Miami is America's melting pot of a city. Like New York with its neighborhoods for Russians, Ukrainians, Rich People, Famous People, Puerto Ricans, artists (most, I hear, moved elsewhere when the Rich People took their lofts), and every other brand of exotic creature, Miami has room for many tongues and growing businesses. All those cultures melting away in the pot leave a residue of different dishes, ingredients, spices, and cuisines. Florida may once have been fed by fried fish, fried chicken, and roasted pig with some collard greens and a few oranges but, today, the pot runneth over.
Like New York, the melted pot is bubbling with once exotic foods and tastes, many from Latin America, to which Miami is America's gateway. Yes, I know there are those who think they should all go home, wherever home is. But home is often here. Many Cubans may speak Spanish or only Spanish but have been here since Fidel came out of the mountains of Oriente Province. In Tampa my mother used to complain of Cubans who had come after the Spanish-American War and not learned English by the 1950s. Some people are not proficient in languages, others adapt more quickly.
Miami has its Cuban base as well as Haitians speaking Creole (a sort of French with a twist of this and that), Japanese and Chinese, French and Peruvians, Salvadorans and Basques, Pakistanis, Indians... each brings the tastes of their cultures. The only cuisine that is primarily a bore is American unless you like fried chicken from plastic chickens, chain hamburgers from factories, and computer-scheduled drive-throughs or Chuck E. Cheese, whatever it may be (I saw one but there were too many tots slobbering to get in for me to look in).
My relationship to restaurants here is eclectic although it tends toward the nearby (I am relegated to public transport in a city of Maseratis and Porsche SUVs), the Chinese which are my favorites, and the affordable while visiting my country which has become astoundingly expensive. Therefore, this episode in Travels With Howard has a few places for those who are in or coming to the sunshine if they can get out from under the 200 inches of some odd, white stuff of which I have nearly forgotten the lovely feel.
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