South Beach Grill: Boca Grande is Hell on Earth

South Beach Bar and Grille
777 Gulf Boulevard
(941) 964-0765
Boca Grande, Florida

Ah, Boca Grande. It's a little island about two hours or so north of Tampa, and it is absolutely beautiful, the kind of place that gets slapped on tourist brochures - or would, if the people who own property on the island weren't clever enough (or well-heeled enough) to keep it off the beaten track. My grandparent's owned a condo here when I was a little kid in Florida, and I went there yearly every year until I was about 11 or so.

They sold it when my aunt and my cousin's moved away from Florida, but family members still come back here - my mom has been coming here since she was a kid, as well. For my cousin's graduation, we came back once again. A home-coming of sorts. It's funny how me and my two cousins remembered almost every inch of even the drive - the mangrove stands, the little podunk towns you drive through, the massive, yellow Sunshine Skyway bridge, the tragically now-closed Dairy Queen with the barbeque sandwiches - and then crossing the tollbridge to get to the island.

No color manipulation needed. God, it's nice.

The island is all white sand and beautiful sunsets and one large lighthouse, and people riding golfcarts, except not many people, because they really do manage to keep the riff-raff out. We had rented a very large and lovely vacation home and a bunch of us arrived to hang out and eat tamales and wander around.

Not that I really appreciated it, this go-round - you see, I was flying to New Orleans the next day to see my boyfriend, who I had gotten back with over the Internet (sort of) over the course of a couple months, and now he was moving to Phnom Penh.

And we were pretty certain we were going to still like each other, but how could we be certain? It was terrifying. I believe I spent about half the day at Boca Grande hiding under a blanket on a couch, squinting to read my new Kindle, but not really reading, more just being trapped in a haze of existential, relationship-and-future-of-your-life based terror. The timing in other words was a bit off, but it's not your fault, Boca Grande.

(My boyfriend is moving to Phnom Penh in less then a month. I had nothing to worry about. But you never know that before.)

Awful place.

Oh yes, this is a food blog. I did eat one meal "out" on Boca Grande, which was at the South Beach Bar and Grille (with the obnoxious e). It's right on the beach and serves slightly fancified Florida beach shack fare. Think lots of grouper, fried seafood, pastrami sandwiches for the NY transplants, salads of various kinds, seafood chowder, hamburgers, and other seafood-themed stuff. It's expensive as hell, but food on Boca is expensive.

Curiously enough, despite the awesome location, the food is really, really good. (Just don't try parking there then hitting the beach, apparently, judging from Tripadvisor. Seriously. They don't like that.)

What is it with me and grouper? To me, it's like the madeline of the fish world, the protein that takes me back to childhood. My dad used to fry grouper at the beach all the time when I was a kid - some of my earliest food memories involve getting grouper sandwiches after preschool with my mom at this colorfully decorated restaurant in Tampa.

Whenever I'm in Florida, I eat prodigious quantities of the stuff. This was an excellent grouper sandwich, a good specimen of the genre: Plenty of fish, lots of mayo, lettuce and tomato, keep er' simple. I prefer my grouper sandwiches fried - doesn't obstruct the flavor profile - but some would beg to differ. Liked the coleslaw fine. I'm on a coleslaw kick lately. $15. Can be done reuben style. I almost went for it but decided that would either be perverse or awesome, and I didn't feel like wasting my one shot in 2011 for a grouper sandwich.

Must add that the fried grouper fingers were also very good, as determined by myself and my cousin. My mother was also very pleased with her seafood chowder, which was thick, Boston-ish, and absolutely terrible for you, as it should have been. We hung out for a bit and watched people on the beach. I worried about my boyfriend and worried about sun protection - oh god, what if I get a cold sore? - and worried about the universe and my job and probably individual atoms if I got right down to it.

I'm not very good at beaches.

Kaiko's Sushi: Back to Basics Japanese in Clearwater

Kaikos
2475 North McMullen Booth Road
Clearwater, FL 33759
(727) 791-6640

The sushi disease has infected Tampa, just as it has pretty much everywhere else, barring (perhaps) certain grasslands in Nebraska and the wilds of Upper Mongolia. There is a sushi restaurant on just about every corner, sushi at the grocery store, and sushi-making classes on offer at your nearest convenient library location. Most of this sushi is absolutely horrible. Thus, I'm happy to relate that Kaiko's Sushi in Clearwater is tasty, fresh, and suitable for human consumption. Back away from the Publix stuff. I mean it, you dirty little animal.

Kaiko's is what I'd call a traditional style sushi bar, Thank God. This means the rolls are

1. Small enough so that they can be fit in a standard-issue human mouth.

2. Not drenched in mayonnaise based sauce in wacky colors.

3. Put together with an eye towards fresh ingredients and the interplay of flavors, not with an eye toward "How much random shit can we stuff in this sushi roll for ten bucks? And how much sake do we have to sell to the pale-faces to get em' to eat it?"

All of these elements are Good. The menu is short and exists in the form of a piece of paper on which one marks off one's choices.



Sunonomo salad with seafood. Fresh and a good selection of fish - that's a plus here. Too much vinegar.



The Tampa roll. People in Tampa are nuts for fried grouper, totally nuts and thus this roll - fried grouper and onions, no more, no less. Too simple for me - grouper isn't exactly a hyperactively flavorful fish - but certain family members go nuts for it.



Ah, that's the stuff. I liked the 7-ingredient futomaki, which featured a whole bunch of crunchy vegetables, some preserved, and was very refreshing indeed. Also liked the simple unakyu with avocado and eel. The chopped conch special was all right, but not sure how I feel about the (thankfully not over the top) mayo mixture. Conch on its own is an interesting sort of flavor experience - not sure if that lily needs to be gilded. A very nice sashimi selection - these guys are sourcing and cutting their fish well. I can't stand sashimi that's been cut so thickly and so poorly that one needs a steak knife to get through it.


The two guys next to us were friendly in that older-guys hitting on you in a courtly fashion way to me and my cousin, and we shot the shit merrily throughout dinner. It's a convivial place, and the older guy manning the sushi bar is funny as hell, berating a regular who identified himself as "crazy, just crazy." (Not in my eyes: a lot of middle aged guys trying to seem wacky have this habit of identifying themselves as Crazy, as if I will leap back all astonished and horrified but at the same time aroused. I have (I think) looked into the Eye of Crazy on a couple occasions on my life and you sir, wacky as you may be, do not qualify as bona-fide crazy. That is darker and much more complex. Such things do not need to be discussed over austere and good sushi somewhere in the depths of Clearwater.

I have forgotten where I was going with this.

I recommend Kaiko for back-to-basics sushi in the Clearwater area.

Go Fish: St Helena

Go Fish
641 Main Street, St. Helena.
Lunch and dinner daily.
Reservations welcome.
707.963.0700.




Scallop Ceviche – $10
Hawaiian Poke – $12
Big Eye Tuna Burger - $15
Grilled Rock Cod Sandwich - $12

Go Fish is Cindy Pawlcyn’s latest restaurant – Cindy being the clever woman behind St. Helena’s deeply reputable Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen and Mustards restaurants. I admit I have not tried Mustards, but Cindy’s is just about my favorite restaurant in California. Her riff on Oysters Rockefeller – Oysters Pablo – is about the closest thing to an out of body culinary experience I’ve had in my short life. I could happily plow through pounds of the delicious, delicious roast duck that comes out of their wood burning oven. Let’s not even discuss the peppermint ice cream.

So Go Fish.

Go Fish is Cindy’s venture into the exciting and extensive world of seafood, with Ken Tominaga handling the sushi bar side of the venture. On the left side of the road as you enter Napa, the restaurant is roomy, airy, and quite attractive, with that crisp white table-clothes and tasteful yet quirky ambience I expect from the Napa region. We were quickly seated at lunchtime on the open patio, which is a lovely place to sit, dappled in shade from the trees. Ambience: score. But food?

The menu is large, diverse, and absolutely stupefying when first presented to you if you are of the “I want to try everything,” disposition like myself. A representative from pretty much every culture’s take on How To Cook A Dead Fish is here – from ceviche to sashimi to little-neck clams, and that’s just the raw stuff. How the hell do you choose?

Incoherently, in my case. The waitress hovered expectantly over me and I blurted. I wanted the scallop ceviche and the Hawaiian Poke. I subconsciously didn’t want them to cook anything. My mother had the grilled rock cod sandwich, and my dad picked the big-eye tuna burger, which is definitely an evocative name.

My ceviche came out first as it was technically an appetizer. The scallops were juicy, fresh, and delicious, helped along by the spicy broth and the pieces of onion, mango, and pepper diced up with the seafood. After I finished it, I found a few pieces of avocado at the bottom of the dish: a pleasant surprise.

Entrees came next. My poke was not what I’d expected: instead of the usual casual salad of tuna chunks, onion, and vinegar, it was a carefully molded mound of raw and high quality tuna, accompanied by various artistic squiggles of condiments: spicy mayo, seasoned salt, sliced avocado, an assortment of chopped red and yellow pepper.

It didn’t have much to do with poke, but it was certainly tasty, if ephemeral. The quality of the fish is one thing Cindy has aced: this was as fresh as can be.

The cod sandwich featured a very large slab of cod on buttered bread, served over crunchy coleslaw. The fish was peppery and skillfully cooked, but it wasn’t transcendent – and that’s kinda what I’ve come to expect from Cindy’s restaurants. The potato chips on the side, however, were made in house and seductively delicious. The sandwich came with homemade sweet pickles and carrots, which were crisp and excellent.

The tuna burger was certainly satisfying, with the fish presented in such a way that it tasted eerily like a bloody beef burger instead of something from the sea. This was a good thing – I’d happily order this next time I visited. The French-fries were also tasty, with the skins left on and plenty of sea-salt.

Service was prompt and good, if a little bit awkward: our waitress wavered confusingly between casual and efficient. Pick one! Still, any complaints about slow or rude service have been addressed: food came out quickly and correctly, and everyone was perfectly polite.

So is Go Fish worth the money? Can it stand up to Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen?

Eh, I guess. The food is tasty, but it’s not as delicious or inventive as the stuff served at the Backstreet Kitchen – and why the hell don’t they do Oysters Pablo here too? The menu is long and quite frankly too diverse - I don't want to or need to spend an hour and a half considering what continent I want my fish to come from. Still, the fish may be expensive, but it is fresh, tasty, and excellently sourced, which is hard to find in the Napa area – and this is one of the only games in town if you’re looking for good sushi.

Visit Go Fish if you just want a solid seafood meal with upscale pretensions, but don’t expect the Ultimate Seafood Experience – they’ve got a ways to go.