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Archive for July, 2009
Good Medicine
Double Disc Trouble A pain in the neck. For Ken Levine, that’s no mere figure of speech. Levine knows all about neck pain. His painful odyssey began in 2004, when he was only 46. Levine moved to Sarasota from St. Petersburg in 1974 after accepting the position of service manager at Sarasota Chrysler—a job he [...]
Read More >>What I’m Drinking
Just in time for peak gin and tonic season comes New Amsterdam straight gin, a new American premium spirit that has knocked our socks off—or would, if we wore socks in the summer. New Amsterdam, of course, is what New York originally was called, and this strikingly smooth gin relies heavily on Manhattan’s sophistication for [...]
Read More >>In Season
I fondly recall New England summers, when we gathered at the farm stand to go out in the field and pick our own vegetables. As we approached the cornfi elds, the air was filled with the aroma of sweet corn. While the summer corn crop from the North will soon dominate our local grocers, Florida [...]
Read More >>Good Deal
The Place: El Greco Mediterranean Café, 1592 Main St., Sarasota; open Monday-Saturday for lunch and dinner, Sunday for dinner; (941) 365-2234. The Fare: Greek and Mediterranean favorites plus pizza. The Drill: A facelift and name change have brightened up this downtown stalwart considerably, but the best news is that there now are sidewalk tables under [...]
Read More >>Food & Wine
At Aqua Restaurant on Blackburn Point Road in Osprey, it’s all about the beautifully conceived and superbly executed dishes ferried to table from chef Matthew Passalacqua’s kitchen by a well-schooled staff of pros. A seat by the west or north windows in the third-floor dining room yields nice views of a marina and Sarasota Bay [...]
Read More >>The Par Side
Anyone who criticizes a golf course is like a person invited to a house for dinner who, on leaving, tells the host that the food was lousy. —Gary Player Thankfully (who wants to risk the wrath of Th e Man in Black?), I found little to criticize about Misty Creek Country Club. This was not [...]
Read More >>One Great Room
With expansive indoor and outdoor living spaces and its Mizner-inspired architecture, the Noora model at Country Club East in Lakewood Ranch is a perfect blend of old and new Florida, says builder John Cannon, president of John Cannon Homes. Winner of Best Overall in the 2009 Parade of Homes, the home garnered accolades for its [...]
Read More >>Designing Mind
Sarasota’s Michael Carlson of Carlson Studio Architecture, a pioneer in the environmental design movement in Florida, went national big-time this spring as designer of the HGTV Green Home 2009, built in the community of Tradition in Port St. Lucie. How did you get the HGTV Green Home 2009 project?We’ve been doing green building since 2000, [...]
Read More >>Luxury Homefront
GREAT VALUE Buyers in the market for end-of-the-season deals need look no further than Alinari at Rosemary Place, the high-rise condominium complex on North Tamiami Trail across from the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall and symphony center. Its developers are offering six-figure reductions on remaining condominium units. Among the discounts: $662,000 for a 2,474-square-foot, two-story [...]
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