If an idea works in Orlando, expect it to spread. These five restaurants may be the vanguard of eating trends.
By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published October 15, 2003
[AP photo]
Inside this unusual McDonald’s there’s cheesecake on doilies, fresh pasta and omelets made to order on an experimental menu by franchisees Gary and Jean Oerther.
ORLANDO - It's understandable for Tampa Bay area diners to think that the food revolution is over. But look east, and you'll find the next generation of new foods and handsome restaurants.
Yes, the engine is Disney World. Even in down times, the theme parks draw a gazillion tourists per year to countless hotel rooms, and though some visitors match the image of National Lampoon vacationers at WallyWorld, a growing number have much more sophisticated tastes.
Disney makes Orlando an ideal test market not only because it offers exposure to such crowds, but because 30 years of megatourism have provided plenty of staffers and diners who know food well.
The restaurant of tomorrow has a steadily changing menu where food comes first; vegetables and starches get as much attention as meat. Fresh ingredients and the open kitchen are part of the decor; their beauty also comes on large white plates that show off bright colors and caramelized crusts. The menus credit all the chefs and there's often a separate one for desserts where even the ice cream is made in-house. Decor is smashing and the host stand is staffed by a mature professional who can solve any problem without fuss. (Everyone on the staff serves as a warm, unofficial greeter.)
While St. Petersburg and Tampa have a few restaurants that have all those features, Orlando has dozens, from high-end hotels to neighborhood places. (If you think Orlando is all theme park and no neighborhoods, you haven't been cafe hopping in loft-y Thornton Park on the edge of a bustling downtown scene, let alone ever-fashionable Winter Park.)
And Orlando's getting more, thanks to the two forces that are changing the American menu: celebrity chefs and corporate chains. Both have been present in Orlando for some time but they are at work in greater force and with more imaginative ideas than ever.
The changes likely to reach the bay area market and the rest of the country are those concocted with big money and sharp demographics, such as a McDonald's that serves panini and a glitzy restaurant with a weekly, revolving health-conscious menu from the folks who brought us Olive Garden and Red Lobster.
Chefs celebre arrived in Orlando decades ago when Disney brought the most noted names in France - Paul Bocuse, Gaston Lenotre and Roger Verge - to head the restaurants and patisseries of the French pavilion at Epcot.
After them came a deluge of restaurateurs and chefs from around the world, both within Disney and without.
Emeril Lagasse, the first chef of modern celebrity certified by the Food Network, arrived four years ago to open his fifth restaurant at Universal Studios' CityWalk. This year he opened another also at Universal, this one with a Cajun-Asian fusion theme.
Two more big-name chefs arrived this year: Norman Van Aken, he of South Florida's mango gang, a James Beard Award and five cookbooks; and Melissa Kelly, who won a Beard at Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn and has often been seen on TV with Martha Stewart.
Van Aken and Kelly have been installed in Orlando's latest monster hotel project, Grande Lakes. In the $100-dinner tourney, Van Aken is the Ritz-Carlton's champion; Kelly is the standard-bearer of the JW Marriott.
In the wings is Todd English of Boston and Olives fame, who will open a restaurant next month in the Swan & Dolphin resorts at Disney.
A few miles farther east up Interstate 4, Sand Lake Road leads to the tourist-clogged horrors of International Drive on one side and to Windemere and Bay Hill on the other. These are the affluent southern suburbs of the "real Orlando" where the nontourists with the best jobs in the theme parks, including the likes of Monsieur Bocuse, live.
On this part of Sand Lake, chains line Orlando's biggest restaurant row. Roy's, Bonefish and the Samba Room are all here plus local chains a-borning, like Moon Fish and Timpano, an Italian chophouse.
It's just the spot for an experimental McDonald's as European bistro the first Seasons 52 from Darden Restaurants Inc.
Although none of these restaurants are directly connected to Disney, they have their roots in the tradition, experience and huge pool of talented chefs and waiters, created by the theme park.
Here's a taste of what the celebrities and chains are cooking up in Orlando:
Bistro Gourmet at McDonald's
7344 Sand Lake Road; open daily; prices: $4.25 to $8.79.
Really. I'm not talking about that giant container of fries off I-4 that bills itself as the "World's Largest Playplace." That's pretty much a McDonald's supersized to the max.
Nope, turn to the nontourist side of the interstate and you'll find a two-story McDonald's that looks more like a steep-dormered Norman townhouse built of Legos. Look carefully inside and you'll find plenty of Big Mac's, breakfast burritos and such.
Your jaw will drop at alabaster chandeliers (under exposed pipes), walls covered with baroque mirrors and a big Renoir print. If the Boating Party isn't eating les Big Macs, neither are we. White bistro plates of fresh pasta are stacked on the marble top of a gilded bombe chest. Next to it are Euro glass cases of gorgeous cheesecakes on doilies and chocolate mousse triangles dusted with gold leaf, and a long row of unMac sandwiches from wraps to paninis. (The upstairs is a playroom with a lake view and all-American pool tables, air hockey and video games.)
This McDonald's is the gamble of Gary and Jean Oerther, the imaginative franchisees who built the biggie fry McD and five others with themes from motorcycles to ruins and safaris.
The bistro, however has a massive menu change with prices up to $8.79 for blackened grouper panini - and a small separate kitchen with a small crew in chef's garb working a separate line of grills and a free-standing pasta station.
At breakfast they do waffles, omelets and French toast, but I arrived at noon so I tried vegetarian panini and a pasta.
Eggplant and mushrooms were done better than many and the roasted red pepper was the real thing (although it's not my thing). Toasting veggies and cheese on the panini grills gave it the cross-hatched grill marks, but the ciabatta bread was too thin and greasy. To make any good sandwich work, let alone compete with Panera and crew, they've got to buy better bread. That's a huge change for McDonald's, but it has to happen.
Angel hair pasta tossed with shrimp and something of a pesto of olive oil, pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes came out surprisingly well. It was fresh, made in a few minutes and delivered to our hip, high-top table by a proud young woman in a floppy chef hat who later plated our sorbet (rock hard, sadly) with a palm tree outlined in chocolate syrup and strawberry jam.
That one was fine, but two others fell into the weeds quickly when three sandwich orders and a dessert stacked up on them. The Oerthers and their executive chef have the recipes in place, but they need a short-order cook from an IHOP to set up operational routines.
Similarly, an espresso came covered with a big hunk of frothed milk; the order taker said it was the same as cappuccino. Half the country knows the difference thanks to Starbucks.
Don't laugh. Mickey D can fix these problems easily, and this bistro has already proved to the Big Cheeseburgers that an American McDonald's can handle additional formats and more will open. Chef Mac's Cafe in New Orleans is already serving creole shrimp and po' boys.
It could happen, whether it's a good thing or not.
Emeril's Tchoup Chop
Royal Pacific Resort, Universal Orlando, 6300 Orlando Way; (407) 503-2467; open daily; lunch entrees, $13 to $24; dinner entrees, $18 to $32. Reservations required.
If you don't yet understand "Bam!," you can see and taste it at Tchoup Chop (say chop-chop) on the first floor of the Royal Pacific Resort.
The over-the-top taste of Emeril Lagasse smacks you in the face as soon as you enter. No windows, but you've never seen more color with cool blues, greens and silver, heating up with coppers and orange and gold so loud they might overcome a roomful of tourists and conventioneers. Only Chinese restaurant red is missing.
This remarkable setting is the home of Emeril's own Cajun-Asian fusion, which he created to fit the hotel's pseudo-Pacific theme - and he did it with more style than the sea plane and jungle riverboats outside suggest. Even the music, ranging through all manner of jazz and blues, somehow fits the idea of the Big Easy in China.
Only Lagasse, whose TV shtick disguises his culinary scholarship and competence, could find the journey so easy. It seems to me the bridge he found was in the rice and pork that link jambalaya and such with fried rice. Much of the menu is closer to the heavy traditional meals of Asian peasants than it is to the spare minimalism of modern Pacific Rim fare.
Here Lagasse's crew makes everything from scratch, including wontons, chorizo, shrimp toast and, of course, sauces as smooth as classic French.
Starting from those principles, the kitchen kicks up traditional fish and pork dishes with hot piri piri and serrano chilies, Kona coffee, Hawaiian sea salt, Asian pesto, rarities like Kobe short ribs and burgers, and down-home comforts such as macaroni. The best dishes are a steamed fish of the day in banana leaves with onion salsa and a clay pot of the day that often mixes seafood with a lemongrass broth.
The appetizer I tried, fried oysters, had too heavy a crust to show off the herb and ginger sauces, and a side order of green beans gave in to the fat from its pork glaze. Cooked less it might have survived.
An entree from the wok, however, combined shrimp barbecue with a kiss of ginger and Lagasse's take on fried rice with seafood. In case you didn't get your share of fat in the rice, there are wontons with a bit of chorizo.
This kind of cooking is fun and hearty, suggesting another link around the tropics, as if the strutters in a jazz parade carried bamboo parasols from their cocktails.
I don't think I found the best, but Lagasse keeps trying and I'm tempted to too, especially that oyster-stuffed quail with chorizo cream and crisp spinach.
That's the kind of diet-defying thrill you can get at the state fair, so it seems only appropriate for a culinary fantasyland.
Norman's
The Ritz-Carlton, Grande Lakes, 4012 Central Florida Parkway; (407) 393-4333; dinner nightly; three-course meal, $55; five-course tasting menu, $75; wine, cheese, beverages extra. Reservations recommended.
Forget Floribbean and Jimmy Buffett. The New World cuisine that Norman Van Aken fashioned 20 years ago at Louie's Backyard in Key West has moved uptown enough to fit the faux neoclassical precincts of a Ritz-Carlton.
The hotel itself is much like other Ritz-Carltons, an unappealing big box of rooms with an Italianate lobby of big windows and marble floors, swarming with an attractive, quietly attentive staff all in discreet uniforms that suggest you have invaded the lair of Goldfinger. (Nobody builds pink castles like the Vinoy and the Don CeSar anymore.)
Off to the side in a Palladian octagon is Norman's, a posh room of creams with a featured table surrounded by wine racks and bookshelves in the middle. With its prix fixe menu and elaborate linens, the room is luxurious enough to be an old-school French restaurant of the stuffiest sort.
But the menu is, well, Norman's, a precise deconstruction and reconstruction of the widest variety of foods and flavors to come near Florida or anywhere Europeans confronted new tastes, from the West Indies to the East. Here all their foods, from a Salvadoran steak and egg to pecan catfish and pork belly, are treated royally and globally. Pompano meets pad Thai and foie gras sits on French toast with Curacao, and all dressed to kill.
Three courses of this cooking at $55 is a bargain price, especially if you choose right. You'll understand immediately with a small amuse such as a flavorful ravioli in a near transparent consomme of tomato water with half a yellow pear tomato.
Conch chowder has never been like this. The bowl brought to the table had conch crusted with toasted coconut over vegetable salsa, handsome enough, until the waiter poured the saffron seafood cream around it and topped it with a cloud of cream. You could drown happily in this.
Our entrees didn't match those heights. Tuna wrapped in serrano ham might have worked if the fish could have survived rare, and the trimmings of charred vegetable salsa, beans and olive oil had the punch they should have. Duck came closer; sliced breast and a bit of cooked confit in tiny moo shu pancakes; the real star was salsas of beans, corn and, surprise, prunes, a great combination.
I yielded to cheese a la carte and off the cart, a proper selection from several bleus and goat cheeses to nutty, buttery curls of monastery tete de moine, all at the right temperature, served with crisp crackers, nuts, figs and dried cherries. The flaw was that on this night I ran out of server luck; out of all the polished pros around us I drew a smarmy one who was clumsy with the cheese knife, food knowledge and tableside warmth. Even at these prices I am not "the lady" or "the gentleman." That's not polite, it's phony.
Norman's is the newest of Orlando's celebrity showcases and the most ambitious, so it has kinks to work out. They should start with the music: vibe happy game-show themes, Tijuana Brass and Muzak's Bridge over Trouble Water don't fit the room, the food or the menu quotes from Jack Kerouac.
Norman's will, however, eventually "Lean forward into the next crazy adventure." Van Aken has been on plenty of others, and he should be able to get this one right, too.
Primo
JW Marriott, Grande Lakes, 4040 Central Florida Parkway; (407) 393-4444; dinner nightly; appetizers, $6 to $15; entrees, $17 to $32. Reservations recommended.
As a top brand of the chain, this hotel also indulges in a palazzo look, taller and more interesting than the neighboring Ritz. Its signature restaurant is ornately outfitted in dark woods, deep blues and grays and gilded touches. And dinner won't be cheap.
But when you enter Primo, some bit of Italian zest survives. Huge crusty loaves are stacked on the mahogany table, the crowd is loud and you can eat at the bar, or a long chef's table or at a table with a clear view of the kitchen line.
Bad choice. You'll never make up your mind what to order; everything coming across the counter looks terrific. Even the steak, a glistening bone-in New York strip propped against a pile of roasted potatoes and cippolini onions topped with grilled herbs, begs to be eaten. This is farm fresh, ripped from the garden stuff; it's lusty, not precious.
All this marvelous food is the work of Melissa Kelly, who owns Primo on the Maine coast, where New England seafood meets earthy Italian traditions.
How appropriate is that in Florida or a faceless spread of resorty Sunbelt? Who cares? It's just the jolt we need, and it's certainly food we're hungering for. Kelly may be just the person to teach us. For now, her menu is heavy with the providers she used up north for Jonah crab, Winterpoint oysters, Charentais melons and huckleberries, but she's already found local clams and tuna and goat cheese from Palm Beach.
The foraging won't be as good here (she's starting her own garden at the hotel), but she's likely to find what there is.
Whatever the origin of the ingredients, they get lively primal cooking. Or not. Kelly serves a crudo of raw fish, in the Italian sushi style of Mario Batali. On my visit it was thinly sliced yellowfin marinated in basil and a little oil, served with Japanese radish mint and slices of orange. A smart, classy idea but at $13 for small, subtle tastes, that's too steep for all but the most indulgent expense accounts.
Still that pricy taste is an anomaly. The rest of the menu doesn't stint on substance or flavor. My scallops, Maine divers and the biggest I've seen, came on remarkably smooth corn cakes with a succotash of lobster and mushrooms and a lemon butter. Wow.
Only big miscue was in cheeses. Primo had a range of the good stuff, but it arrived at my table straight from the fridge. I gave up on it and the staff quickly forgave the cost of the course and a second glass of wine. I forgave them just as cheerfully.
Primo is definitely Kelly's taste, not just her brand. On my visit two months after opening, she was working the wood-fired oven in chef-striped coveralls and black T-shirt while the local chef de cuisine Kathleen Blake inspected every plate. Kelly will be here more this winter when the Maine restaurant closes.
The Orlando tourist zone is not Maine or Italy, but perhaps it will take a visiting celebrity to teach us the spirit of food.
Seasons 52
7700 Sand Lake Road; (407) 354-5212; dinner nightly; appetizers, $3.95 to $9.75; entrees, $10.25 to $19.75. Reservations recommended.
With its Frank Lloyd Wright good looks and a menu full of lemongrass, wild mushrooms and seafood so rich in flavor and trimmings, you'd never believe Seasons 52 is both healthful and affordable.
Or that it is the latest concept of Darden Restaurants, the Orlando group that created Red Lobster 30 years ago and followed that with Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze and Smokey Bones.
It is. Founder Joe White is here shaking hands and beaming almost every night.
The delicious details were supplied by a younger generation of local celebrities, Clifford Pleau and George Miliotes, the food and wine team that elevated the California Grill at Disney's Contemporary Hotel to culinary heights. Darden lured them away in a stunning raid two years ago, and the results of the collaboration are beyond expectations.
The menu changes each week to accommodate the arrival of golden beets and oyster mushrooms, but the cooking principle remains the same. "There's no butter here. I want to get all the flavor I need out of the food and the fire. If I use a cheese, it's got to give a lot of flavor for the calories," says Pleau.
He does. A skewer of big chunks of turkey and sweet onions barbecued over mesquite are a long way from Thanksgiving and just as good; chutney of roasted apples and wild rice make a perfect accompaniment for $12.75. For extra fire in a salad, romaine lettuce gets grilled before it's dressed with lemon and Parmesan cheese.
Slower cooking produces a risotto of lobster and butternut squash as a luxurious starter or a full meal for the prudent.
Modern staples such as seared tuna and jumbo scallops get updated with gingered greens and polenta cakes and dessert gets a dramatic makeover. Nine old favorites from pecan pie to strawberry shortcake get moussed up and turned into miniature parfait glasses at $1.95 each.
Add to that a wine list that's just as long on imagination, and service as smooth as the nonfat chocolate sorbet, and it's a delightful new season.
Can such a chef-driven restaurant based on constant change and spare-no-expense construction and staffing be duplicated at modest prices around the country? Pleau says that with careful collaboration of chefs in each city, it can. It's a nice dream, one even independent restaurateurs will have to admire as much as they envy.
