Hold burger and cheese for, presto, a BLT

By CHRIS SHERMAN, Times food and wine critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 13, 2000

Ever get stuck in the drive-through with the feeling that the voice at the other end of the speaker is Jim Carrey?

When you hear this great idea from Checkers, you'll realize that Jim Carrey must be sitting in the board rooms of the other fast food joints. (Besides, it's Kevin Spacey at the window).

The issue is the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, summer on toast. The Nibbler was dreaming of that lemonade of sandwiches when I drove past a Checkers with a sign: Special BLT for 99 cents. Brilliant seasonal marketing, says I, making the kitchen table favorite fast-food convenient.

That's when I started smacking my head on the steering wheel and uttering a resounding DUH. Of course, every roadside purveyor of bacon cheeseburgers with all the trimmings has the ingredients: Hold the burger, hold the cheese, and you've got a BLT.

So I checked in with the corporate types. They said yeah, it's not an official chain-wide menu item or a special, but any unit knows how to make it and how to ring it up.

Obvious but still smart, especially in heat so stultifying as to make the Nibbler and some of the rest of you think of fried pig meat and mayo as a "light sandwich." Must be all that lettuce and tomato.

Flight of the Ibex

Tampa Bay loses its only Ethiopian restaurant, its only taste of Africa this weekend when Ibex closes, and owner Melkam Weldekidan moves to Miami for better hunting grounds.

Weldekidan, an accountant who got some of his restaurant training from Bern Laxer, opened the restaurant in West Tampa in 1991. That was just as the Tampa Bay area got a taste of the charms of Ethiopian cooking, buttery peppered meats and curried vegetables wrapped in delicate pancakes.

Ibex (1809 W Platt St., Tampa; (813) 254-4239) was unusually sophisticated in decor, service and presentation and eventually moved to the edge of Hyde Park in 1997 and became the most successful Ethiopian restaurant here (we've had three). Darlene Weldekidan, a Tampa native, said the restaurant never did as well in south Tampa.

"We had a dream there," she said, but Ibex never succeeded like the rest of Restaurant Row. "It gave Tampa a little bit of something. Who knows? Maybe Tampa will catch up some time."

Indeed, Ethiopian cooking is now a fixture on most metropolitan menus for health food fans, students of Africa and adventurous nibblers and is especially big in cities with large Ethiopian communities, such as Washington, D.C. Now Miami will get some served up on the first floor of a condo tower off Collins Avenue.

In Tampa, if you want doro wat or other Ethiopian delicacies, Ibex will be open only through Saturday.

On the water's edge

Dining by the water is the oldest of Florida pleasures. Nothing beats a table with a view of rocking boats, jumping fish rippling the water and -- floating trash.

Our most pleasant dining settings are awash in trash, pure-D trash, foam cups, potato chip bags, broken coolers, pop cans, beer bottles and more. I've seen it repeatedly in recent weeks, especially from restaurants along the bays and inland waterways in both Pinellas and Hillsborough, and it's not just from the Bud-and-Fritos crowd; I've seen the water bottles of the pure of heart and the tennis balls of the pure of breed floating by.

When the drought brought the water level low, the trash in the water piled up on the shores and sandbars. Storms and returning rain, however, have flushed this collection along with a vengeance.

Wish the Nibbler could say that this is a temporary problem. It's at best a temporary reminder of an ongoing problem. If it's so great to live by the water or on it, why do we trash it?

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