M’ama Napoli Italian Bakery & Deli

M’ama Napoli Italian Bakery & Deli (https://www.instagram.com/mamanapoliwinterpark/) is a new business that opened this past summer in Winter Park, just south of Fairbanks Avenue on State Road 17-92.  It is a cute café with delicious coffee, pastries, snacks, sandwiches, rustic-looking pizzas, and shelves laden with Italian groceries.  There are a few booths inside for lingering over a cappuccino and any number of Italian delicacies.

You can see some of their premade panini sandwiches above the deli meats: the Vesuvio, Procida, Ischia, and Capri.  If you right-click on the photo below and open it in a new tab, you can probably even make out the ingredients listed for each.

This glass case includes fresh cannoli, tarts, macarons, and cake slices.

Here are gorgeous pistachio, Nutella, apricot, and almond croissants.

Bombolone are like Italian doughnuts, and these all had different fillings: Bavarian cream, apricot, Nutella, and pistachio cream (which seems to be becoming a trendy dessert ingredient).

And here are flaky, shell-shaped sfogliatella pastries, with a light, crispy texture and a smooth cream filling with the slightest hint of lemon.

M’ama Napoli has several shelves of imported Italian groceries, including some nice-looking fruit preserves, pickled peppers, and tomato sauces.

For the first order I ever brought home, I selected some cream-filled conchiglia puff pastries and a croissant filled with almond paste (marzipan) for my wife who loves almond-flavored anything.  While I still give the edge to Benjamin French Bakery in Thornton Park for the best croissants in Orlando, my wife and I enjoyed all these pastries.   

I also got an incredible sandwich on freshly baked, fluffy focaccia bread, the Toto.  I’m sure it wasn’t named for the yacht rock-adjacent band that featured David Paich, Steve Lukather, and the Porcaro brothers,  but it was full of paper-thin slices of prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, arugula, tomatoes, and shaved parmigiano cheese.  I loved it.  It was huge, too!

Here is a better photo of the Toto sandwich from our second visit.  My wife doesn’t share my obsession with sandwiches, but she likes good bread, prosciutto, fresh mozz, and arugula — pretty much everything but the tomatoes — so she had most of this one.

That time, I tried the Maradona sandwich, with salami, fresh mozzarella, and arugula.  The salami was really high-quality, but since I ate this sandwich at home, I plussed it up with the tomatoes from my wife’s Toto sandwich, some hot cherry peppers, and balsamic glaze.

And this was a special sandwich that was only available that day, with prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, shaved parmesan cheese, and some kind of creamy sauce that gave it a bit of a funky flavor, but not unpleasant.  It was an umami bomb, though! 
I would probably skip this one in the future, just because the Toto is so great, and there are lots of other sandwich options too — not just on focaccia, but pressed paninis as well.  Maybe I’ll try a focaccia sandwich with mortadella next time, which is like very posh bologna that sometimes contains pistachios.

There are only a few parking spaces behind the building, off busy State Road 17-92, but I’ve had decent parking karma on my two visits to M’ama Napoli so far (which is more than I can say for many of Orlando’s most popular dining districts).  Check it out, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed, especially if you get the Toto or one of the other focaccia sandwiches!

Leave a comment