September 2026 – The Saboscrivner

Chima Steakhouse

“Who is the gaucho, amigo?
Why is he standing
In your spangled leather poncho
And your elevator shoes?
Bodacious cowboys
Such as your friend
Will never be welcome here
High in the Custerdome.”

–“Gaucho” (1980), written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, performed by Steely Dan.

If you’ve ever been to an all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse (commonly called churrascarias), you are familiar with the servers (commonly called gauchos, named after Brazilian and Argentinian cowboys) showing up at your table with a never-ending parade of grilled meats on swords and serving whatever you request, as many times as you wish. While the titular gaucho in Steely Dan’s song was a garishly clad, unwelcome weirdo, the gauchos at these restaurants are a welcome sight, and they will seduce you with steak, beguile you with beef, and charm you with chicken.

Chima Steakhouse (https://chimasteakhouse.com/), located at 7830 West Sand Lake Road on Orlando’s “Restaurant Row,” is one of these Brazilian churrascarias, similar in concept to international chains Texas de Brazil and Fogo de Chao and Orlando’s locally owned and operated Adega Gaucha and Boi Brazil. They are all decadent experiences, where you can eat like a king until you get the meat sweats, but I can’t eat like I used to, back in my 20s. (Shame, because I have a much better budget now to treat myself to dining out.)

But my favorite part of all the all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouses, even moreso than the gauchos and their tireless meat delivery system, is the sumptuous salad bar all these restaurants have in common. As if nonstop meats weren’t enough of a draw, they also offer a variety of fresh salads and house-made dressings, fresh, roasted, grilled, marinated, and pickled vegetables, fresh fruit, hot rice and potato dishes, prepared salads (Chima has a mayo-based potato salad with chicken and a quinoa salad, among others), Brazil’s beloved national dish feijoada (a black bean stew full of beef and pork, which you top with toasted yuca flour called farofa), smoked salmon, fine imported cheeses, fancy cured meats, and more. And you know your friendly neighborhood Saboscrivner — some of my favorite foods in the whole world are smoked salmon, cheese, and cured meats!

Chima’s salad bar is top-tier. Here you see their gorgeous platter of folded slices of melt-in-your-mouth cold-smoked salmon, perfect and untouched since we got there right when the restaurant first opened for lunch. In the top left, you see their chilled kani and mango salad, kani being the sweet and tender surimi, or “krab” you may have enjoyed in California rolls. Below that is their seafood salad, which includes shrimp, scallops, tender squid rings, grape tomatoes, red onions, celery, and capers, tossed in a light and refreshing vinaigrette dressing. I loved all of this, especially on a hot September day.

And of course, I couldn’t leave these delectable cured meats behind! Not when there are thin slices of peppery Genoa salami, rich and salty prosciutto, and tender, fluffy mortadella with pistachios to choose from. I’m a shark when it comes to charcuterie.

And these were paper-thin slices of beef carpaccio, served chilled, topped with pesto sauce, grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, and capers. This was another hit, as far as I’m concerned.

By the way, during the week, if you just get the salad bar at lunch, it is only $20 per person, which I consider one of the best deals in town, with all of this bounty. I don’t get many weekdays off work, but you better believe I will return to take advantage of that deal. My wife and I went to Chima on a Saturday with the salad bar on our minds first and foremost, but we found out that on the weekends, the salad bar costs $36. However, for lunch, the complete churrascaria experience is $54 — much cheaper than it is at dinnertime — so for an additional $18, we decided to treat ourselves and go for the meat as well. We don’t go to these places often, but I was happy to try as many things as I did. And this way, I can offer my dozens of readers a more thorough and detailed review! Yes, I did this for YOU. You’re welcome!

This was my plate of salad bar goodness, with all of the above, plus fresh mozzarella and gouda cheeses, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, orzo pasta salad with pesto, and what they had labeled as “Brazilian vinaigrette,” that reminded me of a pico de gallo with all the finely chopped multicolored vegetables.

When we first sat down, our jocular server brought us this pao de queijo, Brazilian cheese bread that is always a little chewy and gummy. My wife absolutely loves these, but I gotta admit, for a fella who loves bread and cheese and especially cheese on or in bread, they don’t do much for me. It’s a texture thing, as well as having my buffet-loving dad’s voice in my head, sharing his wisdom, cautioning me “DON’T FILL UP ON BREAD!”

The pao de queijo were soon joined by cinnamon-dusted fried bananas (top right), creamy mashed potatoes (bottom left; neither of us messed with this), and fried polenta (bottom right). I had a piece of the fried polenta just to try it, since none of the other Brazilian steakhouses serve these; it was okay, but I won’t bother with them in the future. The bananas were my favorite, but I would have preferred them a little caramelized with sugar rather than cinnamon, like my beloved maduros.

These days, I mostly eat lean meats at home: chicken breasts (boring, but healthy), lean pork loin (a blank canvas for infinite variations), and ground turkey, which I usually make into meatloaf or chili. I hardly eat beef at all anymore, especially because it is so expensive these days, but I figured I would go hard on protein and take advantage of Chima’s offerings.

The very first meat that was delivered to our table was filet mignon. Our server asked us how we like our meat, and we both said rare, so all the gauchos were very conscious of only bringing us rare cuts of beef. (Luckily, they didn’t deliver us any rare chicken.) While I failed to photograph the filet, it was so incredibly tender. I almost never eat steak, and especially not filet, but I was impressed by the almost buttery texture.

Next up, I tried both cuts of chicken Chima offered: grilled chicken thigh marinated in their house-made aji sauce, and a beer-marinated chicken drumstick. Usually I skip the chicken at these Brazilian churrascarias, because it tends to be on the bland side (and it’s cheaper than beef, so they walk the chicken around more often, hoping you’ll fill up on it), but these were amazing. I could have happily made a meal of just these two kinds of chicken.That is rare flank steak on the right, which was delicious, but much tougher than the perfect filet.

I held off on eating the next few meat deliveries so I could take a pretty picture for y’all. That’s how much I care. On the left, carnivores will recognize the famous Brazilian picanha, or top sirloin, which is a standard at these sorts of places. On the top, you have a rich, fatty, tender cut of beef rib (costilla), cut right off the huge bone. This is my favorite cut of beef at churrascarias, and it is one of my wife’s favorites too. Next to it are two different Brazilian sausages. Most of these restaurants just offer the more pinkish-hued savory sausage on the bottom, but Chima also had a cheddar sausage (on the top), full of melty cheddar cheese that oozed out when I cut into it. I really enjoyed that one.On the right, you can see marinated and grilled shrimp, which I’ve never noticed at Texas de Brazil, Fogo de Chao, or Adega Gaucha. These were also terrific. And in the middle, those lovely things are grilled slices of Brazilian coalho cheese, topped with a little honey. These were so nice as palate-cleansers between the various rich and salty meats. Adega Gaucha and Boi Brazil serve this cheese with a thick and sticky guava sauce, which I honestly prefer, but they were great with the honey. When the honey hit that Brazilian sausage, it was also a flavor sensation, reminding me of how Special Agent Dale Cooper loved it when maple syrup collided with ham on his breakfast plate on Twin Peaks.

These were slices of pineapple, grilled and covered with cinnamon, which served as a nice, light dessert after all that heaviness. I love pineapple in any form, or pineapple-flavored anything, but this was another rare time when I preferred the more caramelized, less cinnamony grilled pineapple at Adega Gaucha.

Neither of us had expected to have such a huge and heavy lunch when we headed down to Chima, but faced with paying $36 for the salad bar versus $54 for the full experience, I think we made the right call. I’d do it again, but honestly, I am much more likely to return on one of my rare weekdays off from work, so I can take advantage of that gourmet salad bar for the low, low price of $20.

How would I rare Chima compared to the four other Brazilian churrascarias I’ve been to? Well, I’ve never gotten around to reviewing Fogo de Chao (after four visits) or Boi Brazil (after one visit that will probably be my only one). I think Adega Gaucha was my favorite of all of them, and I can’t say anything bad about it, but I honestly think Chima might be my new favorite, and my wife agrees, having been to all of them except Fogo. The atmosphere at Chima was incredibly nice, and the service was top-notch. I appreciated how they remembered our preference for rare steak and how they took requests, like when we asked about the beef rib. They were also forthcoming with the better cuts of meat, even though I actually loved the chicken here. A lot of the other restaurants walk around a lot with a parmesan-crusted pork loin that I always find to be very dry, but nobody even approached us with that one at Chima.

I think I liked all the meats here the best for one major reason: they were much less salty than all of their competitors, which is another reason I like doing the salad bars alone so much. I like meat, I like salt, but most of their rivals oversalt the meats like crazy. Not Chima. Everything was seasoned and cooked perfectly. That chicken! That shrimp! That filet! Those sausages! And yes, the salad bar was unparalleled. I give Chima my Saboscrivner Seal of Superiority, and I know I’ll be back at some point. (It’s across town from us, but maybe that’s a good thing, so I’m not tempted to try again tomorrow.)

Chain Reactions: Philly Pretzel Factory

Philly Pretzel Factory (https://phillypretzelfactory.com/) is a chain of soft pretzel bakeries that two Philadelphia guys started 25 years ago. The website doesn’t make it easy to see a complete list of locations, but as of this writing, there are two in Florida — one that opened recently right near me in Casselberry, and another further south in Palm Beach Gardens. However, more are coming to Orlando’s Kia Center, Winter Garden, Cocoa Beach, South Tampa, and Cape Coral, and their pretzels are also available at Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks in Oviedo and Orlando’s SoDo neighborhood. (I haven’t tried Big Dave’s yet because I already have my favorite place for cheesesteaks in all of Florida).

But just for the heck of it, I searched for locations within 200 miles of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and 150 showed up, so there may be a Philly Pretzel Factory near you, wherever you are — or one might be coming soon, in any case.

When I visited the Casselberry shop the week it opened, the lady working was kind enough to offer me a free pretzel right away! I don’t think I’m a special person or anything; she probably offers everyone one. But since I was coming in to purchase a pretzel, I happily accepted. This is what five of them look like, and they pull apart easily.
The pretzels are somewhat soft, but on the dense side. If you’ve been to a Wawa (another Philadelphia import; my favorite convenience stores in the Orlando area, which serve surprisingly solid hoagies and other fresh food), they sell really similar dense pretzels. As an aside, we used to buy frozen Deutsche Kuche pretzels at Aldi, imported from Germany. I must admit that after baking those in the toaster oven, they are a lot softer and fluffier than Philly Pretzel Factory or Wawa.

Thinking of my wife back home, as I always do, I thought she might like the cinnamon “rivets,” pretzel nuggets coated with cinnamon and sugar. Unfortunately, they only sell them in these large shaker cups. She didn’t really care for them, and I’m more of a savory pretzel person, so I literally rinsed the cinnamon and sugar off each one, dried them carefully, and used them for my own savory (never unsavory!) purposes.

I couldn’t resist the allure of these pretzel poppers, which are stuffed with Philly cheesesteak — sliced and chopped steak and Cooper Sharp white American cheese, which has become my favorite cheese for burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, breakfast sandwiches, and of course cheesesteaks. American cheese is already great for any melting purposes, and I like the tanginess of Cooper Sharp more than any other brands I’ve tried. If you’re stuck in the mindset that American cheese is all gross plastic-wrapped, highly processed “cheese food,” think again!

They come in an order of three, and here’s a cross-section:These were far superior to the plain pretzel, and so much more unhealthy!

Because I am also a mark for spicy sausages, I couldn’t turn down a spicy pretzel sausage on my first visit:

And here it is, cut in half. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was essentially a hot dog inside, just a little thicker and slightly spicier than a normal hot dog. But it paired well with…

Mustard! Philly Pretzel Factory sells four kinds of mustard in squeeze bottles, and they have little dipping cups for those who aren’t obsessive-compulsive mustard collectors like your humble narrator. I skipped the original yellow and honey mustards, but I bought bottles of the spicy brown and super hot mustards. How were they? You’re going to have to wait for my next installment of Cutting the Mustard, my massive mustard mega-reviews, to find out!

So did I like Philly Pretzel Factory? Sure! They were so nice, and I rarely regret trying anything new and novel. I was a little disappointed that the regular pretzels are almost identical to the ones at Wawa, in all their denseness. But I was happy to try the Philly cheesesteak-stuffed pretzel poppers and even the spicy pretzel sausage, and I’m always thrilled to discover new mustards to sample and review. But at the end of the day, my greatest soft pretzel experience remains a different chain, one you probably recognize from malls and airports: Auntie Anne’s. I love their buttery goodness above all! Maybe one day I’ll review them.

Aurora

To my dozens of regular readers, I apologize for accidentally publishing this piece last week, while it was still an incomplete draft. I unpublished it immediately, but any subscribers would have automatically received an unfinished version, and I regret that. That’s a rookie mistake, and you really hate to see it!

***

Aurora (https://aurorarestaurantorlando.com/) is a beautiful restaurant located inside the Celeste Hotel, standing in front of the University of Central Florida in East Orlando, at the intersection of University Boulevard and Alafaya Trail. I recently took my wife to dinner at Aurora, the first time for both of us, and we had an incredible experience that left us yearning for more. Executive Chef Mike Trudnak is a CIA graduate (the good CIA, the Culinary Institute of America), and he has created one of the most exciting menus I’ve encountered in the Orlando area in a long time. We will definitely return and hopefully become regulars, especially since Chef Trudnak changes the menu seasonally.

I had bugged my wife to try Aurora for years, but the impetus for us to finally make it there back in July was Bite 30, the annual midsummer event in which some Orlando restaurants offer an optional prix fixe menu where you can get an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert for the reasonable fixed price of $38. (It started out years ago at $30, hence the name, but I get it, food costs more, and I don’t begrudge restaurants having to raise their prices to stay afloat.) It’s a fantastic way to try new restaurants and sample several different dishes that you might never otherwise order.

I absolutely love that younger generations are drinking less, encouraging more and more restaurants to offer mocktails on their drink menus. Neither my wife nor I drink alcohol, but she likes the experience of getting a nice mixed drink in mocktail form. This was the Asteroid, with muddled blueberries and blackberries, lemon lime soda, and simple syrup, and garnished with fresh mint leaves. She said it was delicious.

Even though it wasn’t part of the Bite 30 menu, I suggested we get the bread service, with fresh, fluffy, pillowy-soft yeast rolls. These were awe-inspiring. If you’ve ever bought frozen Sister Schubert’s yeast rolls or tried the versions at Texas Roadhouse, those are fine, but these are a million times better, and not just because I’ve been eating low-carb lately. I can’t rave about these yeast rolls enough.

The bread service came with honey butter and house herb butter, both whipped for smooth and easy spreading. They were great (show me some bad butter… I’m waiting!), but the rolls were so perfect, they didn’t even need butter.

The beet and goat cheese summer salad was on the appetizer list for Bite 30, but even though there were appetizers that appealed to each of us more, we were both very intrigued by this salad. Our lovely and patient server Alura told us that we could order a half-portion of the salad and the kitchen would even split it for us, so we could each try everything. That was the perfect solution to a first-world problem, and we were so grateful to her for letting us know.

So this beautiful plating is half of the half-portion! The salad contains local baby greens, paper-thin sliced cucumber, heirloom tomatoes, pickled fennel, watermelon radish, baby beets, sorrel, sunflower seeds, hibiscus, and goat cheese puffs, with a wee pitcher of honey thyme vinaigrette dressing. What a masterful salad, as beautiful as it was tasty. We both love beats and goat cheese, and I’m always intrigued by interesting dressings because I eat so many salads at home. This did not disappoint.

The baked puffs, airy and crispy at the same time, really did have goat cheese baked inside!

We both love raw tuna, and my wife chose these gorgeous tuna tostadas as her Bite 30 prix fixe appetizer. They contained ponzu-marinated Ahi tuna, smashed avocado, aioli cabbage slaw, wakame (an edible seaweed), and pickled red onion on the top of the crunchy fried tostada discs. They were a little messy to eat, but so worth it.

As for me, as a middle-aged man, I don’t get that many opportunities to eat an entirely new meat for the first time in my life, so I couldn’t resist the allure of camel empanadas! Yes indeed, these golden-brown empanadas, fried to perfection, contained ground camel meat, seasoned with vadouvan curry, onions, peppers, and garlic. What the heck is vadouvan curry, you ask? Well, I didn’t know either, but I’m a librarian, so I looked it up. As usual, Serious Eats had the answer — a sweet and smoky French-influenced blend of toasted spices, with shallots, onions, garlic (sometimes), fenugreek, chile, cumin, and curry leaves.
They were served with whipped feta cucumber tzatziki dipping sauce. Everything was so good. As Jim Gaffigan once said, there’s no such thing as a bad empanada, and he was right.

Here’s a rare look inside a camel empanada!

My wife ordered the grilled beef filet medallions as her entree, a dish that would have cost $58 just by itself on the regular menu! They were served on a bed of carrot puree with asparagus, fondant potatoes (the two brown puffs at 1:00 and 7:00), and the brown sauce is a peppercorn demi-glace. Her only complaint was that she asked for them rare and they were cooked well beyond rare, but she still liked them a lot.

And since I was having a hard time deciding, I asked her what her second choice would be, so I could order that one. She said she was curious about the tableside finished eggplant parmesan, so of course I ordered it so we could share. The Italian-breaded eggplant cutlet looked a little naked, despite being topped with balsamic spheres and micro basil. The description didn’t mention it came with any pasta, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a bed of thick sheets of (no doubt freshly made) pappardelle underneath it.

But hey, what’s this? A second server came to the table, carefully holding a sizzling skillet of San Marzano tomato vodka sauce topped with melty broiled burrata and parmesan cheeses, meant to pour over the eggplant at tableside!

I never record video on The Saboscrivner food blog, because nobody wants to watch me eat, plus I have a face for radio and a voice best suited for print media. So you’ll have to believe me that it was a nice little production of the sauce and cheese sliding out of that hot pan onto my eggplant, but you don’t get to see it in action. You can imagine, though. I NEVER order eggplant parm at restaurants (I have two talented friends who made the best versions I’ve ever had in their own kitchens), but this was a particularly nice one, especially with the whole “dinner and a show” aspect.

For dessert, my wife got the flourless chocolate torte, with dark chocolate ganache, strawberry sorbet, and fresh strawberries. Me not being a big chocolate eater, it would never have occurred to me to order this, but I tried a small morsel, and I loved not only the rich, intense, chocolatey flavor, but also the smooth texture. It’s gluten-free, too!

I chose the lemon and wild berry cake because I always love any citrusy desserts. The small cake was about the size of a hockey puck, rather than a slice from a larger cake. It was topped with blueberry compote, a mountainous dollop of fresh whipped cream, and a beautiful hibiscus flower.

Here’s a better angle so you can see more of the blueberry compote on top and all the berries baked inside.

We went back to Aurora this past weekend for Magical Dining, when Orlando-area restaurants offer a similar fixed-price menu for either $40 or $60, and part of each bill goes to worthy charities like OCA (Opportunity, Community, Ability), which empowers individuals with autism and other developmental differences. (Aurora’s menu was $40.) This event is always scheduled for mid-August through September, historically one of the slower times of the year for restaurants, since kids are back in school and tourism decreases. Just like Bite 30, it’s a great opportunity to try new dishes at new restaurants, or to go back to old favorites, and my wife was excited to return to Aurora. Hopefully after reading this review, you might be excited to go there too, with several weeks left to go during Magical Dining.

The Magical Dining menu was very similar to the Bite 30 menu, but I tried my best to try different things this time. My wife got the beet and goat cheese summer salad for her appetizer again, because she loved it that much, but I got something I hoped she would enjoy as well: the jackfruit “tostachos.” This was a platter of crispy tostones (fried green plantains, not sweet or soft like maduros, which are ripe plantains), topped with shredded, roasted, and barbecue-seasoned jackfruit, pickled red onion, heirloom tomato salad, and adobo mayo ketchup. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like, but it was delicious, and it was a much larger portion than the other appetizer I was considering, the Mexican arancini. There were actually five separate topped “tostachos” (like tostone-nachos, get it?), but I gave my wife one before snapping this photo.
The mayo-ketchup was a nice touch, since that’s a common dipping sauce for tostones at Puerto Rican restaurants. And the jackfruit had a similar consistency to shredded barbecue chicken, even though most people wouldn’t mistake it for chicken. I can see it being a godsend for any vegetarians and vegans who used to eat chicken and miss the whole experience.

My wife was drawn to the same grilled beef filet medallions, but this time, they were cooked perfectly rare, as she requested, and I thought this photo came out better.

But I switched it up and ordered a real Florida Man fusion dish: alligator fried rice, with marinated and cornstarch-fried Louisiana gator, tamari orange sauce, stir-fried vegetables (lots of snow peas in there), and sesame seeds. Alligator sure seems like a novelty food — something tourists have to try when they visit Florida or Louisiana — but I can’t help but be drawn to it every few years, just because I crave novelty just like anyone else. If I didn’t know it was alligator, I’d probably think it was fried chicken, but it is not as tender as chicken. Other than the fried gator nuggets and the sweet orange sauce, this reminded me of the fried rice I make at home, which was somehow a confidence-booster. I’m extra-glad I didn’t get the Mexican arancini appetizer, because that would have been two rice dishes in one meal, and that would be unhinged!

Creatures of habit that we are, we defaulted to the same desserts as last time, because they were so damn good. She got the flourless chocolate tarte with dark chocolate ganache and strawberry sorbet again, and it was just as good this time:

And I got the lemon and wild berry cake again, because it is probably in the Top Five restaurant desserts I’ve ever had. But this time, I was so full, I asked for it to go, and they were kind enough to pack up the fresh whipped cream and blueberry compote in separate little plastic ramekins.

Well, we have every intention of returning to Aurora in the future, even when they aren’t doing special fixed-price menus. I think of it as a “special occasion” restaurant, even though they have perfectly normal menus and even serve breakfast every weekday until 11 AM, plus brunch on the weekends. There aren’t a lot of “nicer” restaurants in East Orlando — just the Cooper’s Hawk chain in Waterford Lakes, the casual Wine 4 Oysters, and Aurora, and this is definitely our favorite. It’s so nice, but not a stuffy or intimidating sort of nice. Bring a date, bring your parents, bring out-of-town guests, and you’ll have a grand time. Just show up for breakfast or lunch on a regular, normal day, and you’ll really enjoy it, but don’t miss that Magical Dining menu. You have a few more weeks to catch the prix-fixe options, and I promise you won’t regret it.

Mae Tao and Son’s Kitchen

Orlando’s newest, hottest restaurant is Mae Tao and Son’s Kitchen (https://www.mtskitchen.com/). Located in the food court of Lotte Plaza Market, the sprawling Asian supermarket at 3191 West Colonial Drive, Orlando, FL 32808 (on the corner of John Young Parkway), this venture from married couple Brittney Keophoxay-Lam and Dan Lam serves Laotian and Cambodian (Khmer) cuisines. Orlando has had one Laotian restaurant for many years (Sticky Rice, which I haven’t been back to in far too long, come to think of it), but this is the first-ever Cambodian restaurant to open here, and it started out as a food truck before moving into its permanent location in the Lotte food court. They were in a soft opening phase for the past week, and they had their grand opening yesterday. Now that Mae Tao and Son’s Kitchen is officially open, the hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11 AM to 8 PM.

The menu is on the website, as well as on the illuminated big screens above the booth, and believe me, my wife and I studied it in advance. I got there shortly after it opened today, and I ordered a bunch of food to bring home to share with her. I always keep a big “heat bag” in my car for bringing takeout food home, and everything was still hot when I got back home.

We started out with an order of roti, those crispy, flaky fried flatbreads that came with pickled cabbage (more about this later) and a creamy, mildly spicy house-made curry dipping sauce. If you’ve ever been to Hawkers, you probably know and love roti, and I’ve even bought very similar frozen ones, but these tasted freshly made.

We were both intrigued by this cured salmon laap salad. I am never a fan of cooked salmon, but I love raw salmon (one more reason I may be a bear, besides looking like one), and one of my favorite foods is cold-smoked, thin-sliced nova salmon, so I was curious about this version of cured salmon. The website says the slices of cured salmon are tossed with herbs (there was a lot of fresh mint, in addition to crunchy red and green onions), toasted rice powder, lime, and traditional Lao seasonings. It was served with some sliced cucumbers and a nice-sized portion of sticky rice, which I thought my wife would love, even if she wasn’t into the salmon. Well, she loved the sticky rice (she had only ever had sweet sticky rice before, in Thai desserts), and she surprised me by not only liking the cured salmon, but liking it more than I did. I generally love tangy, sour, acidic flavors, and I fell in love with the Thai “meat salad” larb when I first discovered it last year (at Isan Zaap Thai Cafe). I wondered if this “laap” salad would be similar to larb, especially with the toasted rice powder and lime juice, but this particular recipe had a fermented funkiness I wasn’t expecting, which made me wonder if fish sauce was one of those traditional Lao seasonings. I did appreciate that the salmon still had that nice raw texture and wasn’t “cooked” by the lime juice, the way salmon comes in ceviche. That said, I don’t regret ordering or trying it!

This was kuy teav, a Cambodian noodle soup made with a Wagyu beef broth, tender (and chewy!) beef meatballs, and flat rice noodles, topped with fresh herbs, shallots, and crispy fried garlic. I also paid small upcharges to have quail eggs, beef tripe, and a braised boneless beef rib added to the soup. My wife and I both love Vietnamese pho, that ubiquitous beef noodle soup that maybe should become the official dish of Orlando (hey, it makes more sense than honey nougat glacé!), and I really wanted to compare and contrast this new soup to pho, since they sounded similar at the most surface level. Like all the best pho spots, Mae Tao and Son’s packaged the broth on the side, so it wouldn’t turn the tender noodles to mush on my drive home.
I liked all the ingredients in this kuy teav soup, even the addition of beef tripe, despite not always enjoying the texture of it in pho. I thought the broth was more delicately flavored than the stronger flavor of pho broth, but maybe it’s because I’ve only tried it this one time, and it didn’t come with any additional condiments or seasonings that way every Vietnamese restaurant allows diners to customize their pho. I loved the meatballs and quail eggs, though. (I keep a few cans of quail eggs in the pantry at home because I like to pickle them in the fridge for quick protein snacks. Yes, you can buy peeled, hard-boiled quail eggs in cans at Asian markets!)

Mae Tao and Son’s Kitchen is definitely a fusion restaurant, devoted to winning over new fans who are unfamiliar with Laotian and Cambodian flavors. In addition to everything else we tried, we got two of their sandwiches, which are huge and beautiful and served on toasted brioche buns, served with the cut side up because they are so photogenic. Longtime readers and anyone who knows me in real life know how much I love a good sandwich, and these sandwiches are designed to be perfect gateways to introduce those unfamiliar eaters to these two new cuisines. (I still have fond memories of my first introduction to Filipino cuisine, which I now love, from the fusion dishes at the long-gone Taglish, a former tenant of the Lotte Plaza Market food court.)

This was the BBQ tiger beef “sando,” smoked beef in a crying tiger Lao-style barbecue glaze, layered with delicious black garlic aioli, jeow som cabbage, and fresh greens. I was completely unfamiliar with jeow som, but I did a bit of research, and it is a Lao dipping sauce made with fish sauce (A-HA!), herbs, fresh lime juice, garlic, sugar, chopped cilantro, and peppers. So the finely shredded red cabbage was tossed in this dipping sauce, making it like a sweet, sour, funky, crunchy slaw.

One thing my wife and I were surprised to discover on this sandwich that wasn’t listed in the ingredients was a large hash brown potato patty, which was a really nice touch. I don’t know why more places don’t put those into sandwiches! Anyway, this was a huge hit with both of us.

And this was maybe my favorite thing of all, the sweet and sour tamarind “sando,” with crispy panko-breaded and fried chicken thigh cutlets tossed in a sweet and sour tamarind glaze, topped with more of that black garlic aioli, jeow som cabbage, and fresh greens. There is A LOT going on in both of these sandwiches, but in a good way. Over the past three months, my wife has suddenly become a far more adventurous eater. I’ve always loved trying new things, but she has started sharing my enthusiasm for food, even as I’ve been slowly eating less, eating healthier, and losing weight since the start of this year. (Today was a bit of an exception, obviously.) She never even cared for sandwiches before, mostly because she doesn’t like different food touching and usually tries to avoid bread, but she gave both of these sandwiches a fair chance and ended up liking the BBQ tiger beef more. I was happy that she was all in on this new alimentary adventure with me.

So even though you’re probably going to be seeing these stunning sandwich cross-sections in your socials a lot over the next few weeks, I wanted to publish this review ASAP, while the details were still fresh in my head and the flavors were still dancing on my tongue and in my memory. You should make your way to Lotte Plaza Market ASAP, because it’s still a super-nice Asian supermarket with something for everyone, and it’s still a lot less crowded and chaotic than H-Mart, a year after the latter opened. And while you’re picking up your staples, sauces, seafood, and snacks, stop by the food court and give Mae Tao and Son’s Kitchen a try. If you’re still on the fence, you would probably love Laotian and Cambodian food if you like Thai flavors. It’s not a fully accurate comparison, but it might be the most familiar to the uninitiated. The sandwiches were my favorite by far, but you really can’t go wrong. I didn’t get to meet Brittany or Dan (and they would have no idea who I am anyway), but they’re off to an amazing start with Orlando’s hottest restaurant. And as you can tell, this place has everything.