Prato

The upscale Italian restaurant Prato (https://www.prato-wp.com/) is a mainstay of Winter Park’s tony Park Avenue for good reason.  Chef and co-owner Brandon McGlamery (also of the excellent Luke’s Kitchen and Bar in Maitland) has always served top-notch food in gorgeous surroundings.  This is not a typical “red sauce” Italian-American restaurant, so don’t expect spaghetti and meatballs or red and white checkered tablecloths.  But even though Prato is a cut above, it isn’t snooty or snobby, and the comfort food truly comforts.

I had not been back to Prato in years, due in part to the difficulty of parking on Park Avenue (ironic, eh?) and a lot of bad timing.  Sometimes I’d find myself there in the off time between lunch and dinner service, where Prato only offered a limited menu, and one of the most famous pasta dishes in Orlando was unavailable.  This review was from a recent visit with my wife for lunch, which I timed just so I could try the legendary pasta for the first time, after years of reading hype about it online.

We started out with pretzel-crusted calamari, fried to golden-brown perfection.  I always note that too many restaurants overcook their squid tubes and tentacles until they are chewy and rubbery, but these were really tender, as they should be.  We had tried these before, too many years ago, and these were just as good as they had always been.  I always appreciate dipping sauces (salsa rosa and grain mustard aioli), but this calamari didn’t even need them.  That didn’t stop me from dipping, though!

After how much we enjoyed the beef tartare on a recent trip to Luke’s, we decided to trust Chef McGlamery and ordered the carne cruda at Prato as well, to compare and contrast them.  It is raw beef (which tastes great and must be the highest quality to avoid safety concerns), topped with a farm-fresh egg, grated horseradish, and romanesco conserva.  I realize romanesco is a relative of the cauliflower that grows in stunning fractal patterns, but I didn’t see any of that vegetable, so I wondered if the menu might have meant romesco, which is a sauce made from cooking down tomatoes, roasted red peppers, garlic, and almonds.  It was also served with crunchy toasted focaccia bread slices for scooping up the meat or spreading it onto the toast.  We loved it, just as we loved the beef tartare at Luke’s.

Here’s a close-up of that amazing carne cruda.  The meat was so tender and flavorful in a way we rarely get to experience, since everyone cooks their meat (and should continue to do so, don’t get me wrong).

I forgot to mention that we came to Prato during weekend brunch hours, being sure to be there as it opened to avoid a long wait.  After the savory appetizers, my wife went with a sweet dish: perfect little pancakes topped with freshly made ricotta cheese and blueberry compote (which strikes me as more of a dessert than a breakfast dish, but millions of brunchers will disagree).  She adored it.

And I finally got to try the legendary pasta dish, mustard spaghettini “cacio e pepe.”  I fully admit to being a red sauce guy, since that’s the Italian food  I was raised eating.  I am always drawn to rich bolognese and spicy arrabbiata sauces, so I rarely order cacio e pepe on menus, even though it can be so luxurious and decadent despite its relative simplicity (just Pecorino Romano cheese — the cacio — and black pepper — the pepe).  This version was anything but simple, though.  It included mustard in there somewhere, but it’s subtle, and you definitely won’t detect the brightness of yellow mustard or anything horseradishy, so don’t worry about that.  I love mustard (and even review mustards on this blog), so that was the main thing that had me intrigued for so many years.   
This house-made pasta also includes balsamic vinegar (another favorite ingredient of mine), radicchio, a spicy and bitter vegetable that looks like red and white cabbage and is sometimes called Italian chicory, and speck, a cured and lightly smoked pork leg (think of ham or bacon) from the cold and mountainous South Tyrol province in northeastern Italy.  If you are familiar with geography, you might guess that there is some German or Austrian influence to this particular cured meat, and you’d be right.  Also, the mountains are called the Dolomites, but Rudy Ray Moore had nothing to do with it.

This was a gorgeous and delicious pasta dish that surpassed all the hype.  I make pretty great pasta dishes at home, but I had never had anything quite like this, and I was so happy to finally try it, after all these years.  It was one of my favorite things I ate in 2024, that’s for sure.

I don’t know when we will return to Prato, but as tempting as it always is to try new things on every visit, I am obsessed enough with the mustard spaghettini “cacio e pepe” that I will probably order it again and again in the future.  It’s like nothing I’ve ever tried before.  Leave it to me to be late to the party and then never want to leave!  But I’m sure Prato being great is no big surprise or secret to anyone else in Winter Park or Orlando.  It has a swanky vibe that would be perfect for a date night or just a nice dinner out.  The hardest parts will be parking nearby and figuring out what to order, but hopefully I have already helped you with the second challenge.