none I hold in higher esteem than the lowly pretzel. For years people had raved to me about Munich, but no one had mentioned the fact that the bread baskets in restaurants always include a brezel or two. I had heard about Swiss chocolate of course, but the pretzel roll sandwiches - first encountered at the Lausanne train station - were the real revelation.
Yesterday, after a hard day at Seatrade in Miami Beach, I strolled Lincoln Road. At the east end I saw a new place - SwissMaker - which displayed various types of large pretzels in its front window. Walking inside, I entered a pretzel emporium. (The place, I was told, has been open three months.)
The glass case on the left side of the restaurant bulged with looped and then straightened out doughiness. Starting in the back, I passed the basic hot dog brezel, a "super brezel baguette" (a kind of Bavarian hoagie), cheeseburger brezels, roast beef brezels, egg salad brezels, gourmet chedder cheese brezels, prosciutto-ham brezels, the "classic garlic butter brezel," the "gourmet Swiss-cheese brezel," the "premium smoked salmon brezel," and the "premium tuna salad brezel."
Closer to the front, for purists who don't like their pretzels serving as sandwiches, there were classic butter brezels, poppy seed brezels, caraway seed brezels, sunflower seed brezels, pumpkin seed brezels, salt brezels, sesame brezels, "original pizza-topped brezels," and the "original spicy Orient brezel."
A twisted cheer for globalization.
Picked Terry up at the Fontainebleau around 7 and headed across the Julia Tuttle Causeway. It was Chinese New Year and I had checked out Miss Yip's off Lincoln Road but it was booked. I had also driven past Sum Yum Gai on Washington, which I had been told is better, but it looked empty.
So I headed to Bengal on Biscayne Blvd. I had seen the "Coming Soon" sign months ago, which advertised "modern Indian cuisine." When ethnic food gets modernized it usually means smaller portions at higher prices.
I was half right. The prices were good - vegetarian dishes in the low teens - but the servings were less than abundant, unless you count the rice, which arrived already on our plates and overwhelmed both Terry's chicken and my eggplant. I missed the unmodern pleasure of getting rice in one bowl, main dish in another, then repeatedly pouring the second over the first.
But this gave us more time to talk. Terry is also a freelance travel writer so, with all the eloquent and detailed complaints about editors, it took a few hours for the food to disappear.