Bread – 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.

Bachour (Coral Gables)

Bachour (https://antoniobachour.com/) is a beloved bakery-cafe-restaurant in Coral Gables, a historic and tony area of Miami. I was down that way back in May, visiting my family in Kendall for the first time in far too long. I also spent some quality time with my best friend (going back to elementary school) and his amazing girl, taking advantage of their generous hospitality and visiting parts of Miami I never ventured out to when I grew up down there. The last day I was in town, we had brunch at Bachour, and his mom — who just happened to be my first-grade teacher! — joined us. We had a great time, despite getting rained on while we ate in a semi-covered outdoor alcove. The food, which combined French and Latin influences, was magnificent.

Founded by Puerto Rican-born Chef Antonio Bachour, Bachour is known for gorgeous pastries, arranged artfully in glass display cases:

We started out with an order of arepa fritters, one perfect crispy fried sphere for each of us, stuffed with cotija cheese and held in place with avocado puree underneath.

We also got an order of tequeños, small pastries made of long, flat strips of dough wrapped around salty queso blanco and baked or fried. (These were fried.) They were served with cilantro garlic aioli dipping sauce, which was so good, I kept it for whatever was coming next.

This stunning swirled pastry is Bachour’s version of a cinnamon roll. Look at those crispy, light, flaky layers of laminated dough. It was a work of art.

My boy’s mom ordered this creme brulee French toast with vanilla custard and mascarpone creme as her entree, even though that’s a dessert in my book.

His lovely ladyfriend got this breakfast sandwich with scrambled eggs, applewood smoked bacon, aged cheddar, truffle butter, and arugula (it’s a veg-EH-ta-ble) on a soft brioche bun.

She also ordered a side of crispy home fries with it.

My friend got the Bachour crispy chicken sandwich, with butter lettuce and creamy, crispy slaw on a brioche bun, and he said it was one of the best chicken sandwiches he’s ever had. He chose fries as his side instead of a salad, which makes me think of John Mulaney’s routine about ordering a chicken sandwich and choosing between the two most different foods in the universe.

And as for me, your friend and humble narrator, one of those foods that always tempts and tantalizes me is smoked salmon, so I got something I normally never order anywhere, a club sandwich (a triple-decker sandwich with bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise on white toast) with smoked salmon and a bit of avocado added in. Club sandwiches often slide apart, or the toasted bread crumbles under the architecturally unsound structure of its fillings, but I am a grown man, and I promise you I did my best.
Even though I really have been trying to eat healthier, I kept the server from removing that delicious cilantro garlic aioli from earlier, so I ordered fries instead of a salad too, figuring I would share them with everyone else at the table to assuage my guilty conscience (another Mulaney bit).

I brought home two croissants for my wife. This one was pistachio:

And this one was almond. She loved both, but I don’t think she mentioned a favorite between them.

All in all, it was a nice visit back home, and a highlight of the trip was this wonderful brunch shared with some of the best people I know. I had heard of Bachour before, but just like 90% of places I hear about in Miami, I never thought I would actually go there. Well, on this recent trip down, I scratched a few of those semi-mythical spots off my list. This was a great meal, and the company couldn’t be beat.

Canter’s Deli (Los Angeles)

Canter’s Deli (https://www.cantersdeli.com/) is a legendary Los Angeles delicatessen, a Hollywood hotspot that has been in business since 1931 and in the same location at 419 North Fairfax Avenue since 1953. The decor is pure 1950s-style Art Deco, which I associate fondly with Los Angeles delis and diners, and with the City of Angels in general. I wish everyplace was decorated this way, including my own home. Like so many other timeless restaurants I’ve enjoyed in L.A. like Langer’s Deli, Philippe the Original, HMS Bounty, The Prince, Bob’s Big Boy, and Pann’s, Canter’s retains all its old-school cool as it approaches its hundredth anniversary. I regret not taking any photos of the interior, but I was a little distracted on my one and only visit.

I visited Canter’s on my second work trip to L.A., where I met an Internet friend for the first time after knowing him online for over 25 years, along with his lovely and talented wife, who many of you may recognize.

These free pickles were delivered to the table, as any good deli should do, and they were great.

Instead of a soda or egg cream, I ordered this chocolate phosphate, kind of like a creamy chocolate soda — so not really that different from an egg cream. I just thought it would be nice to try, like an old-timey soda fountain favorite that you never see on menus anymore. Now that “dirty sodas” are a whole thing, I wish people were willing to go more retro and bring back the whole soda fountain concept. With all the jerks out there, maybe some of them could find work as soda jerks.

My friend’s wife is an actress you would have seen if you watched the first season of The Pitt, the wonderful HBO Max hospital drama that was my favorite show of 2025. She ordered a lox benedict, a classic brunch dish with a toasted English muffin topped with salty, smoky salmon, poached eggs and velvety, creamy hollandaise sauce. I didn’t try any, but it looked like a perfect version of eggs benedict. Personally, I never order benedicts at restaurants, but sometimes I make them in my own kitchen because there is no place like home for the hollandaise. At the top, she chose potato pancakes (also known as latkes) for her potato side. They are usually served with sour cream, applesauce, or in this case, both. I always recommend both.

Los Angeles is a big pastrami city, between its historic delis like Langer’s and Canter’s as well as the pastrami French dip, a more localized sandwich that hasn’t spread out of the city. (I tried one of those at a “deli-adjacent” spot more recently, and I will get around to reviewing it eventually.) Local fast food joints like Original Tommy’s and The Hat even load up burgers and hot dogs with pastrami. Somebody call Randy Newman, because I too love L.A.!

My friend, an accomplished film critic, ordered this terrific-looking pastrami Reuben sandwich with grilled pastrami (my preferred alternative to the traditional corned beef), Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing on rye bread grilled to perfection. It looked perfect, and so did the fries.

I got the Canter’s Fairfax sandwich, with generous portions of corned beef AND pastrami on rye. Just like I did at Sarge’s in NYC and Attman’s in Baltimore, when I visit a deli in a faraway city, I usually order combination sandwiches that allow me to sample as many different tastes as possible. They loaded up the sandwich higher than the pastrami sandwiches (plural!) I tried at Langer’s, but I give Langer’s the edge for the exquisite quality of their thicker, hand-sliced pastrami. Not that this was bad, by any means. It was terrific! That’s potato salad in the background — the Canter’s Fairfax comes with a choice of that or cole slaw. The good conversation distracted me, because for a mere dollar more, I could have ordered the Fresser, an identical sandwich that would have come with potato salad AND cole slaw. Oh well! At least the potato salad was excellent.

Because I’m me, I had to RING THE ALARM and try onion rings while I was at Canter’s, and I’m so glad I did. These are some of the most perfect onion rings I’ve ever had in my life. There’s something about Jewish delis just nailing the batter, the frying process, and onion rings in general. Junior’s and Sarge’s Deli in New York City both serve a very similar style. They all share rich, thick batter that holds up and doesn’t separate from the onions, and they are the perfect light, crunchy consistency that never has any burnt spots.
Yup, those are my Top Three onion rings of all time (and no others even come close): Sarge’s, Junior’s, and Canter’s. I’ve never had any quite like them here in Florida. I guess Jewish delis in major metropolitan cultural centers are the lords of the rings.

I can’t imagine how many famous, talented people have hung out at Canter’s Deli over the past 95 years, although the website drops a few dozen names. (I loved Guns ‘n’ Roses back in 8th and 9th grades, and I know they hung out at Canter’s all the time back in the late ’80s.) It is staggering to think how many genius ideas were born there, how many deals were struck there that helped shape our culture, and how many delicious deli dishes were devoured during those acts of creation and negotiation. We certainly enjoyed the heck out everything we tried. Even though there are other delis I have yet to discover in L.A., I would totally return to Canter’s on a future visit. Whenever I do, what should I try next time? I’m thinking some kind of smoked fish, but it would be hard to turn down those top-tier onion rings again.

Rawsha Mediterranean Cuisine

Rawsha Mediterranean Cuisine (https://rawshamediterraneancuisine.com/) is the first Iraqi restaurant I know of to open in Orlando, and definitely the first one I’ve ever tried. It is a very casual restaurant in a strip plaza at 8956 Turkey Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32819, easily accessible from Sand Lake Road, especially if you take I-4 and get off on Exit 74. There are plenty of tables, but no booths. You take a seat and a server will take your order, so there is no lining up at a register to place your order and pay up front.

This is their chicken shawarma, ready to be sliced off this huge rotating vertical spit:

And this is their rotating beef shawarma. More on that later, I promise.

They have their whole mise en place setup for assembling wraps and platters with carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, pickles, pickled red cabbage, pickled turnips, olives, and more.

I ordered this hala platter for my wife, figuring she would get two or more meals out of it, but I planned to taste the meats too, for the sake of journalism. It included an Iraqi kebab made of beef and lamb (on the left), a chicken kofte (in the middle; almost like a grilled meatloaf made of ground chicken with savory herbs and spices), and a lamb chop (on the right), grilled to medium. These platters come with two choices of sides: rice, fries, hummus, baba ghanouj, or fatoush. You can see we went with rice as one of the options. I was glad that my wife enjoyed all three meats, but the lamb chop seemed to be her favorite. I didn’t try it, but I can vouch for the Iraqi kebab and chicken kofte being really, really delicious. I enjoyed the char-grilled tomato, onion, and jalapeno later, and I ate the orange-looking flatbread at the top, brushed with their special red sauce and lightly grilled.

Baba ghanouj, that Middle Eastern dip of roasted eggplant and tahini paste, is one of my wife’s favorite things to eat in the world. Normally it takes on a smoky flavor from the eggplant roasting, but Rawsha’s version of baba ghanouj was light on the smoke and heavy on the tahini. Not bad, just different.

I also ordered fatoush, a delicious salad made with lettuce, tomato, red onions, cucumbers, crispy bits of fried flatbread, and I think I tasted parley and mint in there too. The dressing was very light, and may have included pomegranate molasses. I liked this more than my wife did.

This was the beef arabi, something else I expected we would split, but she wasn’t into it. It was a flatbread wrap with beef, red onions, and herbs, crisped up on the flattop grill and sliced into pretty slices, almost like how a sushi roll is served. It wasn’t crispy by the time I got it home, so this is one better enjoyed on premises.

The beef arabi came with a side of a delicious creamy garlic sauce (toom), as well as cole slaw, slices of crunchy, fresh cucumber and carrot, pickles, and pickled turnips. I thought the garlic sauce helped the beef arabi tremendously, but something more acidic inside or on top would have helped it too, like a hot sauce. Luckily, I have a house full of hot sauces.

These fries were limp and cold by the time I got home, which was reasonably foreseeable. I jazzed them up with some spicy Filipino banana ketchup, though.

The main reason I wanted to try Rawsha was to try their “crispy shawarma” that they demonstrated making in an Instagram video. It looked so good in the video, especially with all the ingredients. Even though I arrived right at 11 AM when the restaurant opened, they told me it would be 20 to 30 minutes for the shawarma to be ready. That was fine with me. I drove across town meaning to try that one specific thing, and for a change, I had nowhere to rush off to, so I killed time on my phone. It ended up taking a full hour, but whatever, these things happen (and often to me).

I’m sure the shawarma would have been in its ideal state eaten hot and fresh at the restaurant, but it took so long, and the rest of my takeout order was ready and had been sitting around for a while, so I had them wrap it up to go as well. At least it looked good, having been brushed with the aforementioned special red sauce and crisped up on all its outer surfaces on the grill. It did lose some of its crispiness on the way home, which was inevitable, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

It tasted fine, but it didn’t have any of the cool stuff inside that they included in their video: no pickles, tomatoes, tahini, or pomegranate molasses. It was just the beef sliced off the spit, and that was it. I think those other flavors, especially the acidic flavors and crunchy textures, would have balanced it out much better. Was it worth the wait? Maybe not, but I hope if you go to try it, you won’t deal with a wait like that. I would totally try it again if I could enjoy it crispy and fresh in the restaurant. Otherwise, the next time I’m craving beef shawarma, I think I will return to The Cairo Express instead. And since I visited Rawsha, I found a place that serves the best chicken shawarma I’ve ever had in my life, which I will review soon enough. But I would still return to Rawsha, especially for that Iraqi kebab, chicken kofte, and fatoush salad.

So that’s my first experience at Rawsha, raw(sha) and unfiltered. When you try it yourself (which you should), dining in would be the preferable option, as it usually is. Maybe coming later in the day is a safer bet if you don’t have a cushion of time to kill. When you taste this Iraqi food, you might find yourself singing “Oh baby, I like it RAWSHA!”

Cafe De Wan

Cafe De Wan (https://www.instagram.com/cafedewan_/) is a brand-new Turkish restaurant that just opened a few weeks ago in Casselberry. My wife and I love Turkish food, and we are still sad about Beyti Mediterranean Grill closing during the pandemic, only a year or so after it opened in our neighborhood. We really like Sourdough Bread House, another Turkish cafe in Casselberry, but Cafe De Wan is even closer, with more savory dishes on its menu. But like Sourdough Bread House, just five minutes north on Semoran Boulevard, Cafe De Wan serves an awe-inspiring Turkish breakfast feast.

We started with a spinach and onion borek (left), a flaky pastry filled with seasoned, sauteed (what else?) spinach and onions. On the right is a “Turkish pastry” that was very dense and barely sweet. These arrived at our table sliced up. They were sold separately (not part of the Turkish breakfast), but we were happy to have them, due to so many spreads and dips that were about to arrive.

The Turkish breakfast “plate” (which actually includes many plates) comes with a pot of steaming hot black tea. I am not a big tea drinker, but this was delicious, especially after adding a few sugar cubes and waiting for it to cool. I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed this tea.

Well, here we go! We first received a wooden platter with walnuts, almonds, golden raisins, grapes, orange slices, very nice green and black olives (both kinds had pits), English cucumbers, grape tomatoes, and mixed greens topped with three different kinds of cheese. The top dishes were fig jam, creamy tahini with pekmez, or grape molasses, swirled into it (not date syrup, as I originally thought), and what I thought was ajvar, a thick dip of roasted red peppers blended with garlic and olive oil, topped with a walnut. (Ajvar wasn’t listed elsewhere on the menu, but I’ve had it in jars a few times, and this was more like ajvar than any version of ezme, a spicy Turkish salsa, that I’ve ever tried.) I devoured the fig jam and ajvar, and my wife was crazy for the tahini with pekmez. A reader informed me that the combination is like Turkish peanut butter and jelly, which makes all the sense in the world. Thank you, Ipek! At the bottom, there was Nutella, that chocolatey hazelnut spread that is beloved around the world, and thick honey with decadent clotted cream in it.

The Turkish breakfast plate came with two pieces of this fantastic Turkish bread, which we both liked more than the Turkish pastry above. It was so fluffy!

This plate was menemen, a dish of scrambled eggs mixed with sauteed peppers and tomatoes and topped with a bit of cheese. I devoured the menemen since my wife didn’t want anything to do with it, so that worked out.

The Turkish breakfast plate came with yet another plate with a plain egg, fried over easy with a runny yolk. She ate that egg, and I did not get a picture of it, but I’m sure you are envisioning it in your head right now. This was so much food for $25, but we weren’t even done!

Just like I have go-to dishes that I will order anywhere (Italian subs, onion rings, chili, macaroni salad), my wife is like that with baba ghanoush, the Middle Eastern dip of roasted eggplant blended with tahini, olive oil, and garlic. We were disappointed by another new restaurant’s baba ghanoush recently, one that tasted like straight-up tahini, lacking that smoky flavor that comes from roasting the eggplants, so we were hoping for the best with Cafe De Wan’s version. It was stupendous, and the smoky flavor came through first and foremost. That’s another cured black olive on top.

The baba ghanoush came with yet another type of bread for dipping, this time pretty standard (store-bought?) soft pita bread wedges. I left most of the baba ghanoush for my wife, the true aficionado, but I used the pita for dipping in everything else on the table.

This was the lahmacun combo, one of my favorite dishes at any Turkish restaurant, which I order everywhere and have even made from scratch at home. It looks like a pizza without cheese, but it is a flatbread topped with seasoned ground lamb, onions, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and spices, baked until crispy. Instead of cutting it into slices, you essentially put a salad on top of it (usually sliced tomatoes, onions, and flat-leaf parsley — not cilantro!), squeeze on some lemon juice, and roll it up to eat like a wrap. It is so good, and this was one of the better lahmacuns I’ve tried anywhere. It was definitely the crispiest and thinnest!

This was the “dip sauce” that came with the lahmacun combo. It was kind of like toum, a creamy, garlicky dip with the consistency of hummus. It was great, especially with so many things to dip into it!

In addition to the pot of tea that came with the Turkish breakfast plate(s), my wife ordered a drink called the Crimson Bloom, a combination of hibiscus, cranberry, and clove. She always likes jamaica (hibiscus) aguas frescas at Mexican restaurants, so this was a big hit with her. It also sounds like a superhero, or possibly a villain. The white drink is homemade ayran, a yogurt drink similar to Indian lassi, but this was tangy and sour, rather than sweet like lassi. I would not have ordered it, but it came with the lahmacun combo, which was a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t really into it, but my wife enjoyed it, so that worked out well. Next time (and there absolutely will be a next time), I’ll try Cafe De Wan’s mint lemonade. It is the same price as the ayran ($3.99), so I wonder if they would consider substituting it in the future. I would definitely get that lahmacun combo again!

It is my pleasure to welcome Cafe De Wan to our neighborhood. It doesn’t offer all the savory Turkish entrees you would find on the menu at Istanbul Grill or Bosphorous, but it has more of a cafe atmosphere, for lighter meals. That luxurious Turkish breakfast plate (which deserves to be called a feast or a smorgasbord, considering how many individual plates are involved) is a perfect thing for two people on a date to share, and they offer it all day, not just during breakfast hours. Yes, I asked. I am familiar with the concept of “girl dinner” — eating little bits of this and that, and that’s how I eat many of my meals at home, usually standing up in my kitchen so I’m not away from work for too long. If you like “girl dinner,” you’ll go gaga for the Turkish breakfast plate. My only concern (and it is a small one) is that they didn’t have any of the small plastic ramekin-style containers with lids to take home small amounts of different things, but that’s okay. They had larger containers, and we made do.

Believe me, my wife and I got at least four full meals out of everything we ordered, and you may have already noticed that I eat a lot. (I’m going to try to eat less and eat healthier in 2026, though, so wish me luck! I’m gonna need it.) Please give Cafe De Wan a try, because it deserves our support. Unique restaurants like this don’t always thrive or even survive in Casselberry, and I really enjoyed it, so please help them become a dining destination!

Colorado Fondue Company

I live right near the Colorado Fondue Company in Casselberry (https://www.coloradofondue.com/), but I had not been there in close to 15 years, not since I was dating my wife. I do love dipping foods in other foods, so it surprises me that I haven’t come here more to get my dip on. The menu features a variety of cheese and chocolate fondues, meant for sharing and dipping, as well as meats that you cook yourself on heated stones on the table.

It is a beautiful restaurant space, designed to resemble a cozy ski chalet in the Rocky Mountains, so it has an upscale-yet-festive atmosphere that would be perfect for a date or a special occasion dinner. It is even nicer around the holidays, since they put a lot of effort into decorating the place like crazy for Christmas. I get depressed around the holidays like clockwork, and I don’t do any decorating or much celebrating myself, but even I was struck by how nice it was on my most recent visit with two former co-workers, now friends. That’s why I didn’t want to wait any longer to run this review, here on Christmas Eve. If I can inspire even one couple, family, or friend group to dine there together while the Christmas decorations are still up, I will have done my job (that I don’t make a dime for), and those people will have a grand time.

In addition to a la carte options, Colorado Fondue Company offers four separate dinner options, which they call “trails,” keeping the mountain ski lodge theme. You really have to get along well with the people in your party, because each of the trails requires two people per order. I guess one ravenous person could go to town, though.

The Beginner trail is the cheapest, and each person gets to choose their own soup or salad, but they have to agree on the cheese fondue and chocolate fondue for dessert. The Intermediate trail includes the choice of soup or salad, a cheese fondue, and a selection of meats, but no dessert. My party of three went with the Expert trail, so we each got a salad, we agreed on the cheese fondue, we got the meats, and we got a dessert fondue. There is an even pricier Extreme trail with more premium meats, but we were content with the Expert options.

This was the seasonal Holiday Harvest salad that one of my colleagues ordered, with chopped iceberg lettuce, roasted pumpkin seeds, Craisins, crumbled gorgonzola cheese, and sliced apples. The website mentions a bacon balsamic vinaigrette dressing, but this looks more like a ranch dressing.

Another colleague got the Mountain Mix salad, with a blend of “harvest greens” and iceberg lettuce (although that looks like all iceberg to me), a “sesame-nut trail mix blend,” and shredded sharp cheddar cheese with honey Dijon ranch dressing. I do love those crunchy, salty sesame sticks.

For my salad, I chose the Southwest Caesar, with romaine lettuce, toasted croutons, and parmesan Caesar dressing, also anointed with a sweet red pepper coulis. I had to look up coulis on my phone (a thin, pureed sauce made from fruits or vegetables), but they had me at “sweet red pepper.” I stirred it into the salad, and it was a perfectly cromulent Caesar.

We shared more than one basket of these garlic-herb rolls, with crackly exteriors and pillowy soft interiors. They were great for dipping in the cheese fondue and various condiments yet to come.

On my first visit to Colorado Fondue Company with my now-wife, we shared the original cheddar fondue, with sharp aged cheddar and Swiss Emmenthaler cheeses, a beer and bouillon base, garlic, and herbs. This time, with my two colleagues, we shared the bruschetta Jack fondue, with fontina, asiago, and Monterey Jack cheeses, roasted garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, basil pesto, and seasoned toast crumbles on top. It was great.

They brought us a basket of various breads and generic tortilla chips to dip in the fondue. The round slices of pretzel bread were my favorites. They were very similar to the frozen Bavarian pretzels I sometimes buy at Aldi, from the Deutsche Kuche brand (which I pronounce “Douche Cooch”).

The cheese fondue also came with broccoli, sliced carrots, apples, and grapes.

Slainte! L’chayim!

Next, we got two burning hot flat stones and this long platter of raw meat and seafood to cook ourselves. It included (from top to bottom): Pacific white “fusion” shrimp marinated in basil and garlic roasted pesto, coconut milk, and salt and pepper seasoning, Pacific Northwest chicken in a citrus soy marinade with mixed herbs, Colorado lodge sirloin in a teriyaki and soy-infused ginger marinade, filet mignon in roasted garlic pesto, soy sauce, lager beer, and crusted peppercorns, and at the bottom, Jamaican jerk-marinated pork tenderloin.
I don’t have any pictures of the cooked meat, but you know what meat looks like while it’s cooking and when it is cooked. If not, take a peek at similar photos of cooking and cooked meats from my trip to GG Korean BBQ earlier this year. I can tell you that all the meats were very tender except the sirloin, which was chewy. I never order filets, but I was impressed by how tender it was, especially since I like my steak bloody rare.

We also got a fondue pot of boiling hot broth to put the ravioli and potatoes in, and there were already random mushrooms and penne pasta in that broth. I was careful to avoid any mushrooms, my old culinary nemesis.

We got these four sauces for spooning onto our plates to dip: a whipped herbed cream cheese, a creamy red pepper sauce that reminded me of thinner thousand island dressing that wasn’t spicy at all, honey mustard, and savory-sweet teriyaki sauce. Me being me, the Condiment King (with all due respect to DC Comics), I probably paid more attention to these sauces than my dining companions did. But since I wanted to let the meats speak for themselves, I mostly dipped the remaining breads in them.

One of my companions, a brilliant professor and scholar, and one of the kindest people ever, chose our dessert fondue: the Winter Caramel Crunch. It combined milk chocolate, salted caramel, and Irish creme (maybe the actual liqueur, which used to be delicious back when I drank), and was topped with crushed pretzels. I can usually take chocolate or leave it, but it was a very good choice. A real crowd-pleaser, in fact. From the name, I’m guessing it is also seasonal, so try it while you can!

The dessert fondue came with this tray of cream puffs, graham crackers, marshmallows, pretzels, cake pieces, Rice Krispy Treat pieces, sliced bananas, and strawberries. Dipping things in the fondue is always fun, but I ate the strawberries plain, since I like them best that way.

It was really nice catching up with these ladies, since I don’t work with them anymore, and the setting and dinner could not have been better. It would have been pleasant even if we went to some dive, but instead, we had a long, luxurious meal in one of the prettiest restaurants in Seminole County, if not the entire Orlando area.

Seriously, get over there ASAP, before they take down all those Christmas decorations! You won’t be sorry. If you get sentimental and nostalgic at Christmas (and I’m one of the few sad weirdos who doesn’t), you’ll be in holiday heaven. And if you don’t want to splurge too much, you can have a totally nice, light dinner date by just going with the Beginner trail: salads, a cheese fondue you all have to agree upon, and a chocolate fondue you all agree upon, with all the accoutrements, for $16.50 per person. Then you can just focus on dipping and good conversation, without having to cook your own meat.

The Baker’s Son by Valerio’s

The Baker’s Son by Valerio’s (https://thebakersonusa.com/) is a Filipino-American bakery/cafe that first opened in Jacksonville, but opened a second, much larger location in Kissimmee this past Thursday, December 4th. (The address is 4797 W. Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway, Kissimmee, FL 34746, in front of the Target.) I have been following its progress, excited about sampling new and unfamiliar sweet and savory baked goods, as well as any drinks and dishes they might serve.

According to the website, owner-operator Jun Valerio is a third-generation Filipino-American baker, and his family owns multiple Valerio’s bakeries on the West Coast. Jun and his wife Kathleen ran Valerio’s locations in California, Seattle, and Canada before opening their own spinoff, the first Baker’s Son location, in Jacksonville, which has a larger Filipino population than the Orlando area. But now that they have opened in Kissimmee, I have a feeling they will have a huge hit on their hands with mass appeal that will reach beyond Filipino locals and tourists.

I finally made the hour drive to the new Kissimmee location on Saturday morning, hoping to beat the lunch rush, but instead I found myself in a slow, serpentine line that wrapped around the entire store. There weren’t any employees directing traffic, but customers walked to the left upon entering to grab any packaged breads and sweets off the shelves, then found their way to the end of the line. I estimate it took me an hour and 15 minutes from entering the store to ordering my food and paying at the front counter, but I chatted with the guy in front of me, and everyone was patient and polite, helping point the newcomers in the right direction.

The full menu is not on the website, so I took photos for my dozens of readers, so you can study in advance. Try right-clicking on these menu photos and opening them in new tabs for slightly larger images.

This is the coffee, tea, boba, and signature drinks menu:

Here is the food menu, with merienda (snacks), rice plates, sandwiches, burgers, healthy eats, and breakfast sweets:

And this is the Cloud Series (The Baker’s Son’s version of milkshakes), plus soft serve ice cream:

The coffee drinks people were picking up from the cafe counter all looked delicious, but coffee makes me feel terrible. I, on the other hand, have never met a cold, refreshing, citrusy drink I didn’t like, so I got the fresh calamansi juice. Calamansi is a fruit that is similar to lime, and its juice adds sour notes to many Filipino recipes. This was similar to limeade — sweet, sour, and so refreshing.

After how long the line took, I didn’t know how long it would take for the food I ordered to be served, so I asked for an empanada when I got to the counter. They looked really good. This was a little smaller than a typical Cuban empanada:

It had a saucy, seasoned beef filling with some raisins, but it was nothing like the picadillo filling I’m used to in Cuban empanadas. It was definitely saucier, and the fried shell had a really pleasant salty-sweet flavor and didn’t taste or feel greasy.

I really wanted to try something with longanisa, a sweet and savory Filipino sausage. They offer a longanisa burger, but since I was planning to eat there after waiting that long, I chose something that would not have traveled well: loaded longanisa fries. These were really crispy fries that any fry lover would love, topped with crumbled longanisa sausage, caramelized onions, creamy garlic sauce (like an aioli), and an over-medium fried egg. It was so delicious and decadent.

I’ve had bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches on my mind recently, so since I didn’t get a burger, I opted for the tocino glazed bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, served with sweet glazed bacon called tocino, scrambled eggs, American cheese, and a crispy hash brown patty on a pillowy-soft roll called pan de sal (literally “bread of salt”) that had been grilled to crisp up its interior. Pan de sal (sometimes stylized as pandesal) is one of the specialties of The Baker’s Son, so I’ll come back to that a little later.

This was sinigang popcorn chicken off the merienda (snacks) menu. I certainly didn’t need it, and it was a bit of an impulse buy, but the guy in front of me said he was going to get it, and I trusted him. He said it should have a sour seasoning sprinkled on it, but even though mine was good, with a crispy, crunchy batter, it didn’t taste sour to me. While writing this, I found out that the sour sinigang flavor usually comes from tamarind.
I ate most of the above food on site, but took most of the chicken home with me, where I will try it with my huge collection of condiments and sauces.

But since I was at a brand-new bakery, I couldn’t leave without buying some bread. I bought the smallest bag of pan de sal they had. These were smaller rolls, like dinner rolls, but they had much larger bags with larger rolls, more like what I had with my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich (think of typical burger buns). They are made with flour, eggs, yeast, sugar, salt, and powdered milk, so they will be nice and light and fluffy and slightly sweet. They reminded me a bit of Japanese milk bread.

This was pan de coco, more small, fluffy rolls stuffed with a sweet spread made of young coconut. (If any MCs are looking for a new stage name, may I suggest “Young Coconut”?)

And this box of Spanish bread is a bit like buttery, soft brioche, with a sweet, buttery, creamy filing in the center. I would have been fine with one or two, but they only came in boxes of six.

They had so much more to choose from, including a lot of sweeter breads, rolls, and pastries, many of which had lots of icing and/or ube (sweet purple yam) filling. But I knew my wife wouldn’t be terribly interested in any of these, so I reigned myself in. I like to make sandwiches at home, so I could level up my sandwich game with all these different rolls.

I would definitely recommend The Baker’s Son, even though people might want to wait a little longer to avoid the long lines. Most new restaurants will have a certain amount of hype involved, and I did make the choice to go on the third day it was open, but I suspect it will calm down soon enough (and probably be a lot more chill on normal weekdays, rather than the Saturday of its opening week). Most of the people waiting inside with me were Filipinos of all ages, and I could sense their excitement and pride in The Baker’s Son. I couldn’t be happier for them, or for the Valerio family and their staff, or for the rest of us, having a bakery/cafe like The Baker’s Son as an option in the Orlando area. Head down to touristy Kissimmee when you can, and please let me know what you ordered and what you thought!

Woodlands

Woodlands (http://www.woodlandsusa.com/) is a vegetarian Indian restaurant on South Orange Blossom Trail, very close to my favorite Indian restaurant, Bombay Street Kitchen (which is not strictly vegetarian). That area is pretty far from me, so one day I went for lunch on a weekend while my wife was getting her hair cut and colored, knowing that whole process would take a few hours.

Woodlands specializes in dishes from Udupi, a town on India’s southwestern coast. Since I went alone and was a little intimidated by the menu, I ordered a few things, fully expecting to end up with lots of leftovers to bring home. I started with a tall glass of cool, tangy, sweet, creamy mango lassi:

I don’t even remember ordering this, but it is a soup called rasam, described on the menu as “Traditional South Indian Sour’n Spicy Soup.” The sour ‘n spicy aspects would have appealed to me, especially since I was ordering several carb-heavy dishes to come. It is made with tomatoes and tamarind and garnished with chopped cilantro leaves. I think I got it planning to dip the various baked and fried breads in it, not realizing that they would come with their own li’l dipping cups.

These doughnut-looking fritters are medju vada, which are like savory fried doughnuts made with lentils. They were served with coconut chutney (top) and sambar (bottom), a soup of lentils, vegetables, tamarind, and various spices.

These were paneer pakora, lightly spiced fritters stuffed with homemade Indian cheese called paneer. These were about the size of fried ravioli. For those who haven’t tried paneer, it is kind of a dry, firm, crumbly cheese that doesn’t get melty like mozzarella. It is similar in texture to feta, but firmer (and a lot less salty and pungent), and also similar in texture to tofu.The darker sauce is actually brown, and it is sweet, sticky, tangy tamarind chutney. The green sauce was a delicious mint cilantro chutney that had a bit of heat.

This was the onion rava dosa, which was different from smoother-textured dosas I’ve ordered elsewhere. It is a thin, crispy crepe made of cream of wheat and rice, grilled with onions and mildly spicy chilies. It has been too long since my visit, but now I’m wondering if I got the onion rava masala dosa, which is the same thing but stuffed with potatoes and onions. For a dollar more, that’s probably what I would have ordered! Anyway, it was awesome, and I could use one of these right now.

This was garlic naan, soft and fluffy bread baked in a clay oven called a tandoor. If you’ve ever had Indian food anywhere, you have probably tried naan, and you know how delicious it is. And garlic only makes things more delicious!

These were large, fried puffy bread called batura. They are often served with stewed chickpeas as chana batura (including at Woodlands), but these were on the bread menu without the chana. They are awesome, no matter where you order them from. Anyone remotely skeptical about trying Indian food would love these. Go ahead, take those batura.

Boy, I really carb-loaded at this meal! This is what I get for going alone on a whim, without having studied the menu in advance, and without having more experienced Indian food lovers joining me. Writing about this meal so many months later, I was reminded of the cafeteria at the Hindu Society of Central Florida in Casselberry, one of the greatest hidden treasures in the entire Orlando area. Guided by a knowledgeable friend and joining other friends, that was the first place I ever tried vada, dosa, sambar, and coconut chutney, many years earlier. I guess I defaulted to familiar favorites at Woodlands.

But to wrap up this review, Woodlands is one of Orlando’s best-known and best-loved Indian restaurants, and I guarantee that you won’t miss meat if you go there, with all the delicious, flavorful vegetarian options to choose from. I love meat, but I was overwhelmed by all the choices, and I really enjoyed everything I tried. Whenever I make it back (and who knows when that will be), I would love some suggestions of what to order next time!