This article originally appeared in “The Mashup,” my weekly newspaper column for Florida Weekly.
I think it’s about time David Lanschner gives me my turn with the orange juicer. In my very first entrepreneurial effort, my high school friend and I decided to enter the world of street food vending.
We lived in New York City before the island of Manhattan was made over into a Disney version of itself; becoming a food vendor didn’t require anything more than running down to Chambers street and buying a license. So I took my meager savings earned as a messenger after school, David ponied up a similar sum, and we headed down to the Bowery, then populated exclusively by homeless people and restaurant supply stores, to purchase what we needed to start a business selling fresh-squeezed orange juice and croissants.
We came back to my apartment with a low metal cart onto which we could mount a wire-frame basket to hold oranges, a cutting board that could also be mounted on the cart that would double as our juicer platform and a hand-operated orange juicer.
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 I'm a dead sucker for architecture that looks like a hat. (click to enlarge) Renaissance Hotels & Resorts may have dropped upwards of $200 million on the renovation of the über-cool (because you can pretend you’re in the Rat Pack) Eden Roc hotel in Miami Beach, but as far as I’m concerned the best thing they did was hire Paula DaSilva to be executive chef at 1500°, their new farm-to-table restaurant (that features plenty of steak).
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like the rooms at the Eden Roc weren’t worth their effort: mine was seriously beautiful, comfortable and quiet, plus I could shower while looking out my 10th floor balcony doors at the ocean: as close to an outdoor shower experience as you’re likely to get outside of a singles resort in Jamaica, and one sure to make you feel like king of the world, ma.
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I recently received an email from a reader who would be heading to Boston, and was looking for a good burger. As I’m not a Boston resident, I had to reach out to a meat-loving friend in Beantown for a good recommendation. And as the emailer didn’t provide a return address to send an answer to, it gets its own post. Because that’s the kind of guy I am.
So the answer, at least according to my friend (who shall remain nameless until we’re able to confirm his opinion – don’t want anyone hunting him down for a lousy tip) is Abe & Louie’s, a steakhouse on Boylston St. In his words:
“…it’s a steak house but the burger is KILLER!!!”
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 Did someone tell them that they should make it look like the Hawaiian Punch mascot, or is it just a happy coincidence? Presentation is a bit absurd. “How did you know that was frozen?”
My 13-year-old daughter’s friend was asking about the tuna dish I’d just tried at Yard House, and that the waiter had just confirmed was, in fact, made with frozen tuna.
“Because I’m a badass,” I told her.
O.K., maybe I’m not that much of a badass, but my kids and wife were totally impressed, even if they insisted they weren’t and acted completely indifferent to the entire thing. I knew they were thinking I was cool though.
Anyway, the specific dish I’d tried was my daughter’s spicy tuna roll. Which, at Yard House, is a cake, not a roll, and it’s a hearty sized cake at that. Seared rare spicy ahi tuna, avocado, cucumber, edamame (which I could have done without, even if I enjoy it in other contexts) and a wasabi-soy sauce ’round the plate.
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Despite my pleas, my good friend, fellow meat-lover, and Lavola bass player Matt Hanser refused to join me at Five Guys today (something about getting ready for his trip to SoCal tomorrow – he prides himself on never being late, but this was ridiculous) for my follow-up, no cheese, jalapeño-laden, Cajun-seasoned fries accompanied burger eating excursion.
 Bossy's got it right: these are two great tastes that taste great together. I wrote about my impressions of the Palm Beach Gardens Five Guys location just under a week ago, but since I thought the cheese was disgusting and neglected to try the Cajun fries, I knew I needed to make a follow up visit.
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 So I just, finally, hit a Five Guys burger joint. I’ve been meaning to for a while, but put it off because I’m lazy.
Recently though, I heard someone say people were claiming it was the East Coast version of In-N-Out Burger, which is heady praise, no matter how accurate it is, so when my kids were requesting some FOOD (such pains in the ass), I found myself in the neighborhood and we grabbed lunch.
Here’s the upshot: Five Guys does a lot of things right. They also do at least one thing horribly wrong. And they aren’t the East Coast In-N-Out, if for no other reason than the lack of a secret menu, and the fact that food costs almost twice as much. My specific thoughts:
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 Four orders. Still affordable. Incredible. Last week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to dinner at Morton’s in West Palm Beach to try some new additions to their menu. A rarity, this changing of the Morton’s menu, and they’d added a few carefully selected and extremely tasty items. In the entrée category, I was loving the terrific prime bone-in filet mignon which, although wet aged (as opposed to dry aged – I asked) was as tender as, well, something really, really tender.
But as great as that piece of meat was (and I recommend it without hesitation), the star of the night for me was the plate of three crabcake BLTs on tiny slider buns with a mustard-mayonaise sauce. Each crab cake was made with a ton of lump crab meat and no filler, the lettuce and tomato were fresh and delicious, and the bacon did what bacon usually does: made me say “mmmm…bacon.”
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I’m about to take a risk. I don’t particularly want to look like I’m jumping on the “everything’s better with bacon” bandwagon (which is getting a bit played out, particularly for those of us that have had bacon-lined arteries since sometime in the 80s), but I wouldn’t be The Meatist (and I’d be failing to recognize the donut obsessions of some very good friends) if I didn’t show you these beautiful things:
 How's that for a presentation that honors the food? They appeared on my table after dinner at The Office in Delray Beach (well, appeared after I offered the waiter his choice of three of my toes if he’d just bring them to me as fast as possible – he declined the toes, but the dessert arrived quickly any way) and they’re actually better than they look. Which is tough to believe considering that what you’re looking at, what you’re drooling over, is a pair of beautiful fresh donuts (yes, I prefer the Dunkin’ spelling to Kripsy Kreme’s).
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I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating – one of the great things about being The Meatist is the continuous (well, almost continuous) stream of meat pics and meat topics that people text and email me.
 For example, today I got some meat porn (the good kind of porn, the kind with burgers) from Swanky’s barbecue, whom I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now. Swanky’s Barbecue, for those of you who don’t get out enough, is providing a huge public service in South Florida by showing up at various music venues and offering delicious and reasonably priced protein options for those in need after they’ve poured too many PBR tall boys down their hipster throats.
I originally found these guys outside of Propaganda in Lake Worth, right after they sold the last pulled pork sandwich to Justin, the sound man at Prop. Yes, I was bummed; I think they offered me some sort of non-meat alternative which was completely out of the question, and I was forced to head to Havana on Dixie for a Media Noche. It was many weeks before I was finally in the same place at the same time as the Swanky boys, but it finally happened at a Lavola show at Respectable Street Cafe in West Palm Beach.
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 A proper pastrami sandwich. My friends down here have been known to give me minor amounts of crap for being a Yankee and missing the joys of growing up with southern food. And I’ve freely admitted to having found chicken fried steak way too late in life to suffer from childhood obesity (us Northerners had to use Oreos), and still don’t know what the hell a fried pie is.
But, at the risk of being ostracized by the few friends I actually have in South Florida, I’ll tell you right now I’ll take my New York City culinary upbringing any day. Fried everything (including Twinkies) can’t hold a candle to fresh falafel from Mamoun’s (yeah, technically I guess that’s fried, too), Indian food on sixth street, pizza from Ray’s (the one on 11th and Sixth, not the 358 copies), sushi at Tomoe, panelle specials from Ferdinando’s in Brooklyn, steak from Peter Luger’s, dirty water hot dogs from one of the skanky carts on the street (and Nathan’s in Coney Island for those late night runs), fresh hummus from one of the joints on Atlantic Avenue, Korean barbecue in midtown, dim sum in Chinatown, and Vietnamese from the joint south of Canal St. that I can’t remember the name of.
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