Pizza joints come and go, but I feel it’s my civic duty to inform you on the front end – especially when a great Neapolitan-style pie maker looks like it has plenty of staying power.
The restaurant in question is Capriccio, located in the Bi-Lo shopping center at U.S. 17 Bypass & 38th Ave. N. Owner Michael Macchia and his son, Michael Macchia, Jr., bring a New York-style flair to their pizza and pasta dishes that have already had our family back for seconds, thirds …
Myrtle Beach now boasts three Starbucks locations along Ocean Boulevard – all providing the high-quality “Starbucks Experience” you’d expect to find at any of their stores, but each offering its own little wrinkle that makes it a go-to java destination.
Now in its fifth year of operation and the first Starbucks to come to Myrtle Beach, the shop at Breakers Resort (Ocean Blvd. at 21st Ave. N.) boasts a central location to get your coffee or latte, then walk across the street for an early-morning stroll along the beach. Uptown, the store at Long Bay Resort (7200 N. Ocean Blvd.) offers easy beach access and features an outdoor patio in front, perfect for using the free wireless Internet connection while you soak up afternoon rays.
The latest addition comes a shade downtown, at Bay View Resort (504 N. Ocean Blvd.). Here, you can get your joe to go – or stick around, catch a seat at the high bar along the 5th Avenue North side, and enjoy the ocean view from the inside (pictured). Right now, this is the only Starbucks location along the entire Grand Strand that offers such a convenience.
And when you leave Ocean Boulevard, there are several other Grand Strand locations where you can get your Starbucks fix, including:
Jeremy Potterfield, executive chef for Webster’s Lowcountry Grill at Litchfield Beach & Golf Resort in Pawleys Island, is the featured culinary artist in the March edition of Links Magazine’s “Chefs of South Carolina.”
As Links Magazine explains, “Potterfield brings more than 20 years of food and beverage experience to Litchfield Beach & Golf Resort … He honed his skills in some of the Waccamaw Neck’s finest restaurants, and his cuisine embodies the Lowcountry, fusing the freshest local ingredients with flavors from around the world.”
Read on, and you’re rewarded with the recipe behind one of Potterfield’s signature dishes: oyster pie. The ingredients look like they’ll make you take a few extra minutes on the treadmill the next day, but hey – if you’re gonna get a true taste of Lowcountry cuisine, you may as well do it in style, right?
Let’s see how fast Kobayashi can scarf down one of these bad boys.
It’s called the “Super Sub” – 16 inches of deli-style decadence, including a generous combination of ham, provolone, capicola, salami and proscuittini; garnished with “the works” (lettuce, tomato, onion, oregano, oil & vinegar and salt & pepper); and loaded onto a crusty Italian semolina bread loaf. And for $8.99, you’ve got a meal for one to four people, depending on your or your friends’ appetite.
(Point of reference from yours truly, the 200-pound sandwich hound: I usually get it when I’m very hungry, and manage to get about two-thirds of the way through before wrapping up the remainder, storing it in the fridge and polishing that off in Round Two a few hours later).
The “Super Sub” is one of 18 monster offerings at Subs and Suds, located on Postal Way in Carolina Forest just down the road from the post office. For owners Dean and Robin Wooley, the inspiration was simple: opening Subs and Suds was a chance for the former New Jersey residents to bring a slice of their roots for their new Grand Strand customers to enjoy.
Grand Strand diners are lucky to have several outstanding Thai restaurants they can visit, and one of the best I’ve visited lately is Black Thai, which is owned by Nan Black.
The food of course is the best reason to visit, but the ambiance is another motivating factor. The furniture is casually upscale, but the welcoming warmth (the friendly waitress helps a lot in this regard) is cozy. The décor features bamboo, carved wood and gilt-crusted elephants.
Black Thai is downtown on Main Street, which is bad for Nan because traffic, especially pedestrian traffic, isn’t what it used to be in the good old Pavilion days. There isn’t a lot of parking available, but nonetheless at 6 p.m. on a Saturday night we were able to park right in front of the door.
The dishes we tried were delicious and plated with pizzazz. First we shared Thai Dumplings (Kanom Jeeb) which are soft wonton “purses” filled with ground chicken, pork and shrimp. They came with soy sauce, sweet Thai chili sauce and a sweet/spicy sauce for dipping.
Heirloom Recipes At The Heart of A Family Restaurant
By Becky Billingsley
Myrtle Beach is lucky the Toniolo family picked our area for the second location of their Italian restaurant called Stefano’s Cucina Rustica. They’ve owned the first location of the same name in Florence for 19 years.
The owners are Steve and Anna Toniolo, and their 23-year-old son, Steve, is the general manager of the new eatery, which is in Carolina Forest. Steve is a recent college grad with a business degree.
Stefano’s has a warm décor rich with colors of a Tuscan sunset: umber, sienna, misty green. Low metal ceiling fans and lights have a terra cotta hue, and arches that peek into the kitchen lend an old-world air. Classic Italian music plays, and it was the first time I heard “Volare” in Italian.
Myrtle Beach- Top Rated Golf Destination, Vacation Spot Or Both?
By Mike D'auria
In the winter of 1990 I was contemplating planning my first golf vacation. At that time I had been playing for about 13 years, approximately once a week, either with my golf club at Marine Dunes Golf Course in Brooklyn on Flatbush Avenue or at Dyker Beach Golf Course in Dyker Heights. The course was located in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and at the time it was the most played public course in the country.
I always wondered what it would be like to go on vacation for an entire week and be able to play golf every day if I wanted to. In conversation with my golf club comrades and reading my favorite golf magazines, Golf Digest being at the top of the list, it became clear to me that Myrtle Beach would be a great choice. I had one dilemma, my significant other was joining me on the trip and had never played golf before. So I offered her this option - Learn to play golf or wait for five or six hours, while I played, for my return. She was into sports, softball, baseball and football like myself, and athletic so she opted to learn to play. Her decision to learn posed my second dilemma, which was how to teach her to play in four or five weeks before we had to embark on our trip. A crash course with an instructor or should I take on the challenge?
All right, let’s see. Christmas is over, you’re back in the office already but the kids are home from school for another week. What do you do with them while you’re busy working to pay off their brand-new PlayStation 3 and Guitar Hero III?
Let ‘em wear themselves out in the Grand Strand area’s newest recreational Mecca.
SportsZone – the massive, 44,000-square-foot indoor recreation complex located at the SportsZone Center in Little River – offers its “School Zout” program that lets children ages 5-15 participate in a dizzying array of sports activities as you tend to your work schedule. Full-day rates (8 a.m. to 6 p.m.) start at $16 per child for SportsZone members and $22 for non-members, while half-day rates (1-6 p.m.) are also available at $11 and $16 per child. A light snack with sports drink is provided for all program participants, while an additional $5 KidzMeal option is available for full-day registrants (kids can also bring their own lunch with drink).
While they’re there, kids benefit from a combination of sports activities, hands-on teaching of sports-specific skills and an array of other activities that will offer your child a full day of exercise both physically and mentally. Check out some of these pictures to get a good idea of the resources that they’ll have at their disposal:
Had the ‘rents in for a recent visit from Long Island, and as usual I racked my feeble culinary brain for a waterfront dining option we hadn’t yet tried. It had been a long time since we’d been to the Marshwalk in Murrells Inlet, so after we invited my wife’s parents to join us we took her father’s advice and checked out Drunken Jack’s.
We took advantage of a chilly but sunny Thursday afternoon last week to go there for lunch, figuring it wouldn’t be too crowded and we could get a table with a nice waterfront view. We not only got a window-side table with the best panoramic possible of all the surrounding islands, but saw plenty of wildlife off in the distance (birds dive-bombing the inlet for their own meal) and right outside the Marshwalk dock (peacocks).
Beyond its overall reputation as a Murrells Inlet mainstay, the one thing I’d constantly heard folks rave about was Drunken Jack’s “world famous hushpuppies” with sweet honey butter. The appetizer certainly lived up to their billing, but we were more anxious to see how this place would measure up for a group of six with wide-ranging tastes and appetites. On that score, Drunken Jack’s didn’t disappoint.
