3 locations
Miami Beach, FL
La Provence - 1 star
1627 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL
Front Porch Cafe - 1 star
1418 Ocean Dr
Miami Beach, FL
I was lying on my beach chair, not ten feet from a woman talking loudly on her cell phone. She was talking about an article in the New York Post about a "device" that you could plug into a cell phone to retrieve its deleted text messages (no big surprise, since in any reusable memory information is not actually overwritten when you mark it for deletion). But she emphasized that "I never text you, and you never text me," so they were safe. Then they talked about this and that and getting together before saying "I love you" (in the way you say it to your lover, not your mother). Pause. Then her kids and her husband walked up from the water and sat down with her.
It wasn't just that she announced to me, the unknown stranger, that she was having an affair. It was that she did it while worrying about someone reading her undeleted text messages and finding out she was having an affair. But we're here to talk about food, not other people's affairs.
Pizza Rustica has made a reputation for itself as the go-to place for late-night casual eating while pausing between trendy clubs in South Beach. What was I doing clubbing in South Beach, you may ask? Actually, I was getting three take-out pizzas to eat with my family and my sister's family in our hotel suites, which is much easier than taking three girls ages 1, 2, and 4 out to a restaurant. But whatever the setting, the pizza was delicious. In the storefront they sell those rectangular slices with a too-thick, spongy crust - described locally as "Tuscan style" or "Roman style" and called "Sicilian" in New England where I live, although I saw nothing of the sort in Tuscany or in Rome - but the take-out pizzas are round with a nice thin crust. We got a margherita, a rustica, and an arugula, all of which were good both for dinner and the next morning for breakfast and lunch. They might have trouble in New York or Berkeley, but for Miami they do just fine.
Although South Beach has some very good restaurants, in my mind it's like Las Vegas - the good restaurants are more expensive than they should be, and there are plenty of expensive but mediocre ones as well. But all in all we had a reasonable eating time. Besides Pizza Rustica, we had breakfast at the Front Porch Cafe on the same block as our hotel, where you can look out at the park and the sand dune that shields the beach beyond, and where I had a perfectly good breakfast burrito with home fries. The last day we had lunch at La Provence, on an unpromising stretch of Collins Ave. My tomato-mozzarella-basil sandwich was under-heated and devoid of character, but the apricot and raspberry tarts were a decent facsimile of the French variety, and their "rustique baguette" was surprisingly good, with a hearty crust yet soft and fluffy inside.
My trips to South Beach itself nicely illustrate the three ages of my working life. I first came in September 2000 for Ariba's user group conference, right at the peak of our bubble (when my unvested options were worth over $3 million on paper), and spent the entire time working - on what, I can barely remember, although I know there was PowerPoint involved. I don't have any memory of being outside, although I must have been, because I stayed in the Loews Hotel and the conference was in the convention center. I think I may have looked out and seen the beach from a distance, but I'm not sure.
My second visit was in December 2004 with my wife, my sister, her husband, and their one-year-old daughter. We went to the beach, ate at nice restaurants, visited Little Havana, looked for manatees, and generally had a nice time.
This time, of course, we had our own daughter, which meant that our days were a combination of the beach, the playground, the pool, the other playground, and the other other playground, we spent the entire time within half a mile of our hotel, and take-out pizza was as good as the food got. (At the playgrounds, by the way, we English-speaking Americans were a distinct minority, trailing the Russians, who were everywhere, the Spanish-speaking Americans, and probably the French as well. That's what happens when your currency is worthless but you have nice beaches.) But this time was by far my favorite trip. Holding my daughter in my arms as we bobbed in the ocean, or seeing her bounce up and down with excitement as we approached the playground, I wished I could just stay there forever.
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