Codik

Pirolo's pairs dijonaise with house roasted turkey. And it's great.

At Pirolo's Panino pop-up at Macchialina, you can pick from sandwiches that are conventional or playful. Order the Jive Turkey sandwich. Get house-roasted turkey breast, tomato, and Dijonaise thronged by thick bread, which is toasted and smothered in butter. Although the menu listed lettuce as an ingredient, I won't mutter any complaints.

Because this lunch cost $12 -- and it's a fabulous turkey sandwich.

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Emily Codik

Chopped veggie salad at Mercato ($9).

The employee at Dena Marino's Mercato was busy. He played on his iPhone, filled out his W-4 form, and stared diligently into open space. He did not want to be interrupted. So I left the Design District breakfast and lunch spot with a few unanswered questions.

See also:
- Dena Marino Launches Mercato: Casual Breakfast and Lunch in the Design District

Could you refill the napkin-holder next time? It was empty. Would you apologize to those customers? You know, the infuriated couple who paid for a red velvet cupcake that you completely forgot to pack? (Even though it was one of the two things they had ordered.) When they returned to the quiet café and demanded their cupcake, their irritated jabbering really put a damper on my meal.

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William David Lawrence via Lagniappe Facebook

Lagniappe's terrace

Lagniappe is a Big Easy-style beer-and-wine bar/restaurant/live music venue. Although it may sound like a lot of things, Lagniappe is also resoundingly uncomplicated.

At the Midtown bar, which opened late last year, there are no waiters. There are no menus, no silverware, no china, and no cloth napkins. Lagniappe, rather, has refrigerators stocked with craft beers. By the bar's entrance, there are racks holding wine -- with over a hundred vintages for sale. There's no corkage fee. Lagniappe has six or seven choices by the glass. Menu items (all four of 'em) are scribbled across a chalkboard wall.

But the lack of pretense can't hide one inescapable fact: Lagniappe is Miami's best beer-and-wine spot. It boasts cheese plates, composed of sliced crusty bread, marinated olives, and fig jam. The best part? It's only $5.

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All photos by Emily Codik

Pizzarium in downtown: pizza al taglio, Roman-style

In Rome, in the Prati neighborhood located a short walk from the Vatican, there is a pizza al taglio (pizza by the slice) joint named Pizzarium. The restaurant is tiny, there are no chairs, and there is a ridiculously long line at lunchtime. There are craft beers and a choice of fritti -- all things fried. Quadrilateral pies are prebaked and topped with a variety of fresh vegetables and cheeses. Slices are cut with scissors. Some are scattered with whole basil leaves; others are smothered in untraditional sauces such as hummus and potato paste. They are all excellent pies.

Pizzarium is owned by Gabriele Bonci, one of Rome's most famed pizza-makers. His slow-rise doughs and ingredient-centered pies have garnered quite the following in Italy and beyond.

See also:
- Lucali in SoBe: Miami's Best Pizza
- Pizzarium Brings the Roman Art of Pizza to Downtown

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Flickr CC

Lucali in SoBe: One pizza, seven possible toppings, starting at $26.

In a city jammed with outposts of overhyped New York restaurants, Lucali in South Beach is an exception. At the pizzeria on Bay Road, just a few steps from the Pubbelly mecca, pizza-makers wearing white T-shirts roll out doughs with empty wine bottles, cut porcini mushrooms with a mandolin slicer, and scoop dollops of fresh ricotta from a tiny tub.

Outside, there's no sign. Inside, there's no menu. The spot serves calzones and a single pie, dubbed "plain pie." There are seven choices for toppings, including shallots, onions, peperoni, mushrooms, and extra basil. There's a four-topping maximum per pie. When it comes to drinks, there's a choice of only red or white wine, as well as on-tap Brooklyn beers.

At Lucali, 20-inch pizzas are made by candlelight, and the entire restaurant glows. Maybe it's the glim. Or maybe it's because Lucali serves the best pizza in town.

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"Backed Into the Corner" is the provocative name of a new research report that shows almost nine out of ten Miami restaurant workers do not receive any paid sick days and that nearly 50 percent of those employees have gone to work sick. An even larger majority -- 63.6 percent -- said they had no access to health care.

The report was released at Tap Tap restaurant this week by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Miami (ROC-Miami) and the Miami-Dade Coalition for Healthy Families and Workplaces. The latter is a coalition of those advocating legislation that would mandate paid sick days for Miami-Dade workers. Thousands of extensive interviews were conducted for the study, the main gist of which is that restaurant employees routinely work while ill because they get paid so little that they can't afford to lose the money.

The median hourly wage of a Miami-Dade restaurant worker is $9.02.

And how about this appetizing finding: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed 426 restaurants selected at random in nine states and discovered that 12 percent of food workers had worked while sick with vomiting or diarrhea."

This is a major issue locally, because the restaurant industry is now the third-largest private sector in the Miami-Dade region. It employs 72,700 workers. And that's not even including Michael Bloise, who's between jobs.

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It is said that the average diner peruses a menu for a mere 109 seconds. Before we get on to improving menus, I'd suggest diners improve their chances of getting a good meal by spending more time than that. But it is what it is, at least according to a feature story called Menu as Marketing Tool in the latest edition of Mise en Place, the alumni magazine of The Culinary Institute of America.
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"Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible."
-- Pope Benedict XVI, speaking when still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Six local chefs weighed in yesterday on California's upcoming ban (July 1) on force-feeding birds and on selling the resultant enlarged livers. In 2006, I interviewed various local chefs on the topic for a feature story called "Foie Wars". A few foie gras farms have since adopted more "humane" ways of stuffing the birds, but most places still do it the old-fashioned way. Before I respond to each of the chefs who opined on the subject, let's just make sure we all know what this old-fashioned way implies.

During the last three to four weeks of a 16-week life, each day the force-fed bird gets grabbed by its neck and a metal tube nearly a foot long is inserted down its throat. This process takes place three times daily, until a ten-pound bird will consume 400 to 500 grams of feed -- the equivalent of a 175-pound person having 44 pounds of pasta pushed into him each day. The livers of each bird will swell six to ten times in size and weight, at which point the enlarged organ distends and displaces space normally reserved for the air sac, which causes the bird to gasp for air when breathing. They become so obese their legs get pushed out laterally and they can barely walk. Then again, they are restrained in shoebox-size cages so small they can't turn around or stretch their wings, so not being able to stroll is perhaps the least of their problems.

Now keep in mind: This isn't a process used to help feed billions of hungry children around the world with protein-rich liver. It isn't an unfortunate necessity required to provide working people with meat to eat. The millions of birds that suffer the lives described above do so for one reason only: so their livers can serve as an expensive foie gras delicacy for the privileged few who can pay for it. We're not talking about rich people only, but just the sort who can afford to dine at Red the Steakhouse, Meat Market, the Dutch, and so forth.

Andrew Carmellini (the Dutch), Sean Brasel (Meat Market), Peter Vauthy (Red the Steakhouse), Jamie DeRosa (Tudor House), Michael Schwartz (Michael's Genuine Food & Drink), and Kenny Gilbert (the upcoming Swine Southern Table & Bar) expressed dismay at California's foie gras ban. Each chef's argument more or less boils down to the same essence: Why not instead go after _________ ? (fill in the blank: chicken industry, shark finners, etc).

Sheesh -- what a weak defense. Here's what I mean:
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If it ain't broke, tinker with it.

That's apparently the thinking at the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau in regards to its highly successful Miami Spice program. An email was sent out over the weekend by the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau that states, "Restaurants will be showcased in two groups: luxury and fine dining. Fine dining have to adhere to a lower price point which is $19 (lunch) and $33 (dinner)." A subsequent call to GMCVB brought the pricing for the luxury category: $23 for lunch, $39 for dinner.

There's no word yet as to which restaurants will fall into which categories; how that shakes out ought to be very interesting.

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​I cannot honestly claim any huge disappointment over BGR The Burger Joint's decision not to serve the special St. Patrick's Day Reuben Burger ($9.99) "loaded with Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and succulent, thinly sliced corned beef" that it was supposed to be proffering during the month of March. Nor did any tears of sorrow roll down my cheek upon being informed that the Girl Scout Thin Mint Shake ($4.99), a "Celtic-green" nod to the same holiday, was likewise unavailable.More »