LL COOL J J (Ladies Love Cool Jesse Jackson)

Hawai'i Slide....

Somehow the 'Twin Peaks'-style weirdness works. Dressed in full costume as a trucker-hat-wearing, guitar-carrying General George Armstrong Custer (“but this time he wins”), Jesse Jackson, the singer-songwriter, sets up for his regular Tuesday night gig at Amendment XXI. At 10PM, there is no one in the place, it's quiet. It seems like nothing's going to happen here. But the place gradually fills, and by 11PM it is packed. There are visitors from New York, local dance and theater heroes, celebrity bar owners, and some Colombian girls who arrived early to try the new inexpensive menu.




Special Guest Hilary from New York




Octavio Campos, Chorographer, Dancer,

Creator of 'Bugchasers"





Music You Can Dance To...







Sound-Stylings of Jesse Jackson




Buffalo Brown Makes It Official...

Churchill's owner Dave Daniels, with

performer Yvonne, and artist Andrea Preston






Amendment XII owner Perrone, in a photo

style I like to call, 'blogger blurry'.




Lost & Found Saloon owner KB, chills with

the one and only 'ZERO', Natasha Tsakos...






Cigarette Break...


JJ is in very good form tonight, his Mick Taylor 'Can't You Hear Me Knockin'-style guitar noodling seems to get better every show, as does his cover-song picking. Tonight they include a bluesy, Basement Tapes-like version of Bob Dylan's Outlaw Blues, from 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, as much a tribute to Dylan and The Band, as to the White Stripes' stripped-down live version; and a solo encore of Paul Simon's somber American Tune, from 1973, which was achingly-rendered, and perhaps even brought a tear to the eye of more than one slightly-sodden audience-member (well, me).
There were a lot of pretty girls, cigarette-smoking, care-free dancing, old friends, and a general damn-good feeling. There was a vibe player. The sound was great, and the Reverend, as I like to call him, took advantage of the crowd's buoyant mood, and soared.
AMENDMENT XXI
190 NE 46th St
Miami

Pure Hondure....Meche's is The One...

Jaiba-Crab Soup....A Sunday Special




Hangover Cure Pork Chop Takeout

While riding on NW 2nd Ave two months ago, where I shop at the cheapo produce market near 34th St., I spied an interestingly-named restaurant. Meche's sounded so much like Michy's, that I was instantly intrigued. Let's face it, I got lucky. Even though I had been thinking of touting NW 2nd Ave as Miami's New/Old Restaurant Row for some time now, I had never been inside this cozy joint, which you enter through a blue screen door.

Well, over a month ago, I posted about this great Honduran restaurant I had discovered. I failed to give the name and address, because I had written a piece for publication, that examined how two very different restaurants feed their customers. 'A Tail of Two Eateries' is here...

http://miamisunpost.com/032008bites.htm and I thank my readers for their patience. I think the food at Meche's is some of the best authentic homemade grub in the city, and the atmosphere is old Latin Miami, in the historic Wynwood neighborhood, located at 3104 NW 2nd Ave. This part of the neighborhood has definitely NOT been gentrified, and it still retains its small-town 'charms', for better or worse. Please read the full article, and grab a hard copy, if you can. There's a great photo of Meche's Mondongo that accompanies the text, as well as one of Michy's delicious Colossal Shrimp. The beautiful thing about Miami is that there is plenty of room for both...

Full Pot of Beans, Bubbling On the Stove,
with a homemade tortilla grilling (above)


I have eaten some good food. Haute cuisine prepared by some of the world's finest, and most cutting-edge chefs. Foie Gras popcorn and 36-hour short rib; scallops, picked from the bottom of the sea by a Portuguese diver named Jõao, and of course geoduck tartare. But earthy, authentic food, which can come from anywhere, with recipes handed down from the indigenous, to the conquerers, and on and on to the great-great-grandchildren of the inter-marriage of both, can have such a family history, that the ingredients, and the final product, are unique to a place, yet universally recognizable, and satisfying. I was lucky enough to experience this at a Honduran restaurant, in a place that I will soon christen 'Miami's Hidden Restaurant Row'. Not NE 79th St., or Biscayne Boulevard on the 'Upper East Side' (I know it's tired, but I'm tired of fighting it), but an old neighborhood that's never left us for a more gentrified, yuppified, and generic future. Where the lingua franca is good, hearty, inexpensive food, a meal that will cost under $10, and will satisfy a very large man or woman's appetite (I'm speaking about the appetite, not the man or woman-no letters, please), or anyone's craving for honest fucking food. I think you know what I mean. I'm not talking about some Miami simulacrum of Cuban, or Spanish, etc., etc., or another, endlessly tedious take on Italian or 'Mediterranean ' (geez, isn't anyone as tired of this stuff as I am? We got it, you can cook a damn noodle). I'm talking about the uncompromising cooking of a mother/chef, a person who remembers and can recreate those home-cooked meals in a restaurant setting, which is so much harder than it looks, and rarely succeeds in its true dimensions. Well, I have found that place. The Touchstone. The Motherlode. And here are the pictures. Baleados, 10” across, dough homemade, browned on the grill, crisp and smoky, like an Indian chapati (the world is a small place, oh my brothers), filled with eggs, queso blanco, and sweet, crumbled chorizo; or carne asada (grilled steak, carnalitos) and beans, queso blanco, and crema (sour cream). The über-taco? Heresy? Well then, hello Satan, because I'm a convert. And the Sopa De Frijoles? Contains more chicharron de cerdo (pig skin, to be exact) than is to be believed-and it is pure skin, not crisped but SOAKED in beautifully rich broth. A slurping shock to the system....Each piece bringing another shake of the head, and another dive into the Full Quart, damnit, of soup. And then there's the Jaiba....Have a great weekend, I'll see you on the nickel. Till then, I must be on my way....Part Two next week: the mystery is revealed....



Yes, they're that big. Ten Full Inches, homes.


Pig Skin Makes It All Better, Baby

From (Kobe) Tongue to Tail...

Crispy Skin...


Juicy. Tongue-y.





Cooking Show...



Kitsune Soba (Hot) with Deep-Fried Tofu...

Grapefruit on a silver juicer with liquor...



(Further New York Stories...)
The “Chicken Limited' section of the Soba Totto menu is so named because they are sometimes out of the 'soft knee bone', the 'soft bone', which is completely different, the neck, the 'chicken oyster', the 'tail', or the heart. Or is it just 'limited' to those adventurous types who prefer the beak to the breast? The heart was in, had some of that, it was soft and spongy, as Morgan Freeman might say- like a Twinkie, like a Twinkie. The 'regular' Chicken Skewers part of the menu (Yakitori Chicken) also contains some gems-the quotidian wing, which is flattened and made to look and taste like a delicacy, not a bar snack; the gizzard, whose usual combination of grisly and fibrous is made to seem a virtue; and the Kawa, or skin, which IS, in fact, made to taste exactly like a bar snack, and pairs nicely with the grapefruit and Shouju cocktails. Okay-they fill your glass with the clear rice liquor, which I'm guessing is about 25% alcohol, and they bring you a half-a-grapefruit, and a little juicer. You juice the grapefruit, and slide the juice into the booze. Lovely. The skewers are $2.50-$3, we ordered two of several for three of us.


This is an elegant setting, adoring service, and a great show watching the chefs cook behind a partial wall of glass in a thick cloud of smoke (get to know them now, they'll probably all be dead from cancer in ten years-just kidding). The highlight for me, other than the Dango, which are “steamed rice dumplings with chicken meatballs inside”, had to be the Kobe Beef Tongue (Gyutan). Now of course I love tongue, in all of its different preparations, but this was an uncured version, that had the gaminess of great beef, and the taste and texture of fucking tongue. I don't know how else to describe it. The skewers were $8 each, and I'm glad we just got two, because my dining companions and I started exchanging bad looks when we finished them, and probably could have ordered them all night. But we went on to the Soba, hot and cold, and on to another Grapefruit Nama. The check for three of us, very full and slightly buzzed, was $145 before tip. I am amazed. Simply amazed.





Soba Totto


211 E. 43rd St


New York, NY


212-557-8200

Little Creatures Crawling Weirdness...

I had this 'creepy' dish on a recent trip to New York. It looks very, very strange. In fact, it moves. But it is not what it seems. Unless you know your Japanese food very well. The menu simply describes it as Aspara, or asparagus. And like all great foods of the world, it comes on a stick. This was part of an incredible meal I had at Soba Totto, in midtown Manhattan.

[Strangely (or not, from my brief experience in NYC), the cabbie had trouble finding the restaurant located at the rather ordinary address of 211 E. 43rd St. Another guy didn't know where St. Mark's place was. But at least you can watch TV in the back of the cab-they even have the mobile map so you can yell out when your driver has missed the turn. "I said Avenue A, dammit!"]

But I digress. I had not just better (which is certainly expected), but cheaper, 'fine dining' meals in New York than I have ever had in Miami, with very few exceptions. The cheaper part is really what irritates me. I also had some better cheap meals, that were also pretty cheap. But I know there is hope for the future-it's crawling here as fast as it can. To be continued.

(Oh, I forgot to mention-this dish was $2.50. Midtown Manhattan. After this, I've put up with the last bit of bullshit whining about Miami rents from anyone-and that includes (especially) myself.)