best thing i ate last week: pasta "vongole" at Cobaya Seagrape

A bit behind schedule here, as it's already Friday, but better late than never. Last Tuesday we held our 56th Cobaya dinner, this time with chefs Jason Schaan and Tony Velazquez at Michelle Bernstein's Seagrape in the Thompson Hotel on Miami Beach. A full update will be coming shortly, but here let me just talk about my favorite dish of the night: their pasta vongole. This was no garden variety linguine and clam sauce. Here was hand rolled garganelli nestled among a couple different kinds of clams (manila clams and venus clams), batons of salsify and roasted mushrooms, a tangle of sea beans, with a generous knob of silky, oceanic uni butter mounted on top as it was served. It was a great mix of surf and earth, and the best thing I ate last week.

gastroDobo - 10.10.15 with Chefs Roel Alcudia and Jeremiah Bullfrog

In lieu of the "Best Thing I Ate Last Week" – because I didn't really eat anything all that great last week – let me take a moment to pitch something I look forward to eating. Chef Roel Alcudia, until very recently chef de cuisine at The Cypress Room, is teaming up with Jeremiah Bullfrog of the gastroPod, to do a pop-up dinner in Wynwood on Saturday October 10. Roel will be getting back to his roots with some Filipino style dishes – a preview menu hits on lots of classics: balut, lumpia, kinilaw, chicken adobo and more (hey guys, where's the sisig?).

Service will be a la carte style and you can ensure your spot by booking here (your $25 deposit will go towards your tab).

best thing i ate last week: grilled carrots with aged gouda and buckwheat at Eating House

Somehow, I had let a year go by since my last visit to Eating House, Giorgio Rapicavoli's pop-up gone permanent on the northern edge of Coral Gables. That was dumb of me. This past weekend I grabbed a solo spot at the bar after both wife and daughter had abandoned me for the evening, and sampled as much as I could of the current menu. Some staples remain: the tomatoes with coconut ice and Vietnamese flavors, the chicken and "foi-ffles," the over-the-top pasta carbonara. But everything else around the edges is new – and very good.

Vegetable-focused dishes in particular are a strong suit, and of these, my favorite was a plate of grilled carrots, blanketed in soft curls of a powerfully rich five-year aged gouda cheese (it gets crystals like a good aged parmigiano-reggiano), dappled with crunchy buckwheat kernels, all resting atop a pillow of a creamy carrot-top pesto. I especially liked that the carrots were not annihilated, but maintained a not-quite-raw but still firm core – so you get both clean, vegetal snap and dark, sweet roasty caramel flavors. It was the best thing I ate last week.

Runners-up: the blistered shishito peppers showered with cured egg yolk and dry olive at Eating House; the flaky malawach bread (a Yemenite specialty) served with spicy hariff, grated tomatoes, feta cheese and hard boiled egg for brunch at 27 Restaurant (especially good when accompanied by a Miso Honey Cold Brew).