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If it feels a little lonely in here it's because Scott Joseph's Orlando Restaurant Guide has moved. It no longer has a Typepad address. You can find it now simply at scottjosephorlando.com. If you've got the old address in your bookmarks, you'll want to change it over.
Come on over and join everyone else, and see all the new things the flog has to offer.
Scott
Walt Disney World officials have set the dates for the 14th annual Epcot International Food & Wine Festival. The six-week affair will run from Sept. 25 through Nov. 8, 2009. The entire festival roster won't be posted until late July, and tickets to events, such as wine pairing dinners and the Party for the Senses gatherings, won't go on sale until August 11. Many of the more popular events typically sell out within minutes.
According to a press release from Disney:
More details as I get them.
Each year, in July, the excellent Web site Theme Park Insider announces its awards for excellence in various categories among the country's theme parks. Best theme park restaurant is one of the categories.
This year, all five finalists are in Orlando theme parks, so TPI founder and editor, Robert Niles, has asked me to post my reviews of those restaurants for his readers, as well as readers of the flog here. I don't have a say in selecting the winner, that's up to you. At the end of each review, I'll give you a link to TPI's listing for that restaurant so you can vote or leave a comment. Robert will announce the winner on July 4th.
This week we look in on Hollywood Brown Derby at at Disney's Hollywood Studios. I hadn’t done a full review of HBD since it opened in 1989, so when I visited the full-service restaurant recently it was like going back in time.
Which is precisely what Disney culineers were going for when they designed the restaurant to emulate a 1930s era eatery. Though not a replica of the original, which, sadly, no longer exists, Disney’s Derby is reminiscent of an old-timey Los Angeles restaurant, with teak and mahogany accents, and the walls are filled with celebrity caricatures that duplicate those that hung in the West Coast restaurant. Actually, nearly 20 years after the first visit, those caricatures are less recognizable now than they were before as the stars fade further into the past. I could barely identify a fraction of the pictures.
But that isn’t important. What matters is the food, service and ambience. The latter is really kind of nice. The sunken dining room with mezzanine seating on two sides transports guests from the hubbub of the park outside into a Hollywoodland atmosphere. Sure, you’ve got big families with crying kids and people dressed casually, but just pretend you’re dining with the Jolie-Pitt brood and you’ll be fine.
Service was good on one of my lunch visits but lackadaisical and slow on another. The waiters are outfitted in white tuxedo jackets and most offer top-notch care.
I started my lunch with sweet Zellwood corn chowder ($9), which also had bits of applewood smoked bacon. It was a large bowl -- whether it was worth nine bucks is up for debate -- and the kernels of corn still had a nice bit of crunch. I would have liked to have seen some more bacon, and the drizzle of ancho chili oil on the top, which resembled something like an oil slick, didn't add a lot, but overall it was a nice chowder.
The original Brown Derby is where the Cobb salad was invented. It was the creation of former Derby owner Bob Cobb (you’d think he’d go by Robert, wouldn’t you?), who whipped up the salad as a late-night snack for a Hollywood VIP back in the '30s. The story goes that there wasn’t much in the fridge the night the bigwig came in so Cobb just chopped up what he could find. It’s the chopping that defines a Cobb today. A woman once wrote to me to chide me for my description of a Cobb salad at some restaurant saying that a Cobb salad was comprised only of ingredients that grew on a cob. Here the Cobb has greens, turkey breast, egg, bacon, tomatoes, blue cheese, avocado and chives. The basic salad is $15, but for two more bucks you can have some chicken cubes added. I splurged. The salad was delivered in a large bowl with the various ingredients grouped together. The man who brought the Cobb to the table asked if I would like him to toss everything together. I figured I’d let an expert do it.
Except for being unable to identify the greens – they looked sort of like soggy parsely but didn’t have that sharp taste – I liked the salad, especially the chewy bacon and salty blue cheese.
I also had the grilled Atlantic salmon (26), a sizeable, fresh-tasting fillet that had a delightful charred edge. It was served atop a bed of baby spinach on a platform of thickly sliced ugli tomatoes (I guess that would make it a platform bed). There were too many tomatoes and not enough cannellini beans, and I couldn't discern the bacon vinaigrette that the menu promised.
For dessert I had the grapefruit cake ($7), which the menu touts as a Brown Derby original! The exclamation point was unnecessary, and so were the calories. The yellow layer cake with cream cheese frosting was undistinguished in flavor.
I was a solo walk-in on a weekday and waited only a few minutes for a table. Either most guests are looking for something a little less pricey, or maybe something less formal, or I just got lucky. It’s always a good idea to make a reservation in advance, or, if you are already in the park, stop by and arrange a table for later in the day.
Disney's Hollywood Brown Derby offers a quiet respite from the park's hubbub, and a chance to feel as though you're dining in a stylish Hollywood restaurant among famous movie stars, albeit poorly dressed ones. In that respect, maybe this is less about the 1930s and more about the 2000s.
Hollywood Brown Derby serves lunch and dinner daily. Reservations can be made at 407-939-3463.
To vote for this restaurant at Theme Park Insider, click on the Hollywood Brown Derby link.
I'd have to reach pretty far back in my memory to come up with a dining experience as disappointing as the one I had at Zenzi recently. Zenzi is the enigmatic name of a new restaurant south of downtown Orlando. I couldn't find any clue as to the origin of the name or whether it was supposed to evoke some sort of image. Is it an owner's name? Is it meant to imply something exotic in the cuisine? Probably not.
The menu, in fact, gives no clues as to the intended cuisine served here. You've got French steak au poivre, Italian veal saltimbocca, Indian chicken tikka and Caribbean grouper. I'm not crazy about a menu that tries to offer the world, but I have fewer qualms if it can deliver at least one good hemisphere. Zenzi's food train never quite leaves the station.
Now, I know these are difficult times for restaurants, and many established businesses are cutting corners or otherwise attempting to adjust or reinvent themselves. More than a few menus have been tweaked to lower food costs while maintaining quality. It's not an easy thing to do. A restaurant's regular customers expect to find all the favorites when they return.
Zenzi had the unique advantage, if it could be seen as such, of opening in the recession. It had no regular clients to disappoint if it started to cut corners. They could have begun by offering a menu that was manageable and offered quality appropriate to the price. I don't know that this is indeed the case with Zenzi, but everything about my meal had the air of trying to make something from next to nothing.
How else would you explain the veal satimbocca ($21) my friend ordered? First off, it had so little veal that it hardly warranted top billing. My companion and I were sure there must have been more veal beneath the massive mound of ham, or perhaps buried inside the stack of spinach. But no, the two tiny pieces were the lot.
That ham was an unfortunate choice. It was a mere cut above lunchmeat quality, and was overly salty. The mushroom and caper sauce rendered the dish a brown mass.It was accompanied by a small mound of rice that was pebbly in texture, and by that I mean the grains were so hard they could have broken a tooth.
My entree was the crab and brie stuffed grouper ($21) a perfectly fine fillet that was nicely broiled. But the crab and brie were minimal. The grouper was served atop a bed of lettuce, which someone probably thought would make a pretty presentation but didn't consider that the soggy greens would get in the way of actually eating the entree. And the entire thing was drenched in a sauce that looked as though it were pure egg yolk. Very yellow. The description on on the menu said the fish would be "smothered in a lobster sauce." I didn't get a lobster sauce out of it, but I'll have to admit the dish was murdered.
A friend had told me the mushroom soup ($6) was good, but the bowl I had, although showing nice meaty pieces of mushrooms, had a floury texture in the broth. And don't even get me started on paying six bucks for this small serving of soup.
The only problem I had with the crab cakes ($10) was with the name. Remove the word crab and you'd have a more apt description. And the two cakes were filled with pieces of red and green bell pepper. It's the first crab cake I've had that crunched.
After our entrees had been served I noticed that other tables had baskets of bread and we had none. I inquired about this and our server told us that bread was served only upon request. How would I know that, I asked, is it written on the menu? No, he said, some people just request it.
So I requested, and when he left I asked the people at the next table if they had requested the bread. No, they told me, their waiter (a different one) just brought it to them. I might deduce that the two waiters simply had different training manuals but that would be taking a leap of faith.
(While clearing the soup bowl from the table, the waiter dropped the soiled spoon onto the table, and even though he still had a free hand, he chose not to pick it up, and it stayed there until after the entrees were served. I'd love to know his rationale for leaving it there.)
I would have taken the issue up with a manager, but at no time during the entire meal did I spot one person I could have identified as in charge.
The interior of Zenzi is pleasant enough. There are door-sized fountains with sheets of water that cascade down glass, and several odd lamps that look either like paper Oscar statuettes or illuminated dress forms. Tables are covered with black leatherette sheets that, frankly, look tawdry.
As discombobulated as things are here I don't think the situation is hopeless. But it is going to take someone who knows what he or she is doing to fix it. And they'll pretty much have to reinvent the place, which is what they could have done when they first opened only months ago.
Zenzi is at 4120 S. Orange Ave. Orlando. It is open for lunch and dinner daily, brunch on Sunday. The phone number is 407-855-9770.
Almost before it could get started, Orlando's newest culinary school is shutting down. Professional Culinary Institute, which was using the facilities of Doc's restaurant on South Orange Avenue, is in the midst of its first wine education program. According to sources close to the operation, the current course will finish its 11-week run. But plans to begin classes in food preparation for aspiring chefs have been scrapped, I'm told. The school's Web site says culinary arts and pastry and baking arts classes begin at the Orlando school April 30th, but those classes have not started.
A woman who answered the phone at the Orlando PCI earlier today was still taking reservations for an open house scheduled for Saturday. But this afternoon the phone went unanswered.
The school's closing will leave the Doc's facility virtually empty. The restaurant, which once boasted the talents of nationally recognized Neil Connolly as its chef, closed to the dining public earlier this year. For the last few years the office complex that houses Doc's has been tapped for an on-again, off-again hotel.
The school has been on shaky ground for months. It had already lost its wine program director, Andrew McNamara. McNamara, a master sommelier, had been hired away from the Breakers in Palm Beach late last year to lead PCI's wine program. McNamara gave his notice to the school's administrators a couple of months ago and has since accepted a position with a wine purveyor and has returned to South Florida.
PCI is based in Campbell, Calif.; the Orlando campus was to be its second location.
Last November I had the pleasure of hearing former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins read some of his work. He was visiting Rollins College as part of its Scholars In Residence program. It was an enjoyable evening of poetry, and if you're the type who thinks that's a contradiction in terms, I promise you Billy Collins could change your mind. He has a dry wit and a light but probing style of writing.
One of the poems he read that night was titled The Lanyard. It's about a boy's camp-craft gift to his mother, and it resonated with me, I suppose, because I had lost my mother only a few months earlier.
Here's the poem:
Continue reading "Mother's Day 2009 -- A Billy Collins Poem" »
I had been driving west on Colonial, noticing all the closed restaurants along the way and thinking the area most immediately south of Baldwin Park is looking pretty blighted. What's up with that?
Then I got past Bumby Avenue and noticed a new sign: Loving Hut. I thought it was a massage parlor.
Looking closer, expecting to see specials for loofah scrubs or something, I noticed that it is a restaurant. In fact, it's in a space that has held various Asian restaurants over the years.
The last time I was in this building I left without ordering. The place was so unkempt and unclean looking that I just couldn't bring myself to eat there. Sometimes you just have a feeling about a place. My feeling told me to turn around and get out of there.
The owners of Loving Hut have really cleaned the place up. In fact, its interior is so shiny white that it almost glows.
Continue reading "Restaurant Review: Loving Hut: Vegan Fast Food. Really?" »
Citrus Restaurant is partnering with Joey Fatone to host the Fatone Family Foundation’s Rockin Auction event on Sunday, May 17th at 5:00pm. You will have an opportunity to mix and mingle with Joey and several celebrities in a fun and casual cocktail party environment. There will be a variety of entertainment and one-of-a- kind auction items including a golf weekend in Vegas with Justin Timberlake. This is a great event with proceeds benefiting the new music therapy program at the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children.
Tickets are $30.00 each and can be purchased at www.fatonefoundation.com or at the door (if available). Food, beer and wine provided by Citrus Restaurant are included in your ticket price.
One of the allures of the Apple iPhone is the vast number of applications, or apps, that are available to make life better. Well, OK, not all of them are meant to make life better, and some are just strange, others downright wrong. (Apple recently removed from its apps store a program that featured a crying baby that would stop only when the iPhone was shaken vigorously enough. What kind of warped mind would think that was a fun thing?)
Anyway, there are lots of apps devoted to food and restaurants. Some are designed to help you find a restaurant (they even use the phone's built-in g.p.s. capabilites to locate something nearby), others help you snag a table, and still others will help you keep track of the calories you're consuming once you're inside.
This article from pcmag.com features a top-10 list of the best apps for iPhone-toting foodies.
Do any of you use these, or do you have some other favorites?
