It was by design today we frequented a local mom-and-pop restaurant for a celebratory luncheon. The allure was its world famous Cuban sandwich. Weeks ago after having first heard of the joint we curiously ventured on site late one blustery and yawning January afternoon for a personal assessment of the establishment.  We are I confess uncommonly evaluative of the exoteric list of beaneries. They now constitute our gastronomic vernacular. Take for example the Hideout Restaurant at 47 Shoreland Drive. It has been a favourite of ours since its discovery many years ago, an oasis of refreshment en route from Daytona Beach Shores or Longboat Key to Key West. The truth is, within our limited sphere restaurants have become akin to apparel; that is, only certain ones any longer fit. And specifically within this paradigm the limitation provokes that which is more casual than formal or fussy.

Notwithstanding these social and sartorial conventions, it is an inductive leap to infer that they prescribe diminished quality. Indeed the opposite is true. Nurtured as we have been by our own preferences and the unwitting but corresponding stimulation of my erstwhile physician (who combines his inimitable vagabond credentials with superior culinary talent), the ideology of table fare has distilled purely to matters of taste sans fluff. Whether one transports this belief, as my erstwhile physician is wont to do, to a rustic marketplace on the shores of a Greek Island, or whether one captures as we have done the attraction of a small business on the Florida Keys, the imperatives of quality and taste are alone the deciding features.