Indulging your Inner Glutton in North Palm Beach

Northern Palm Beach County lacks the expensive shopping of Worth Avenue, the five star hotels like The Breakers, and the restaurants with their own bouncers. It’s close enough to Palm Beach that there is still fine food to be eaten, but it’s far enough away that its beaches and natural recreation areas are cleaner, prettier, and less crowded.

The principal communities, Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter, Juno Beach, and Singer Island, are studded with winter condominium communities for snowbirds and retirees. If you want to shop, there’s no need to dress up and drive to Palm Beach. There’s a very upscale mall called The Gardens of the Palm Beaches on PGA Boulevard, which is a good place to walk when it’s too hot to get your exercise outdoors.

However, this journal is focused squarely on eating out: where to go, how to eat well, and how not to pay too much for it.

* Note: Lanna Thai and Jettys are in Jupiter: still in North PB County but not in Palm Beach Gardens like the rest of the journal entries. It’s a short drive (15-20mn) and well worth it, especially if combined with a visit to Juno Beach.

Quick Tips:

There are two perils to avoid on the road to culinary paradise. One is spending every dime in your wallet, and the other is gaining five pounds in the course of a single weekend. Both can be avoided!

MoneyYou can eat at Mickey D’s if you want to save, but you’ll miss out on some great restaurants. On my trip, we aimed for that delicate balance between great food and reasonable prices. Don’t get sucked into eating out at every meal, either. Splurge on one meal per day and don’t overdo the other ones.

Pounds (not the English kind!)This is a travel website, not a fitness center - but I can still suggest a few tips that helped me keep from turning into Shamu.

First: Listen to your mother. The Early Bird Special is a good idea! By eating dinner early, you have plenty of time to digest before bed. A post-prandial walk gets the digestion going.

Second: get some exercise. If your hotel has a pool or a fitness center, use it!

Third: take a trip to the West Palm Beach Power Plant to visit the manatees. One look at their cute, blubbery bodies will put you off food for a week.

Best Way To Get Around:

Palm Beach International Airport is serviced by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, United, and JetBlue. Fares get high as the winter progresses but when I went in November, we were able to get round trip tickets from JFK for only each. Unheard of!

Once you arrive, you’ll need a car to get around, unless you’re visiting relatives who are picking you up. When on the roads, be sensitive to the fact that many of your fellow drivers are elderly, and may be slow to react or tentative in making turns and accelerating from a full stop.

Security at PBI airport seems like an afterthought, but with luck that’ll change now that airport security is about to be federally controlled.

Café Chardonnay has something of a reputation for innovative cuisine and fine wines, so it’s a shock to find it in a drab shopping mall anchored by a Publix supermarket. Between the location and the uninspired name, you might overlook Café Chardonnay if you were walking by – but don’t! It’s a real find: an affordable, artfully prepared lunch in an area known for its outrageous prices.

Palm Beach’s "ladies who lunch" do so outside, seated at high bistro-style tables and picking at plates piled high with fresh salads. Conspicuous gold jewelry and facelifts abound. They’ve done their best with the outdoor seating. Attractive leafy plants surround it, but there’s no mistaking the fact that you’re sitting by a parking lot. Inside is altogether different. Families celebrating birthdays and large office luncheons vie for larger tables, while May-December couples lay claim to window tables and cozy corners. Muted pastel walls and wooden slat blinds over huge windows evoke the Florida Keys. Multilevel seating adds interest to the room, as do the bright colors of bold paintings hanging on the walls. Soft generic jazz over the speakers is as restrained as the patrons are ebullient, so it’s a little noisy, despite an acoustic ceiling. But the staff is courteous, referring to any woman over 50 as "Madame" and scurrying to fold napkins if you happen to leave the table.

For $6-10, there are a variety of salads on the menu that are as filling as they are delicious. Spinach salad with smoked salmon, crispy fried onions, lemon and capers drew raves, as did a market salad with grilled marinated chicken, roasted red peppers, and shredded fontinella cheese with a homemade balsamic dressing. No two sandwiches are even vaguely alike, from the smoked mozzarella and roasted portobello mushroom quesadilla to a tasty chicken salad tossed with apples and walnuts, served on a croissant with a side of fruit/vegetable slaw. Pasta dishes, while slightly more expensive, are cooked just right and make effective use of taste combinations like grilled vegetables paired with soft goat cheese, which blends with the sauce and melts into a bed of fluffy angel hair noodles. Desserts are simply to die for. They’re different every day: one time we had light, melt-in-the mouth key lime pie, another time it was chocolate pecan/cashew pie with an airy homemade whipped cream and vanilla bean ice cream. Pineapple upside down cake was simply exploding off the plate with the rich tropical flavors of pineapple, caramel, and cinnamon ice cream. The wine list won a Wine Spectator award in 1999 but for lunch, the iced tea is both cheaper and easier to digest!

If lunch just won’t do, consider the Napa, Sonoma, and Santa Barbara "Touring" dinner - three courses for $35, or $55 if paired with an appropriate wine for each dish. It’s a bargain compared to the regular dinner menu, which will set you back between $22-$35 per entrée.

Talk about off the beaten path. Lanna Thai is an oasis in the desert of the Palm Beach suburbs; a beacon of spicy-scented temptation in the drab environs of the Bluffs Square strip mall. I’d never have found it were it not for word-of-mouth.

If you’re tired of high prices and 20 minute waits for a table, Lanna Thai is the place for you. They’re never too crowded or noisy, and while it is possible to pay $20 for a dinner entrée, most are priced at $8.95. The restaurant seemed to beckon from the parking lot, with soft light pouring from the windows. As we entered, our eyes immediately fell upon a display of a half watermelon, intricately carved with a spray of rosettes. The carver, a member of the kitchen staff, had made subtle use of the white rind and red flesh to create a multicolored masterpiece. This attention to detail was continued throughout the restaurant, with tasteful decorations (authentic but not gaudy), cloth napkins, and sprigs of purple orchids at every table (fresh, not silk!)

Dinner covered all the typical Thai selections and more, with an above-average assortment of sauces and specialties. Our proximity to the Florida coast was evident in the fish selections, which included Lanna Grouper, Snapper Wonder, and Salmon Salmon (trust me, their entrée naming skills are not representative of their cooking skills!)

My dinner companions were a major disappointment to me. Apparently not realizing the vital role they played as food critic’s assistants, they all ordered the same thing - light, flaky spring rolls and Pad Thai. Pad Thai, if you’re not familiar with Thai food, is the hamburger of Thai cuisine: every restaurant serves it, everyone likes it, and it’s hard not to make one that doesn’t taste good. I can report that all three of them enjoyed it immensely. Me, I had the Panang Puck - mixed vegetables in a panang sauce, a favorite of mine that combines ground peanuts, curry, coconut milk, and peppers into a thoroughly delicious and fattening bonanza of flavor. I asked them to add soft tofu for some protein.

The staff, a young-ish couple with several enthusiastic assistants, was charming. Our waiter was the owner. He was effortlessly discreet and attentive while still making it clear that he was the boss, so we not only felt well cared for, but also that we were the most important people in the restaurant! The wine list was short and unremarkable, but Lanna Thai isn’t the sort of place you go for fine wine, so we didn’t mind. Despite or perhaps because of its shopping mall setting, I consider Lanna Thai a diamond in the rough.

The River House‘s formula is pretty common in Palm Beach: big restaurant on the Intracoastal, pretty views, glass walls, expensive entrees. But the service, the salad bar, and the room are a cut above that particular mold, making the River House a pretty good place to go and celebrate. You’ll be fawned over by staff who seem to have no responsibility other than making sure your water and wine glasses are full, for example. But the River House is not cheap – dinner entrées start at $19.95 and quickly soar up to $39.95 for lobster tails. Vegetarians and those on a budget should note that you can order the salad bar as an entrée for only $12.95, which includes a baked potato the size of my head. This was no ordinary salad bar – greens were gourmet, toppings were varied, and at the side of the salad bar you could cut your own slices of several different kinds of cheese.

Try to get a table upstairs, where the view is better. Don’t despair if you can’t see outside, because the interior is quite lovely. This is a good place to bring elderly relatives who are hard of hearing – care has been taken to control noise levels with draped fabrics on the walls and carpeted floors. However, there is no elevator to the second floor, so if you are visiting elderly parents or grandparents whose mobility is limited, make sure you reserve a table on the first floor.

Entrees got mixed reviews from my dining companions. The snapper special in a macadamia crust was neither crusty nor crispy. "Soggy", actually, was the word used. The thick-cut char-broiled Iowa pork chops were tough and difficult to cut and chew, although admittedly they were ordered medium well. I found nothing on the menu for vegetarians except the salad bar, but our charming waiter suggested a vegetable plate, and it turned out to be enough for about three meals. The chef had fallen victim to the common misconception that vegetarians like to eat plain steamed vegetables with nothing on them, but what delicious plain steamed vegetables they were! And in a rare nod to the oft-overlooked fact that vegetarians need protein too, the chef had thrown in a huge quantity of chick peas – cooked, not canned. A little olive oil and pepper made the meal most palatable. I couldn’t even manage more than a few bites of my football-sized baked potato.

Luckily these minor missteps with the entrees ensured that we had room for dessert. Although their cappuccino machine was broken, they more than made up for it with a sublime Florida Key Lime Pie with a raspberry coulis, and an apple pie a la mode with cinnamon ice cream. Both plates were scraped clean.

The owners of Café Chardonnay recently opened this clever little self-described bistro in the brand new PGA Common. Combining casual, inexpensive dining with a gourmet food market and high end deli/take-out counter, there is something for everyone at Off the Vine. It’s a great place to go for an informal brunch or a mid-afternoon snack. In fact, it’s a great place to go get a free snack. Each time I stopped in, there were at least 3 different treats to sample, from the new Beaujolais to a locally made key lime rum cake. No purchase necessary, although I suppose they’ll cut back on the free samples once they get some regulars.

The food market flows from room to connected room, until you are standing in the dining area. The transition is made all the more smooth by the canny use of items from the gift shop as decorations in the dining room, like colorful china, bottles of herbed vinegar, and free samples. Outdoor seating is also available on a pleasant patio. The staff is young and less experienced than at Café Chardonnay, which is reflected in the lower prices. It was actually kind of funny, watching a clutzy waitress trip over chairs and a pair of control-freak teenaged hostesses in capri pants ordering customers around like lipsticked drill sergeants bossing their new recruits.

Brunch is a real treat at Off the Vine. Portions are large, so you can spend as little as $5-6 for homemade granola and coffee, or up to $9 for a smoked salmon, leek, and cream cheese omelette with plenty of trimmings. We ordered the granola and a bowl of oatmeal. I asked the waiter if they had soymilk. He went to check and came back with a tiny pitcher of soymilk for my coffee - but I had wanted it for my oatmeal. He apologized, though there was really no need! His well-meaning bumbling continued when our entrees arrived – two bowls of granola and no oatmeal. He took back the extra granola and brought out oatmeal, but forgot to bring milk, and it took a few minutes to flag him down again to correct the problem.

To my left, 20-somethings chowed on huge portions of fluffy scrambled eggs with a beautiful fruit garnish and massive squares of French toast. On my right, two 40-something local ladies drooled over their Eggs Benedicts with smoked salmon. Coffee was rich and robust. If you enjoyed it enough, you can get another one to go at the coffee bar! Despite the initial mix-up over the entrees, we had a sunny, leisurely, very pleasant brunch.

Lunch is also a casual, inexpensive affair. Comfort food staples get innovative twists, like a grilled cheese sandwich with four cheeses and sliced tomato on sourdough bread, with homemade coleslaw. Salads similar to Café Chardonnay but not quite as classy are equally filling and ever so slightly less expensive. Takeout at the deli counter would make for a great picnic lunch.

On the banks of the Intracoastal, where powerboats frolic and lighthouses send lightbeams spinning into the night, sits a glass-walled restaurant called Jetty’s with a wide, wooden deck overlooking the water. There, seafood and steaks are served to the well-tanned and well-heeled residents of Palm Beach and their visiting offspring. Jetty’s isn’t cheap, but if you’re willing to eat ridiculously early (if you’re visiting grandparents, you’re probably already used to Early Bird Specials,) entrees are only $12.95 each. Here’s how it works.

The restaurant opens for dinner at 5pm. By then, there is already a line out the door of folks eager to save some money. As long as you are seated by 6pm, dinner entrees are $12.95. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but the maitre d’s at Jetty’s are all too happy to take "tips" to secure you a waterside table on the deck. If the "tipping" makes you uncomfortable, just be sure to arrive before 5 to ensure a table outdoors. The best waiters are assigned to the deck and ours, Jeff, was what made the dinner a success. He was part of the fun without being part of the party – quick with a joke or comment, but knew when to leave us alone. He also seemed a bit older than the waiters serving the inside tables, and it made a difference. Reassurances like "Don’t worry if it starts raining, I’ll know it before you do and I’ll get you out of here" made us feel taken care of, and I thoroughly believe that Jeff would have appeared with a stack of umbrellas if the slightest drop of rain had disturbed our dinner. He was infinitely patient with the particular needs of the elderly, and didn’t blink an eye when the five of us split one dessert.

Oh – and the food was great, too! Jeff warned us to set aside a few orders of trout even if we weren’t ready to order yet, in case they sold out. It was so fresh we wondered if they were still swimming when Jeff brought us our calamari. Unfortunately Jeff’s glowing recommendation resulted in three orders of trout, so I can only comment on the snapper (a big hit) and the vegetable plate (tasty, lightly buttered and wonderfully fresh veggies with the requisite baked potato.) Vegetarians shouldn’t go there for the food - they don’t have so much as a pasta plate on the menu - but for me, the ambiance was worth the standard-issue veggies-and-potato meal.

Dessert was a tasty brownie a la mode, with five forks. It was good enough that we ordered a second piece. Jeff whisked them away and returned with five plates, each bearing a sliver of brownie and a dollop of ice cream and sauce. Now that’s what I call working for a tip. He was handsomely rewarded, thanks to the money we saved on our $12.95 entrees!