Despite what I told you when the it opened, which was based on what a manager told me at the time, TajineXpress is not a full service restaurant but rather, as the name would imply, more of a quick-service operation. The Xpress sort of gave that away, but the gentleman I spoke to at the time, back in April, insisted that it merely conveyed a cooking technique the restaurant was using that allowed them to prepare tajine dishes faster than the usual two hours.

That said, the staff at TajineXpress was so friendly and accommodating. And the food, delivered to the table on basket trays and served on earthenware plates, all made it feel like a full dining experience.

Blame Wolfgang Puck.

It was Puck who in the eighties changed the notion of what a pizza could be, getting creative and moving beyond the basic trinity toppings – sausage, pepperoni and mushroom – and heavy sauce and cheese.

Perhaps you can’t draw a straight line from Spago to Perla’s Pizza but a connection could definitely be argued. How else would you explain a pizza with bananas on it?

Perla’s is the project of Mike Collantes of Taglish, the Filipino-American food stall inside the Lotte Market on West Colonial Drive. Perla’s, in the Mills 50 district in an almost-shared space with the Thirsty Topher, does just pizzas (and one salad), offering a small collection of curated pies, most of them more mundane than the one called It’s Bananas.

That isn’t exactly the phrase I uttered when I first heard that Perla’s would offer a pizza with bananas. 

It seems that whenever I visit Miami I tend to look for the newer and trendier restaurants. Too often I’m just not impressed and find that the reality isn’t anywhere near the hype.

But on my recent road trip south I decided to take a different tack and chose a small, unassuming French restaurant in Coconut Grove called Le Bouchon du Grove. It was rustic and cramped and it was wonderful.

My companion and I were given a table up front, covered but facing the sidewalk, and sipped a complimentary glass of Champagne we’d been offered and nibbled on French bread with real butter while we waited for our dinners to arrive.