Lisa Ling on why Asian food in Los Angeles matters.
A black cod goes from the Pacific to Shibumi.
Keeping cool when the kitchen gets hot.
One restaurant’s many pandemic pivots.
Two different takes on Indian food.
Every day’s a hustle at Woon.
From Asian farms to Los Angeles restaurants.
Why in L.A. they’re not boring.
Three restaurants breaking boundaries.
Mastering values at Yang’s Kitchen.
Two chefs go behind the blade.
Omakase and ramen join the neighborhood.
The coronation of soju and makgeolli.
Three women open the bar they want to walk into.
Indonesian community through cuisine.
On working with Mom and Dad at Anajak Thai.
Los Angeles before sushi.
Inside the staff ritual of eating together.
Three Vietnamese restaurants expand the city’s palate.
One chef has some thoughts.
Waking up Los Angeles to Burmese cuisine.
The couple behind Shiku goes with the flow.
An ode to those who keep them going.
Michelle Bernstein embraces the competition.
One restaurant’s epic journey from debt to success.
The couple behind Boia De and Walrus Rodeo play by their own rules.
Vermouth gets a bar of its own.
On the business of BBQ in Miami.
Recipes for navigating an uncertain economy.
The secret to never getting old in a town obsessed with what’s new.
How two pioneers of omakase introduced Miami to a new way of dining out.
Chasing a childhood memory one arepa at a time.
Why Miami’s mainstays of Middle Eastern food aren’t phased by the influx of glossy newcomers.
David Foulquier on his shapeshifting ambitions.
The Black chefs behind a vegan movement in Miami.
Two Cuban sandwich masters talk shop.
A new generation’s take on the classic Jewish deli.
Miami’s mavericks of sustainable growing and dining.
An intimate glimpse inside restaurants after the last customer leaves.
Creating a culture where employees stick around.
A new kind of bottle service takes root in Miami.
The art of staying put in a changing city.
The city’s ventanitas created a culture all their own.
Philadelphia Magazine’s food critic on the irrepressible attitude that is the key ingredient of the city’s restaurants.
How one restaurant gave birth to many.
The cheesesteak may be the global mascot of Philly. But a contingent of pioneering chefs and restaurateurs have made the city a hub of vegetarian innovation.
The city’s Eritrean-Ethiopian restaurants serve up more—way more—than delicious food.
How Juan Carlos Aparicio baked his way to running a restaurant (that isn’t a bakery).
How Alex Tewfik went from being a food editor in Philly to owning one of the best restaurants in town.
Two restaurants that share a belief in how cooking can be force for change.
How Chutatip Suntaranon channeled her upbringing in Thailand—and life spent flying around the world—into one of Philly’s most singular restaurants.
Stopping by the warehouses in Kensington where artisan upstarts are breathing new life into the city’s food scene.
The Ongoing Evolution of Philly’s Classic Sandwiches.
Chloé Grigri, Amanda Shulman, and Ellen Yin on upending the rules of the game.
Mike Solomonov takes stock of his journey.
When a customer becomes a friend.
Ange Branca was forced to close her beloved restaurant in 2020. That was just the beginning.
How do you build a restaurant in a space that was never meant for a restaurant? In Philly, a city of Revolutionary Warera buildings and colonial row houses and ancient warehouses, it can be a bit like playing Tetris with Benjamin Franklin.
Three Philly couples get frank and intimate in sharing their recipes for romance.
Inside the world of homespun pop-ups and unexpected collaborations that have made Philly’s dining scene like nowhere else.
The classics are easy enough to master by anyone with fine liquor and a recipe.
The city has long been a vibrant hub of Vietnamese food. Today, a new generation is striking a balance all their own—between creativity and tradition, innovation and memory.
An ode to the unsung heroes of restaurant kitchens from a comedy writer who couldn’t take the heat.
A cell phone has been invented that allows you to send one text message to your younger self. What do you write?
How the city’s walk-up coffee windows, or ventanitas, began as a business innovation and became a cultural institution.
One of the core memories Rudy Alvarez has of Miami in 1980—his first week in the United States after arriving from Cuba’s rural Pinar del Rio region—is a short stroll taken from his brother’s single-family home in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood to what many consider to be a monument to the city’s Cuban community. The monument in question, located on Calle Ocho, was not a statue or museum, but Versailles Restaurant and its famed walk-up coffee window better known as a ventanita.
The ventanita is a distinctly Miami invention, created in the late 1960s by Versailles’ founder, Felipe Valls Sr., as a way to merge Cuba’s coffee culture, which back then was built around outdoor stands, with the brave new world of air-conditioned interiors that was transforming America. While the first ventanita was lost to a fire in 1977, by then the deceptively simple innovation had already become a staple of Cuban businesses across the city. More than a simple delivery system for strong Cuban coffee, empanadas, and pastries, the ventanitas emerged as crucial nodes of connection for recent emigres, places to gather and gossip and celebrate a vital element of their new life—the reason they came to America in the first place.
“Si, la ventanita,” says Alvarez, who works as a janitor in a Corral Way office building, a smile stretching across his 74-year-old face. “In the café that day I had my first taste of freedom because everyone around me was talking about politics openly and without fear of any consequences.”
The ventanita is a distinctly Miami invention.
Today there are over 1,000 ventanitas peppered throughout Miami, sliding windows built into restaurants that blur the line between multiple worlds—indoor and outdoor, Cuba and America—each with its distinct attitude, personality, and avid regulars. Collectively, they are an around-the-clock operation, a central artery to the city in the way the bodega is in New York and a testament to how thoroughly Cubans have revolutionized the way the city consumes coffee—and communes with one another. If you live in Miami, the ventanita is part of your morning routine, a mainstay of lunch, and often the last stop after a boozy evening. You have run into old friends here. You have made new ones. It is the place you are drawn to, as if magnetized, for a regular dose of Miami’s own kind of vitamin C: cafecito, croquettas, conversation.
To say that Miami has changed since the first tiny windows slid open in the 1960s is an understatement. In just the past decade alone, Miami’s downtown business district has been transformed by gleaming stalagmites of glass and metal, as if eager to compete with Manhattan’s skyline, with many of the towering condominiums now home to the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who fled south during the pandemic. According to the National Association of Realtors, over 330,000 people moved to Florida between 2020 and 2021, many to Miami. In their wake it can occasionally feel like the city has become a place where only the flashiest of businesses can thrive.
And yet the ventanitas remain and continue to proliferate, sly Davids to the Goliath of enormous change, icons of history and heritage in a town that is notoriously quick to shed its past. From the beginning they were an ingenious piece of business, creating a dual revenue stream for restaurants, with the indoor rooms serving more expensive fare while the cash line outside offers quicker, cheaper options—a model that has proven ironclad, thriving and seducing newcomers without having to change. La Carreta, another staple, now has nine locations across Miami-Dade County, with three of those including a signature take-out window. Among the pastel flash of South Beach, an epicenter of Black Cards and Bentleys, the window at Las Olas continues to do brisk business. What for an emigre like Rudy Alvarez were once reminders of why he left Cuba for America have today become a refuge for the city as a whole.
“People are always talking about change in Miami—rents getting higher, new people and business coming in all the time,” says Alvarez. “But the friendships you make over cafecito at the ventanitas? That’s forever.”
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