Saffron

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Saffron of West Palm Beach recently opened a location in Jupiter with the same menu. The choices include meat and seafood from the tandoori oven, spicy curries and fluffy Indian breads.

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It took us a while to find this new restaurant, which has an unusual location inside a pyramid-shaped office building just west of the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. Inside, Saffron is cozy and opulent, with dark ceilings, wood paneling and silk pillows. Read the full story

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Gigantic portions of everything Italian — pizza, hot subs, pasta and baked dishes.

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Luna is an institution in downtown Stuart, with its yellow façade, sidewalk tables and takeout window. Read the full story

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Benihana prepares steak, chicken, seafood and vegetables teppanyaki style. Entrees are served with white or fried rice, Benihana salad, shrimp appetizer and homemade dipping sauces.

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Benihana chefs slice, dice and juggle knives as they prepare your food in front of you on a hibachi table. Bring a group of at least five or six people if you don’t want to share a table with another party. Read the full story

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Tonino’s opened this spring with a menu that includes New York-style pizza, pasta and baked dishes like manicotti and parmigiana. There are also nearly 20 different kinds of sub sandwiches, as well as combo specials that offer several entrees for $14.95.

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Next to the Perky Pelican just west of the bridge to Jupiter Island, Tonino’s looks like the kind of unfussy pizza place you’d find on the Jersey Shore. The inside is small but well-decorated, with paintings of scenes from Italy. Read the full story

Guest bartender Mike Ditusa (left), dressed as James Joyce, listens to readings of excerpts from James Joyce's Ulysses at Brogues Irish Pub.

The entire book takes place in one day – June 16, 1904 – as protagonist Leopold Bloom wanders the streets of Dublin, making up words and speaking in sentence fragments.

“It’s not summer beach reading,” said Alyx Kellington, who nevertheless made a valiant effort to re-read it in preparation for the city of Lake Worth’s first Bloomsday.

The celebration of Joyce and his work, takes place in Dublin, N.Y., and other cities around the world every June 16. And on Tuesday night, Brogues Irish Pub in Lake Worth hosted its first version of the event.

Actors read from the book, and a band played Irish music. A guest bartender dressed as Joyce in a fedora, wire-rimmed spectacles and rumpled black suit.

The event was put on by Blue Planet Writers’ Room, a local nonprofit organization founded a year ago by Cora Bresciano and Susan Gay Hyatt. Blue Planet will offer free tutoring and writing workshops for students from 6 to 18, and hopes to find a permanent home in downtown Lake Worth.

Bresciano, who has a graduate degree in creative writing, read the entire book over a summer in 2004, and saw her first Bloomsday celebration at a bookstore in Coral Gables.

Hyatt has made her own attempts to finish Ulysses, but can’t claim to remember every word.

“I wouldn’t say I have read it very carefully,” Hyatt said. “It is a thousand pages long.”

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Northern and Southern Italian, with a nice wine list and homemade pasta specials. Many dishes are topped with fresh herbs.

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Tucked into an Old Florida home just south of the Roosevelt Bridge, Casa Bella is one of the most charming places to have dinner in Martin County. Lace curtains, candlelight and white tablecloths add romance, and a skylight allows tropical plants to grow inside. For the most privacy, try to get one of three tables tucked into a cozy room at the back of the restaurant. 

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Dresa has a wide variety of Asian food — Japanese, Korean, Thai and Chinese. But the specialty here is Filipino, with a menu offering dozens of authentic Filipino meals and desserts.
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The high black ceiling and colorful lighting make Dresa look like an Asian nightclub. One side of the room has a long bar, and the other has tables with black lacquer chairs and high-backed upholstered booths. A private tatami room offers Japanese-style seating.
OUR FAVORITE FOOD/PRICE
We enjoyed the Escabeche ($15.95), a Filipino meal with lightly battered fish served over rice in a sweet and sour sauce. Our favorite sushi was the Treasure Coast Roll ($11.95), with tempura shrimp, avocado, cream cheese and spicy mayonnaise in a soy paper wrap.
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As SunFest closes down every night, a team of volunteers checks to see if there is any food in need of rescue.

Anything that the vendors would otherwise throw out – black beans and rice, pineapple chicken or corn on the cob – is packed onto a refrigerated truck for delivery to the needy.

The Community Food Alliance is working with SunFest organizers for the first time to get more food to the growing number of people relying on soup kitchens and food pantries. So far, they have gotten more than 100 meals a night that the fair's dozens of food vendors would have otherwise dumped.

"It was good food, and it was going to go to waste," said volunteer Dan Shorter, who is collecting the food as SunFest shuts down with his wife Jacquie and six other volunteers.

The Palm Beach County Community Food Alliance already collects food from Publix and local farms. Now, leaders hope to expand to restaurants, hotels and festivals like SunFest. The program started three weeks ago, pairing hotels with halfway houses and programs that help the homeless.

The food at SunFest isn't the only thing that is being saved from the landfill. Fair food like funnel cakes and fried pickles require plenty of cooking oil, and for the first time this year, SunFest is sending the used oil to a South Florida company to be recycled.

Organizers say they don't yet know whether it will save gallons or barrels of oil, but it's one way of helping the festival get a little greener.

Any business that would like to help with the food rescue program can contact the food alliance at 375-6600. Those looking for a place to get a meal can call 211.

Kids who don’t know how to play a musical instrument but still want to rock can go on stage this weekend at SunFest’s improved youth park.

The Paul Green School of Rock Music will teach kids a few chords on the electric guitar, hand them a microphone and then let them perform. The new attraction was already drawing a small crowd a few minutes after it opened this evening, as kid ages 7 to 17 played the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

Brayden Upton, 2, gets his hair sprayed blue to look like a rock star Friday afternoon at Sunfest on Flager Drive. The Hair Cuttery was creating cool rock star hair-dos free for kids near the location where the School of Rock Music was performing. (Brandon Kruse/The Post)

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She pasted the band’s sticker on her bedroom door when she was a senior at Wellington High, and went to some of their shows. But she didn’t meet anyone in the band until last year.

By then a local kindergarten teacher, McLennand, 30, happened to get tickets for SunFest 2008 from the mother of one of her students.

She was in the mosh pit at last year’s Mighty Mighty Bosstones show when Doran Hoffman, 29, overheard her talking about local bands. By coincidence, he was in The Worms.

He asked what a woman wearing Versace glasses was doing in a mosh pit.

“I said, ‘Hey, can you look out for me in the pit? Because it can get kind of nasty down there,’” McLennand said. They started talking about local music, mutual interests, how happy they were to be there.

It wasn’t something either of them would normally do – “I’m pretty shy and she is very shy,” Hoffman said.

But “I was so happy, so excited to see the Bosstones,” McLennand said.

But they left without exchanging numbers. Later, she e-mailed Hoffman at The Worms’ MySpace page.

Hoffman went to Santaluces High but had since moved to Gulf Shores (Ala.), where he works as a commercial fisherman. A month after SunFest, he invited her out for a visit.

“There was just an instant connection,” McLennand said. A trip planned for one week turned into two, and on their last night on the beach, Hoffman proposed.

They married Feb. 28 in New Orleans, with a meal in one of Emeril’s restaurants, and a parade down Decatur Street with an 8-piece brass band. They live together in Gulf Shores, where McLennand is substituting while waiting for a full-time teaching job.

They had everything in common, and even friends who had known each other for years, she said. But until SunFest, she said, “our lives just kind of ran parallel. We never met.”