Conveniently located in the heart of the Miami Beach strip on Ocean Drive, News Cafe is popular with tourists from Berlin and Idaho alike. This café/newsstand/bookstore (around since 1988) once deserved its reputation of dishing out tasty but relatively cheap lunch plates while giving you the special privilege of watching the Miami low-riders thumping out deep bass rhythms as they cruise past the beach. But, unfortunately, scarred from my first and intense case of food poisoning that hit me late one night and the definite decline in food quality, this South Beach icon, which still manages to entice hordes of tourists each day, is no longer highly recommendable.
The offerings here range from the usual appetizer of fried calamari (still one of their redeeming qualities) and sandwich and pizza meals to Middle Eastern entrées. Although I used to have mouthwatering cravings for their grilled chicken with tomato and onion, with their still-delicious mashed potatoes as a side, they quickly disappeared, as this dish is the suspect of my etched-in-memory food poisoning incident. And because I’m such a risk-taking adventurer (ha!), I have even indulged in this dish since then. Food poisoning aside, this chicken dish no longer gave the same full-belly satisfaction as before—it just wasn’t good enough to leave less than half of it on my plate, even for someone like me, who gobbles up food faster than a food-deprived, cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking New York model.
Even after hearing complaint after complaint from me, you may still decide to dine here purely for the atmosphere, as it is still better than most of the empty restaurants lining Ocean Drive. Keep in mind that even though there is a chance you could enjoy the rare warm, instead of hot, relaxing mid-day meal looking toward the equally as warm ocean, there is also the chance that a leather-clad, beer-bellied metalhead could spend a half-hour steps from your table, revving his motorcycle in a poor attempt to show off his machismos.
Instead, I recommend heading to their slightly better sister restaurant, The Van Dyke Cafe, at 846 Lincoln Road (305/534-3600). My love for crab cakes was solidified with their unbeatable (this isn’t Northeast quality, but still) crab cake appetizer, and upstairs is a lounge with a cooly refined, old-world atmosphere, where you expect everyone to be drinking a Manhattan. Or, skip eating altogether and just head for Wet Willies, an almost equally as famous bar across the street from the News Cafe. Who needs food when two of their shock-inducing, and aptly named, Call-A-Cabs will set you in tipsy mode for the rest of the afternoon. Just avoid this place after dusk, when the FSU frat boys come out to play.