What started two decades ago with the purchase of one of South Florida’s most beloved concert venues has evolved into a business platform under an umbrella—Damn Good Hospitality—that says plenty about the intent of the company’s CEO, Jeff John, and his brother (and chief operating officer), Jarred John. In part two of Lifestyle’s August cover
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It’s a Damn Good story that incorporates the Windy City and the Sunshine State. Old-school values and modern-day deception. Fire and ice (or, at least, snow). Savage storms and uncomfortable calm. A Revolution and a whiskey rebellion. Speakeasy style and beer-pong comfort. And, of course, Michael Jordan and Lady Gaga. It’s also a tale about
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1) Second Home: As a restaurateur, you know it might be time to think beyond your backyard when the customers are imploring you to plant roots elsewhere. For Elizabeth Slavutsky, owner of beloved Blue Dog Cookhouse and Bar just outside of Times Square, the setting for such expansion was a no-brainer. “Boca Raton felt like
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The mission was clear and simple. Raise the bar. Those were the marching orders from Gary Press, then-chairman of Lifestyle Media Group, after he hired me in 2016 to oversee the company’s Lifestyle magazines. It was an offer that I couldn’t refuse, in part because of all the wining and dining involved (emphasis on the
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Picture This Instagram, which launched in 2010, was still in its social networking infancy when Cindy Prado began posting photos. Merriam-Webster didn’t yet have a definition for the word “influencer” as we know it today. And no one was earning millions off their followers. But if the traditional modeling agencies weren’t going to hire Prado
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All it took was a few phone calls from her stylist to stir the pot. Cindy Prado already had plans to be in Cannes the week of the famed film festival in the South of France. She’d scored an invite to the prestigious amfAR Gala inside the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, where Christina Aguilera
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Rejuvenation doesn’t have to be packaged in expansive settings with dozens of treatment rooms to be effective. Sometimes, less is more—especially when it’s served up with the expertise, originality and attention to detail delivered at Conrad Spa. What the pampering space inside Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach lacks in overall square footage (there are only a
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For those of us old enough to remember dropping coins into pay phones, the high-tech wizardry of these hand-held devices we cling to for survival can be an endless source of fascination. It’s said, for example, that the iPhone has 100,000 times more processing power and over 1 million times more RAM memory than the
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It’s not often that an award-winning chef can draw parallels between the foodie life and a background in extreme sports. Then again, there aren’t many kitchen luminaries quite like Akira Back. The Korean-born chef—who earned a Michelin star for Dosa, his restaurant in Seoul—spent seven years as a professional snowboarder before realizing his culinary pursuits
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Back story: Principal of her eponymous Miami Beach-based firm since 2001, Schwartz specializes in estate planning and probate, family formation (including adoption and surrogacy), name and gender marker changes, and counsel/services related to relationships and divorce. Over the past two-plus decades, she’s also been on the front lines of countless battles involving legal protections for
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Elizabeth Schwartz is the first to admit that many would-be attorneys of her era probably had their epiphany to leave law school while listening to the Allman Brothers at the famed New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. But the South Florida native never has been one to play by everyone else’s rules. During her 1994
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What are some of the critical needs that the LGBTQ community is facing right now? Jobin: In addition to elder isolation, I think that LGBTQ youth is going to be a real focus. There’s a mental health aspect for young people to be seeing their lives volleyed in the public square. You don’t realize what
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