01.03.2021 Views

wcw MARCH 2021 HR

In this month's issue you'll find our WCW this month is Jenny Alday Townsend, CEO and founder of Music Compound. In addition to our arts and events calendars, we have events that you can enjoy online such as Choral Artists. Itching to travel? Perhaps later this summer if things go well. For now, check out all the new hotels in Florida in our Travel Feature this month. If you're venturing out closer to home, check out our article on Manatee Heritage Days and learn about the County's history. Last but not least, find a recipe to mark St. Patrick's Day: Irish soda bread.

In this month's issue you'll find our WCW this month is Jenny Alday Townsend, CEO and founder of Music Compound. In addition to our arts and events calendars, we have events that you can enjoy online such as Choral Artists. Itching to travel? Perhaps later this summer if things go well. For now, check out all the new hotels in Florida in our Travel Feature this month. If you're venturing out closer to home, check out our article on Manatee Heritage Days and learn about the County's history. Last but not least, find a recipe to mark St. Patrick's Day: Irish soda bread.

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Restaurant News,<br />

Openings and<br />

Specials<br />

• The City Pier Grill and Bait Shop was<br />

founded in late 2020 after winning the bidding<br />

process to operate on the Anna Maria<br />

City Pier. They offer fresh food, ice cream,<br />

beer and wine as well as bait and tackle.<br />

Originally built in 1911, and rebuilt in<br />

2020 due to damages sustained by Hurricane<br />

Irma in September of 2017, the new<br />

pier has been realized after several years of<br />

planning, fundraising and construction. The<br />

City Pier is the number one tourism destination<br />

in Manatee County for many years.<br />

Manatee Pier<br />

The owners, who were already business<br />

partners in Pine Avenue Bait and<br />

Tackle, each owned other businesses that<br />

fit with the vision for a Grill and Bait Shop.<br />

Some 95% of their menu items are<br />

made fresh in house by father/son manager<br />

Chris Powers and chef Jacob Powers.<br />

They describe themselves as “more<br />

than a snack shop, just not quite a full<br />

service restaurant” due to their outdoor<br />

seating. Menu includes breakfast sandwiches,<br />

homemade sausage gravy and<br />

biscuits, blackened fish tacos, Cuban<br />

sandwiches, and fresh burgers.<br />

Weather permitting they also have local<br />

entertainment each afternoon/early evening<br />

on the pier just in front of the Grill.<br />

In addition food, there’s beer, wine and<br />

seltzers as well as soft serve ice cream,<br />

gelattos, snow cones and more.<br />

They’re open seven days a week from<br />

7am to 10pm with some of the best views<br />

from the Skyway to the north, Egmont<br />

and Passage key to the west, Anna Maria<br />

Island to the south and Bradenton to the<br />

east. Wildlife such as manatees and dolphins<br />

regularly show up around the city<br />

pier and are enjoyed by all daily.<br />

■ Visit http://www.citypiergrill.com/ or<br />

call (941) 254-4219.<br />

• Amore Restaurant relocated late<br />

December to the “Limelight District”<br />

offering traditional Italian dishes with a<br />

Portuguese twist. Proprietors Tito and<br />

Liana Vitorino found their new venue and<br />

added traditional Portuguese dishes that<br />

are unique to Sarasota County.<br />

Their new location is on Fruitville Rd.<br />

and Lime Ave. in the Colonial Village<br />

Shopping Center. Amore’s menu includes<br />

Italian classic dishes with local ingredients,<br />

such Linguini Pescatore, Bronzino,<br />

Amore Restaurant<br />

Veal Marsala, Ossobucco and more.<br />

Also expect to see Cataplana: which is<br />

both the name of the dish and the copper<br />

pot that it is cooked in. Cataplana is a<br />

pork and seafood stew is found in the<br />

Algarve, in Portugal. But there’s also a<br />

seafood version packed with both fish and<br />

seafood. The seafood version is cooked in<br />

a tomato sauce with lots of onion and red<br />

and green peppers.<br />

The new restaurant has been completely<br />

renovated and includes tables and<br />

also booths equipped with glass panels<br />

separating diners for environmental safety.<br />

Outdoor seating is also available.<br />

■ Amore is located at: 180 North Lime<br />

Avenue, Sarasota.Visit https://www.<br />

amorelbk.com.<br />

At Sarasota<br />

Farmer’s Market<br />

• Ddi you know the Market, in addition to<br />

food, flowers, m produce and more also<br />

has live music? Natalia Bonfini is performing<br />

on March 13, 9am - 12:30pm. Natalia<br />

is an acoustic guitarist, songwriter, and<br />

new aged soul and blues musician born<br />

and raised on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.<br />

Natalia Bonfini<br />

When she’s not touring, she spends time<br />

in Cape Cod and the Tampa Bay area. Natalia’s<br />

unique and refreshing style shines<br />

through her covers which mash up genres<br />

from acoustic soul, to pop, to classic rock,<br />

to rap, back to her roots with blues.<br />

Events<br />

• There’s an Outdoor Spring Market<br />

at The Mall at UTC on March 13-14 and<br />

March 20-21, geld in Parking Lot 8 (Near<br />

Brio). Shop local this spring season.<br />

They have 60+ local crafters and vendors<br />

for an outdoor market with rare finds,<br />

handmade items, delicious snacks and<br />

more. Open 11 am - 7 pm each day. The<br />

market is free to attend and pet friendly.<br />

■ The Mall at Universty Town Center,<br />

140 University Town Center Drive, Sarasota.<br />

Info: 941-552-7000<br />

Pizza Wars<br />

• Big Apple? Call it the Big Pizza: New<br />

Yorkers love their tomato pies, so much<br />

so the Big Apple is considered the best<br />

city for pizza lovers. The hand-tossed<br />

crust is wonderfully crisp and airy at the<br />

edge and thin in the middle. And no need<br />

for nouveau ingredients like artichokes or<br />

avocado—the traditional New York-style<br />

pizza is just tomato sauce and mozzarella.<br />

Best in the Midwest: Chicago and a slew<br />

of other Midwest cities took top 10 spots:<br />

Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and<br />

Cleveland. The Windy City, of course, is<br />

renowned for its deep dish Chicago-style<br />

pizzas -- each slice can be a meal in itself.<br />

Pittsburgh has the most pizza places per<br />

resident, with the other cities also sporting<br />

impressive numbers. St. Louis boasts<br />

some relatively cheap pizza, along with its<br />

own named-after-the-city thin crust style.<br />

But which cities take the biggest slice<br />

out of <strong>2021</strong>’s Best Cities for Pizza Lovers?<br />

Best Cities for Pizza (ok, I get the top<br />

four…)<br />

➤ New York ➤ Chicago<br />

➤ Pittsburgh ➤ Cincinnati<br />

➤ Tampa (Huh?)<br />

Worst Cities for Pizza (maybe it’s the<br />

Jersey water?)<br />

✖ Stockton, CA ✖ Newark, NJ<br />

✖ Jersey City, NJ ✖ Santa Ana, CA<br />

✖ Fremont, CA<br />

Things you’ll likely<br />

never do again<br />

while dining out<br />

• The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a<br />

death-blow to salad bars and buffets, at<br />

least for the foreseeable future. Although<br />

the Centers for Disease Control and<br />

Prevention has made clear that COVID-19<br />

spreads primarily from person-to-person<br />

through respiratory droplets in the<br />

air, it can, in theory, be spread through<br />

contact with surfaces on which respiratory<br />

droplets have landed.<br />

What is likely to disappear from restaurants,<br />

possibly permanently”<br />

• Buffets: And that includes every<br />

surface you might touch when serving<br />

yourself at a salad bar or buffet, including<br />

shared serving utensils.<br />

Now consider that COVID-19 can<br />

survive for as long as 28 days on some<br />

surfaces, and ask yourself if you really<br />

want to partake in a salad bar or buffet<br />

at this point.<br />

• Lingering: Remember back when<br />

a night out at a restaurant might have<br />

involved lingering for hours at the table,<br />

maybe even until they told you it was<br />

closing time? Sadly, for the foreseeable<br />

future, nights like that will have to remain<br />

as memories.<br />

According to the CDC, limiting exposure<br />

to strangers remains integral to staying<br />

healthy, and the longer you remain<br />

in an enclosed, indoor space such as<br />

a restaurant, the longer you are leav-<br />

ing yourself exposed to the respiratory<br />

droplets of all the other people within that<br />

space. In fact, prolonged contact can<br />

increase the risk of transmission even in<br />

outdoor settings.<br />

As a result, many restaurants around<br />

the country have now imposed time limits<br />

on how long you can linger at your table.<br />

And many states have imposed limits<br />

on how long restaurants are allowed to<br />

stay open on a given night. How long<br />

these limits will remain in place is really<br />

anyone’s guess.<br />

• Sharing: Group-slurping from an oversized<br />

bowl of fruit-flavored booze is a celebratory<br />

tradition going back at least as<br />

far as the 1930s. But for the present and<br />

foreseeable future, communal cocktails<br />

are a thing of the past.<br />

It is now known that COVID-19 can<br />

be spread through shared drinks (and<br />

shared food). And as much as alcohol-based<br />

hand sanitizer can help contain<br />

the spread of the novel coronavirus,<br />

the presence of alcohol in a typical cocktail<br />

is far too negligible to protect you.<br />

While some restaurants may still be<br />

serving communal cocktails, this is a<br />

practice best abandoned for now, since<br />

even if you know the people you’re sharing<br />

your drink with, they may not know if<br />

they’ve been infected.<br />

• Menus: One of the first things to<br />

change in restaurants when the pandemic<br />

began menus. Since at the start of the<br />

pandemic, it was widely believed there<br />

was a high risk of spreading COVID-19<br />

via hard surfaces, many restaurants<br />

immediately pivoted to replacing physical<br />

menus with QR-coded displays on<br />

tabletops—enabling customers to scan<br />

them with their smartphones to access a<br />

digital menu.<br />

In some cases, restaurants have<br />

pivoted to allowing customers to order<br />

via digital menu, reducing the possibility<br />

of viral transmission between server and<br />

customer. While it is now known that<br />

COVID-19 is spread primarily through respiratory<br />

droplets in the air, the CDC has<br />

made clear that coronavirus transmission<br />

via “high-touch” surfaces is possible.<br />

That’s why menus have all but disappeared,<br />

along with salt, pepper, and<br />

sugar dispensers, and shared creamer<br />

and condiment dispensers. In addition,<br />

we should expect to see less and less<br />

of touch-screen-driven ordering kiosks in<br />

fast-food restaurants.<br />

• Dining at the bar: Once upon a time,<br />

dining solo didn’t mean you had to forego<br />

company. There was always the option of<br />

dining at the bar and exchanging pleasantries<br />

and small talk with the bartender-server.<br />

That dynamic has now been<br />

drastically altered thanks to the installation<br />

of plexiglass barriers between customers<br />

and bartenders (and sometimes<br />

between customers and other customers),<br />

as per CDC recommendation.<br />

March<br />

Food Holidays<br />

There’s a theme here…<br />

• American Chocolate Week - March<br />

15-21, 2020 (Third Week of March)<br />

• Chocolate Chip Cookie Week -<br />

(Second Week of March)<br />

• National White Chocolate Cheesecake<br />

Day - March 6<br />

<strong>MARCH</strong> <strong>2021</strong> WEST COAST WOMAN 23

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