What is The Boca Union Sentinel?

The Boca Union Sentinel was founded in 1938 by Carl Klepper, a German emigre to Florida by way of Scranton, and is the oldest continuously published newspaper in South Florida. For sixty-two years Boca Ratonians have relied on the Boca Union Sentinel as their first source in local news- but if it's opinion you want, we've got that too!

As of November 2010 Melissa Bellovin has taken over the paper as editor-in-chief, managing editor, chief reporter, chief columnist, chief food critic and chief film critic. In fact, she is chief of everything. She is chief of all she sees, and would like it to stay that way, but there is the bad economy, which luckily does not inhibit her duties as chief food critic. Her parents, avid eaters of food themselves, are willing, in exchange for a bit of fine conversation, to foot the bill. This is no joke, and uniquely qualifies her for the position of chief food critic- I mean chief restaurant critic- of the Boca Union Sentinel. Not only is her palate fine, trained by many years of living in London, El Paso, Los Angeles and Long Island (along with the millions of other professional food critics living in those places), she is objective, because the restaurants she frequents simply have no idea what this brazen woman is up to with her eating and mental note-taking.

In all seriousness, non-existent readers, I will take a moment to point out a few things about the writer and eater Melissa Bellovin.

1. She has never met a soft-serve ice cream she doesn't like- unless its name starts with Vanilla. I'm talking to you, England.

2. She has an immodest pride in her ability to avoid spending money and still eating delicious food, which has served her well in her peripatetic, borderline bohemian existence in various cities whose neighborhoods became trendy once she left and started charging too much for their food.

3. Her favorite place in the world used to be the counter at the Original Pantry in downtown Los Angeles, where she would sit for hours writing nonsense about her love life in a little notebook while drinking bottomless cups of coffee and eating home fries, coleslaw and sourdough bread. This does not in the least qualify her to write about food, but she thought you should know this.

4. Melissa used to consider herself an authority on Mexican food, due to her living there, speaking the language and living in a rooming house with pink walls perched above a really, really good puesto- that's like a taco stand for all you non-Mexicans. She lived on fat sandwiches filled with marinated pork, tiny tacos filled with obscure animal brains, and tamales built in the center of the world, aka The Zocalo. Nowadays she considers Mexican food a corn tortilla with a slice of cheese melted into a bit of chipotle, but still looks forward to some far away day when she will eat nothing but chile relleno served by a friendly transexual in front of a post office in Sonora.

5. Melissa hails from Long Island, which taught her everything she knows about pizza and Jewish food, which is that she basically likes it and thinks she knows more than you do about it, at least if you don't share her rather common ethnic and geographic traits. At this point in her life, however, she has to concede the real pizza superiority to the fine nation of Italy. Oh well.