Groceries – Page 2 – The Saboscrivner

Ray’s Deli & More

I really drove out of my way to find Ray’s Deli & More (https://www.raysdeliandmore.com/), which is the closest thing I’ve ever found in Orlando to the bodega-delis of New York City. It is located at 6101 South Orange Avenue in Orlando’s Pinecastle neighborhood, south of downtown (and south of the SoDo district). Once Orange Avenue splits apart into one-way southbound and northbound streets, you’ll find Ray’s in the middle. It doesn’t look like much from the outside — just a generic convenience store with an outdoor table and a lot of signs in the window — but you’ll be pleasantly surprised by all the fresh, made-to-order sandwiches you can order there.

The menu is on the website, but I also took photos of the menu board above the counter. You can right-click these photos and open them in a new tab for larger images.

Here is the deli case with plenty of high-quality Boar’s Head meats and cheeses you can buy by the pound. (The prices are also on the menu board above.) The top shelf also includes sides of potato salad, pasta salad, egg salad, and some slices of cheesecake and red velvet cake, among other things.

The main reason I sought out Ray’s Deli & More was to try the legendary chopped cheese sandwich ($10.99), a New York bodega classic, referred to in so many hip hop lyrics. They aren’t popular outside the five boroughs, but I recently learned that two different convenience store sandwich counters in Orlando offer the chopped cheese. I recently tried the one that is closer to me, but that was after five separate attempts to catch them open for business. Ray’s is across town, but it was totally worth the 45-minute schlep to the Pinecastle neighborhood south of downtown Orlando, because they were open for business during the hours they advertised, cooking up a storm, and the food turned out to be awesome.Imagine a cheeseburger and a Philly cheesesteak hooked up after a crazy night at the club, and the chopped cheese is their beautiful, greasy, cheesy love child. It is two angus burgers chopped up on the flattop grill with onions and peppers, then placed on a sub roll with American cheese, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and mayo, and then pressed on a panini press until the cheese melts. It was still warm by the time I got it home, and it was awesome. So satisfying! I always love a good burger, but I find Philly cheesesteaks often disappoint (except for the one at Cavo’s Bar & Kitchen, which is the best one I’ve ever had in Florida, and it made my Top Twelve Tastes of 2021). This chopped cheese sandwich lived up to all the hip hop hype and combined the best of both worlds. I loved it!

This was the very substantial Italian combo sub ($11.99), stuffed with Boar’s Head genoa salami, prosciutto, capocollo, provolone cheese, lettuce, tomato, and raw onion. I stuck it in the fridge as soon as I got home and enjoyed half that evening and the other half the next day, once it was chilled. I liked it a lot, especially once I got home and added some peppers and a splash of balsamic vinaigrette dressing to it. The sub roll was very soft, almost like a large hot dog bun. I don’t like rolls that are too crusty, but a slightly crustier roll might help bring this sub over the top. No regrets, though. I’m always happy to order an Italian sub anywhere, and I definitely recommend it!

Both sandwiches (and I assume all the others) came with a wee bag of chips (I chose Flamin’ Hot Cool Ranch Doritos for both, since I haven’t tried that odd flavor combo before) and a canned soda. The convenience store has a huge selection of bottled and canned drinks, but the freebie choices were pretty basic: Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, Mountain Dew. Still, free is free! I used to drink Mountain Dew A LOT, back in school, and a few sips from this can reminded me why I don’t drink much soda at all anymore.

Longtime readers, my stalwart Saboscrivnerinos, know that whenever onion rings are available, I WILL order them. These onion rings ($3.99) were just okay. They reminded me of the ones at Burger King, but you get a huge portion of them. They were limp and lukewarm by the time I got them home, but heating them up in the toaster oven the next day helped them get crispier and more satisfying. Essentially, these were condiment delivery devices. But still, RING THE ALARM!

Anyway, Ray’s Deli & More has this huge sandwich selection, plus prepared foods like several Italian pasta dishes, another case with some fried empanadas and other goodies, and they said they also serve breakfast sandwiches all day. This could be another source for New York transplants to track down their classic bodega bacon egg and cheese sandwiches, among other things. It’s a full convenience store with groceries, snacks, sodas, beer, wine, and all the accessories you might want to find at a smoke shop, too. It has a lot more character than a Wawa or 7-Eleven, and it was busy enough that plenty of people already know how good it is. I drove all the way across town to Ray’s for a chopped cheese, an Italian sub, and onion rings, and I didn’t leave empty-handed or disappointed. The only thing this bodega was missing was a great cat, ideally one who takes a pet like no problem!

Grocery Grails: Fox’s U-Bet Syrups

This week I’m taking a break from restaurant reviews to bring back my recurring Grocery Grails feature, where I review and recommend some of my favorite food products you can buy at supermarkets and grocery stores. In the past, I’ve reviewed pickles and ramen noodles in order to highlight the best store-bought varieties I’ve ever found, as well as all kinds of potato chips under the Tight Chips banner, reviewed sardines in features called The ‘Dines List, and mustards in a recurring segment called Cutting the Mustard. Stay tuned for more of those, sharp-eyed Saboscrivnerinos, but today we’re going to cool things down with something a little different.

Have you ever eaten too much, or too much of the wrong things? I have. Sometimes you get that feeling where you’re too full and bloated, or you’re an anhedonic altacocker like me and suffer from a bit of acid reflux. In that case, allow me to recommend the perfect solution for your indigestion: an egg cream! You’ve probably heard of these delightful, deli-derived digestive drinks before, and I’ve even mentioned them in some of my past reviews. An egg cream contains neither eggs nor cream, but three perfect ingredients to help you feel better after a heavy meal, and to leave a sweet, creamy, refreshing taste in your mouth: seltzer water, milk, and a flavored syrup. And folks, if you make your egg creams with anything but Fox’s U-Bet Syrups, you’re not living right!

Fox’s is one of those beloved, old-school New Yawk products that is harder to find these days, and costs a little more, but is totally worth every penny. Founded in Brooklyn in 1895 by H. Fox & Company, the Fox’s U-Bet brand is now owned by the Gold’s Horseradish company. They do not contain high fructose corn syrup, unlike many comparable brands, and they are kosher for Passover. The thick, rich chocolate syrup with the yellow label is the standard for egg creams, but I would strongly recommend it for any of your chocolate syrup needs: making chocolate milk, hot chocolate, ice cream sundaes, milkshakes, or anything else. It tastes better than any other chocolate syrups, and definitely any powder mixes I’ve ever tried.Personally, I like the U-Bet vanilla and coffee syrups even more than the chocolate, which speaks volumes about how good they are. Both of these are thinner than the thick, sticky chocolate syrup, but they are so good. They are harder to find around here, though. I found the coffee syrup once at a “bougier” Publix than my normal location, and last fall, I was lucky enough to find some vanilla U-Bet bottles marked down for clearance after Yom Kippur at another swankier Publix, so I grabbed them all. Pickles Delicatessen in Longwood also sells the chocolate and vanilla syrups.

With any of the three, squirt some U-Bet syrup into a tall glass, fill it about halfway with the milk of your choice and stir well, making sure it doesn’t all stick to the bottom and sides of your glass. Fill the rest with seltzer, stir some more, and enjoy an effervescent, foamy, sweet, creamy, classic beverage that goes so well at the end of any meal as both a dessert and a digestive aid.

Our plastic glasses have seen better days, after going through the dishwasher for 13 years, but here’s one of the many vanilla egg creams I’ve made to relax after work. Hey, as a non-drinker, I take my simple pleasures where I can find them.

Last year I discovered a game-changing new product that completely changed my egg cream game, and it can change yours too. The Polar brand makes several calorie-free flavored seltzers with all-natural ingredients, no sugar, and no gross artificial sweeteners added. Sprouts Farmers Market grocery stores in Orlando and Oviedo (but interestingly, not Winter Park) sell a toasted coconut flavor of Polar seltzer that is absolutely delicious on its own, but elevates chocolate, vanilla, or coffee-flavored egg creams to the next level. Think about how good a toasted coconut flavor would be when combined with any of those flavors, but especially my absolute favorite, the vanilla. Combine that with 1% or 2% milk (which still taste so luxurious to me, after growing up in a house with skim milk, or vaguely milk-flavored water), and your egg cream will taste so much richer and more decadent than it really is. I buy every bottle of Polar toasted coconut seltzer on the shelf every time I see them at Sprouts, just so we never run out!

Last year, a really good friend visited Rhode Island and brought me back this huge bottle of Autocrat coffee syrup, completely unknown here in Florida, but a standard shelf staple in Rhode Island, where everyone drinks “coffee milk.” (Yes, it’s essentially the same thing as chocolate milk, just made with coffee syrup. And I knew about it because I am obsessed with regional foods, especially anything I can’t easily find around here.) I despise autocrats in real life, and there are far too many of them these days with too much power and control, but I sure did like the coffee syrup named after them.I almost never drink coffee due to the aforementioned acid reflux, but I like the taste of a sweet, creamy, chilled, coffee-flavored beverage. Naturally, I enjoyed comparing it to the Fox’s U-Bet coffee syrup and using it in some coffee egg creams with plain and toasted coconut seltzer. I decided the Autocrat works great for coffee milk, but nothing can touch the flavors of the Fox’s U-Bet products for egg creams.

If you read through this review and still have no idea what I’m talking about, treat yourself to a bottle of Fox’s or find a deli or a bagel shop willing to mix you up an egg cream. You’re not gonna regret this!

Grocery Grails: Sun Noodle fresh ramen kits

Everyone loves ramen, right? I sure do. I never even tried ramen noodles until I moved away to go to college, and then they were de rigeur dorm food — bricks of fried noodles that came with seasoning packets (mostly salt and MSG) that you could turn into soup with just a pot of water boiled on an illegal hot plate. Best of all, when we were poor all the time, you could get six or seven packages of this instant ramen in a multitude of flavors for a buck. I quickly learned I liked my ramen best after draining the water and mixing the seasoning directly into the noodles themselves, like eating very salty flavored pasta. When my old band spent our freshman year Spring Break touring Florida for a week, we brought bread, peanut butter, and bricks of instant ramen, which we ate uncooked, just crunching away at them in random parking lots. All of this was extremely unhealthy, but ramen helped get me through three degrees, especially when paired with proteins like canned tuna or sardines, or sometimes chicken or sausage if I was feeling flush.

I wouldn’t discover the glory and grandeur of “real,” authentic Japanese ramen until my 30s, when I was a little shocked over spending $10 or more for a bowl of the good stuff. But it was so good, and I wondered where this real ramen had been all my life. I tried a few and quickly realized tonkotsu ramen was my favorite, a creamy pork bone broth served with a slice of fatty roast chashu pork. So delicious, and streets ahead of the cheap stuff that sustained me for so long. I’ve had particularly lovely tonkotsu ramen at Ramen Takagi, Susuru, and Domu here in Orlando, and those are links to my reviews. The tonkotsu at Ramen Takagi even made my Top Ten Tastes of 2020 in Orlando Weekly!

But sometimes you just want to make ramen at home for a nostalgic night in. Orlando is blessed with a huge number of Asian markets, some of which are as huge as any Publix supermarket, and all of which feature a selection of ramen and other noodles that put Publix to shame. And they aren’t all the fried dry bricks either — many brands offer fresh and frozen noodles that can be cooked just as easily, except the texture, taste, and quality are so much better. Well, constant readers, I might have discovered the best store-bought ramen of all, so I had to share in another Grocery Grails feature.

The brand is Sun Noodle. Based in Hawaii and founded by Hidehito Uki in 1981, Sun Noodle furnishes many of the best ramen restaurants in the U.S. with its fresh, springy noodles. Seriously, if you don’t believe me, check out these features on Eater and Serious Eats and in Honolulu Magazine. In recent years, Sun Noodle started producing ramen kits for home cooks to make fast, easy, restaurant-quality ramen with their fresh noodles and rich, flavorful concentrated soup bases that are a great leap forward from the salty powder packets we all know.

I recently found all three Sun Noodle ramen kits at Enson Market, formerly known as 1st Oriental Market, at 5132 West Colonial Drive in the Pine Hills neighborhood west of downtown Orlando, full of Asian restaurants, markets, and other businesses. I found all three varieties in the cooler and bought them all: tonkotsu, shoyu, and miso ramen kits. Each one comes with two servings. Keep in mind these are perishable, so eat them or stick them in the freezer so they don’t go bad, which would be a damn shame.

Of course I had to start with the tonkotsu, my favorite:

The back of each package includes cooking directions, nutrition information, and ingredients. Note that this tonkotsu soup base contains pork extract, lard, and chicken powder, so it is definitely not for vegetarians!

Each package includes two separate portions, with individually wrapped noodles and soup base packets. The concentrated tonkotsu base was a thick, sticky paste the color of butterscotch pudding. Let me save you the trouble — don’t bother tasting it. You probably won’t like it, at least not until you mix it with hot water and stir well to create the creamy tonkotsu broth you were hoping for.

Here is my tonkotsu ramen, which I served with some corn and a piece of Filipino pork adobo, the only pork I had on hand. It was great! Definitely not as good as Ramen Takagi and the other aforementioned restaurants, because they make their broth from scratch and include house-made chashu pork and other fine ingredients. Cobbled together from a ramen kit, a can of corn, and a hunk of leftover pork that wasn’t even from a Japanese recipe, it was still some damn fine ramen, and far better than any instant ramen I’ve tried before. The rich, creamy broth was better than I could have imagined, made with that paste instead of a powdered seasoning blend.

A week or so passed, and I decided to bust out the shoyu ramen, which is soy sauce-flavored.

Nutrition info and ingredients. This one includes dried sardine extract powder, so vegetarians, stay away.

How everything looks before cooking. Note the shoyu ramen noodles are more of a rich golden color than the paler noodles that came in the tonkotsu kit above.

And here’s the prepared soup, with more corn and some crunchy fried onions. They’re not just for Thanksgiving green bean casserole anymore! I think I liked these noodles better, but I definitely prefer the rich, porky flavor of the tonkotsu broth to the almost overwhelming saltiness of the shoyu broth. And yet, it was still better than any instant ramen I’ve ever tried.

Most recently, I made the miso ramen, which is soybean paste-flavored. Now, I’ve had miso soup at Japanese restaurants before, but only when it came with something else I ordered. I must admit I never get too excited about it, because it never tastes like much to me. I’ve never really sought out tofu or other soy-based meat substitutes, and it certainly never occurred to me to order miso ramen at any restaurants when tonkotsu was an option. But I tried it for you, constant readers, for the sake of SCIENCE and JOURNALISM! I may never be the kind of “influencer” food blogger that gets invited to free meals and fancy events, but I will definitely keeping reporting on the best local restaurants and the most interesting groceries you can find at local markets.

Anyway, here are the nutrition info and ingredients for the miso ramen. Yes, it is vegetarian-friendly!

The fresh noodles and soup base packet. This one was also a thick paste that I poured the hot water from the noodles into and stirred.

And here is my miso ramen, with (surprise!) more corn, more crunchy fried onions that didn’t stay crunchy for long. I decorated this bowl with black sesame seeds, and that cherry on top is actually a bulb of black garlic, with a very complex and surprisingly sweet flavor, and a chewy consistency like gummy candy.

Interestingly, this was the most complex flavor of all. Having never tried miso ramen before, I can barely even describe it, but there was a lot going on — all of it good.

I strongly recommend these to anyone curious, and I would definitely buy them again to keep in the freezer for when I crave ramen. This happens a lot, by the way. I’m sure there are other great ramen brands to make at home, but Sun Noodle is kind of a big deal. I was thrilled to discover these existed, and then to find them locally. Have you tried these? Is there another variety of ramen you recommend, either a brand, a flavor, or both? Your friendly neighborhood Sabsoscrivner is always on the lookout for gustatory glory with Grocery Grails.

Grocery Grails: A Plethora of Pickles

I spent most of my life not liking pickles, despite being a Jew who loves New York-style Jewish deli food more than just about anything. So I’ve been on a long quest to find pickles I liked, with most of them ranging from “meh” to “feh.” My long-time readers will recognize that I’ve brought this up a lot. I can’t try any pickles without commenting on them and somehow ranking them in my head.

Well, thanks to our local barbecue maven Chuck Cobb of Git-N-Messy BBQ (which I reviewed right here on The Saboscrivner last fall and have been frequenting ever since), I’ve found the best pickles I’ve ever tried, and very possibly the best pickles ever: Grillo’s Dill Pickle Chips. Don’t worry, in pickle parlance, “chips” refers to round slices, not pickle-flavored potato chips. See https://www.grillospickles.com/ for more information. But I have snacked on them like potato chips or tortilla chips; they’re that good!

The only ingredients are cucumbers, water, distilled white vinegar, salt, garlic, fresh dill, and GRAPE LEAVES. They are firm, crunchy, and not overly salty, which is always nice. There’s a slight sweetness to them, something I felt was missing from every bite I’ve ever taken of a dill pickle before, but there’s no sugar listed, so maybe it’s the grape leaves. They’re fantastic. I’d put them on just about anything.

At least at Florida’s ubiquitous Publix supermarkets, Grillo’s Pickles are in the refrigerated case above the hot dogs, where they keep the “fancier” pickles and sauerkraut. These came in a relatively small container that cost $4.99, but they’re worth every penny. Sometimes they go on sale. If they do, stock up, pickle peeps!

And of course, as a librarian and a nerd, I have to research anything I like, so here’s an article about Grillo’s Pickles from FoodDive.

More recently, I was at Target picking up a few things and found Grillo’s Classic Dill Pickle Spears in a 32-ounce plastic container in their refrigerated case. I was a little more hesitant to get full spears, rather than the sliced chips that fit so well in sandwiches, but it was a very good price: $5.99 for that much larger container. Well, even though they taste the same as the chips, I didn’t like chomping on the spear as much, compared to the perfect flatness and crunch of the sliced chips. Plus, the spears were just a little more inconvenient for fitting on a burger.

Grillo’s makes hot pickles too, so I’ll have to try those eventually. I never thought I’d be so enthusiastic about pickles, but if I could like Grillo’s that much, then normal people who have always liked pickles should really taste the difference as well. The brine is so good, I always keep it and make pickled eggs in the Grillo’s brine.

I am also a huge fan of shopping at Aldi, the discount supermarket chain that offers amazing deals on everything, including some serious gourmet shit. I buy the majority of our groceries at Aldi now — they can’t be beaten for quality and value on staples like fruit, vegetables, cheese, eggs, and salami. I check their weekly ads online every Wednesday to see their special buys for each week — interesting foods and other products that are only there for a week, or until they run out. Aldi sells a lot of “private labels” that are usually national or international products from familiar brands, just relabeled as store brands that are exclusive to Aldi.

In recent months, I’ve discovered and tried three delicious kinds of sliced pickles from Aldi — two private labels and one national brand. These were all weekly “Aldi finds” that I picked up at various times. They probably won’t be available there now, but watch those weekly ads, and be on the lookout for their return.

The two private labels are the Great Gherkins spicy maple bourbon pickles, which were new to me, and the Park Street Deli sweet horseradish pickles, which were my favorites until I discovered Grillo’s. I still like them a lot, though. Like the Grillo’s brand, the Park Street Deli pickles are sold refrigerated, and they have other varieties, including regular spears and “atomic spicy.” Suckerpunch Gourmet Pickles is a national brand, and I wanted to try their Spicy Bread N’ Better pickles too, since I was reminded of a friend and colleague’s ska-punk band I like a lot.

I recently tested out all three of these pickles on Krystal sliders, one of my favorite snacks that I’ve reviewed before. I ordered a dozen Krystals with cheese, the standard yellow mustard, and extra onions, but I asked them to hold their usual mediocre pickles.

Here are the Great Gherkins spicy maple bourbon pickles on four Krystal sliders, so I could gauge their full effect. I think the strong flavors overpowered the sliders. They have that nice crispness, but they’re a little too sweet and not as spicy as I was hoping.

The Suckerpunch Spicy Bread N’ Better [sp] pickles were also sweeter than they were spicy. They would be a perfect pickle on a larger, more substantial burger to cut the juicy richness and saltiness, but again, Krystal sliders are delicious but puny, and these pickles were overpowering.

I’ve been buying Aldi’s Park Street Deli sweet horseradish pickles the longest, so I already knew I liked them a lot, especially on homemade burgers. Of these three kinds of pickles, they were the best on the Krystal sliders, but the slices are thicker than I would like. They are nice and crunchy, not quite as horseradishy as I would like, but not as sweet as the two aforementioned pickles. These were the best of the three, but would have been even better if the slices were thinner.

Sharp-eyed Saboscrivnerinos, you can see Krystal has pretty decent breaded onion rings now. RING THE ALARM, WHAT WHAT!

But I felt like the two newer, sweeter pickles still deserved another chance, so I made my own really delicious cheeseburgers to try them. I don’t like the flattened “smash burger” style, so my burgers are thicc, juicy, and medium rare. I served these with American cheese (the best cheese for a burger), Cuban mustard, and a little ketchup. Check out these perfect golden buns, spread with garlic aioli and lightly browned in the pan:

Now with the Great Gherkins and Suckerpunch pickles:

Both of these pickles went so much better with the juicier, higher-quality burgers, with their sweetness working well to offset the saltiness of the meat and tanginess of the mustard and ketchup. Their crunch held up well, especially with the light, toasty crispiness of the pan-grilled buns. I give the edge to the Suckerpunch Spicy Bread N’ Better pickles here, but they were both good pickles that led to even better burgers.

Now I’m thinking about all the foods that pickles could go well with, and I am psyched to experiment more. I’ve already chopped pickles up in chicken and egg salads and made my own relish the last time I cooked hot dogs. (I buy the Boar’s Head all-beef hot dogs with the snappy natural casing, and they are awesome.) Salty, sour Saboscrivnerinos, which pickles do you like, and how do you eat them? Inquiring minds want to know!

But so far, the only pickles I’ve just gone to the fridge and sought out as a solo snack are the Grillo’s, which are above and beyond all the rest. In this pickle pantheon, they sit on the throne of gods.

Tight Chips: Whole Foods 365 sandwich-flavored potato chips

I’ve been meaning to review more of the random grocery purchases I’ve tried, when I discover something worth recommending. Sometimes little treats and new discoveries are enough to get us through the day. But that should be a special Saboscrivner feature that deserves a special name, so I went with Grocery Grails because I love alliteration and assonance as much as Silver Age Stan Lee. But for when I focus on one of my favorite foods, potato chips, I have an even more special heading: Tight Chips.

As one of the biggest lovers of sandwiches and new chip flavors, I recently made my first post-quarantine trip to Whole Foods to track down these new sandwich-flavored potato chips from their 365 house brand. I rarely shop at Whole Foods (more like “Whole Paycheck,” am I right?), but these were on sale for a very reasonable $2.39 each, and let’s face it, I probably would have paid more for them and been happy to do it.

Cuban Press ingredients:

Italian Hoagie ingredients:

Pastrami on Rye ingredients. Vegetarians, take note of the beef stock in these chips:

Here are the chips. All three flavors look exactly the same, so there was no purpose to posting three nearly-identical pictures:

They are thinner potato chips like Lay’s, not super-thick, crunchy kettle chips. I actually prefer this consistency. They are easier on my gums, too.

Unfortunately, none of them tasted much like the sandwiches that inspired them. I definitely picked up the flavors of pickles, mustard, and a smoky flavor reminiscent of ham in the Cuban Press chips (and seriously, has anyone ever called a Cuban sandwich or Cubano a “Cuban Press”?). The Pastrami on Rye chips reminded me of smoke, pepper, and the vinegary tang of sauerkraut, but unfortunately the Italian Hoagie chips were the least like their inspiration, with a subtle taste of Italian herbs, maybe a bit of tomato and vinegar. They were all exceedingly salty, even by potato chip standards, to the point where I was thinking “Enough, already!”

So if you’re anything like me and you love to try new and novel chip flavors, I highly recommend them for that purpose. But go in with tempered expectations and don’t expect them to rock your tastebuds or change your life for the better. My best advice is to seek out the actual sandwiches and pair them with some of your favorite chips, no matter what they are. (What are your favorites, anyway? The Saboscrivner is always interested in what other people are eating.) But for sandwiches in the Orlando area, I recommend Italian hoagies from LaSpada’s Original Philly Cheese Steaks and Hoagies (specifically the LaSpada’s Famous), Stasio’s Italian Deli and Market (the Stasio), and Manzano’s Deli (the Rocco). You can get a great pastrami on rye from Pickles Delicatessen in Longwood, and the biggest and best Cuban sandwich I’ve ever had in Orlando is from one of my recent discoveries, College Park Cafe.

Tortilleria El Progreso

Orlando is full of hidden treasures, and my latest discovery is Tortilleria El Progreso (https://www.tortilleriaelprogreso.com/), nestled in a nondescript strip shopping center in the shadow of a Home Depot, along a busy, industrial stretch of East Colonial Drive, west of the 417 and east of Semoran Boulevard. It is a bustling Mexican restaurant and a full Mexican grocery store with a butcher shop, a bakery, an ice cream counter, and more. This is real Mexican food, authentic and pure — the kind of place that makes its own tortillas, chips, and everything else from scratch. The menu is huge, the service is friendly, the prices are cheap, the portions are large, and the colorful, welcoming dining room with hand-painted chairs makes you feel transported away from Orlando, to a vacation destination south of the border.

I went for lunch with a professional colleague who trusts my restaurant-choosing judgment and was kind enough to treat. We started out with complimentary chips and salsa, and we could tell the chips were fresh, made from actual tortillas not long before our arrival:

Whenever I see tortas on a menu, I go for it. If there’s one thing I love more than a good taco, it’s a good sandwich, and tortas are the best of both worlds: Mexican ingredients on a soft bolillo or telera roll, with meat, a schmear of refried beans, avocado, shredded lettuce, tomato, onions, sometimes peppers, and a dab of mayo or sour cream. I got a barbacoa torta, with tender, oven-braised beef. It even came with unexpected fries, but the fries weren’t anything special, and I didn’t dare fill up on them.

But I couldn’t visit a new Mexican restaurant and not sample two of my favorite meats, so I got a chorizo (spicy crumbled sausage) taco on a flour tortilla and an al pastor (marinated pork) taco on a corn tortilla, so I could try both kinds of tortillas too. All the tacos came simply garnished with diced raw onions and chopped cilantro, with lime wedges on the side. I am pleased to say everything was delicious.

My colleague ordered three tacos: shredded chicken and sauteed beef, hold the onions.

We were also offered a choice of red or green salsas for the table, so of course I asked for both. The green tomatillo salsa was medium-spicy, and the red had quite a bit of heat. These were homemade as well:

We also decided to try a side order of the Mexican rice, which was soft, fluffy, even a little buttery. I have a rice cooker at home because my rice never comes out right from a pot, but I still never get it as perfect as all the restaurant rice I enjoy. I stirred a little of the salsas into the rice, to make a good thing even better.

I was overjoyed to see aguas frescas on the menu, which is one of my tests for how authentic and good a Mexican restaurant is going to be. These refreshing drinks are sweet, but not as sweet as high fructose corn syrup-laden sodas, they aren’t carbonated, and they’re ideal for cutting the heat of spicy Mexican food. I ordered a piña agua fresca because I will always try anything pineappley, and I recommended another one of my favorites to my colleague: horchata, which is a sweet rice milk flavored with cinnamon and vanilla. I didn’t snap photos of those, but they were both terrific.

I can’t wait to return to Tortilleria El Progreso and try some more menu items, including some of those other aguas frescas, and some of the paletas (popsicles) and helados (ice creams) in the big case at the front of the restaurant. It looked like the market side had bolillo rolls in the bakery section for tortas, fresh tortillas, sodas, snacks, and other groceries worth exploring. I love grocery shopping at new places almost as much as I love trying new restaurants, so I will definitely be back to this newly-discovered hidden treasure that plenty of other people surely already knew about.

Bravo Supermarket

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big fan of grocery stores and grocery shopping. It’s the only kind of shopping I enjoy, in fact. I regularly stop at multiple stores to pick things up: Aldi (my favorite), Publix, Costco, occasionally Trader Joe’s, Fresh Market, and Target if I’m near them.

We recently had a Bravo Supermarket open near us, which is aimed at the Latinx community and specializes in groceries and prepared foods from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. (https://www.bravosupermarkets.com/)

The prices are fantastic, and as you would expect, they carry all kinds of stuff Publix doesn’t. I got my wife an assortment of coconut waters, since they have over a dozen different brands and varieties: some with pulp and some without pulp, some roasted, some “young” coconut, etc.

The hot foods counter is set up like a cafeteria line, where you can get a styrofoam box stuffed to bursting with the rice of your choice (white, yellow with pigeon peas, or a specialty rice) with an entree and a side, for $7 and change. I’ve been twice so far. Last week, I brought home roast pork over yellow rice with tostones (crispy-fried plantains) for my wife and stewed goat over fried rice with maduros (sweet plantains) for myself. Today being a Friday, I remembered they had rabo (oxtail) as a special of the day, and I always love oxtail. I got mine over moros rice (white rice stewed with black beans and onions) with maduros.

bravo_oxtails

It was really good oxtail, but nothing beats when I get it at the Jamaican restaurant Golden Krust, one of my favorites. I’ll have to go back soon and review it.

The prepared foods counter also has quesitos, empanadas, pastellitos, Jamaican beef patties, some desserts, and they will make you Cuban coffee, too. Their quesitos (pastries stuffed with sweetened cream cheese) are very tasty, but much doughier and chewier than I’m used to. The quesitos from the Cuban restaurants back home in Miami were usually made of a flakier, crispier, almost croissant-like dough that often shattered when you bit into them. Both are good, though.