I am not really a foodie.
I would like to think I am. I love trying new things. But several logical things stand in the way: I'm not old enough to have acquired a lot of experience, I'm incredibly scotch about eating out, and I'm into too many other things to spend a lot of time with cookbooks other than reading them. (But I love reading them - I'm currently wanting Nigella Lawson's Feasts.)
So I'm really, tremendously grateful to my boss & his partner for wining and dining us so well in Orlando. We tried so many fabulous things, and I learned a lot. Here are my notes:
Dinner at Cafe' Tutu Tango , International Blvd.
This restaurant is like walking into the Moulin Rouge. It's a rough industrial decor, painted with bright colors and festooned with all sorts of overly enthusiastic craft, some of which makes it to be art. Naive paintings, glass fish, painted eggs - and the people who make them are there! Working away in various places, because everything displayed is for sale. Even airbrushers working outside - and midway through dinner a couple of bellydancers entertained us, and inspired the waitstaff to further shenanigans. (They were already having a good time with the music - which seems to only have as a common concept - 'pep up') An incredibly high energy place.
And the food doesn't let you down either. Tutu Tango is a tapas bar, so everything on the menu is an appetizer, with three or four little morsels, for about $5 a plate. You order continuously, and get a bottle of wine. The food doesn't come out all together, it arrives when it's ready, and it's so much fun to take turns ordering and share everything. A giant food experiment. Here are some of the really successful combinations:
Grilled tofu, marinated in a sweet soy sauce. I want to make this at home, it was so good.
Flash-fried cabbage cakes, with parmesan and bacon. Like crab cakes, but with green cab.
Grilled asparagus with almond aillade, garlic and pepper. These were perfectly cooked.
Roasted pears on pecan crisps, topped with Spanish bleu cheese & balsamic reduction, on a bed of arugula. This was the most amazing thing, my absolute favorite (and the manager's). The pecan crisps were a sweet cracker thing, with the bleu cheese toasted on, and a carmelized pear slice on top. Man oh man.
Mahi mahi bruschetta. This concept threw us off, but the manager cleared it up - the slice of mahimahi was instead of the toast, which is then covered with a traditional bruschetta mix of tomato tapenade, baby lettuce, and balsamic glaze with chipotle butter. So good.
We also had an eggroll thing that was good, but not out of the ordinary, and a goat cheese pizza, but for dessert I ordered an apricot bread pudding, that was made from croissants and caramel. Amazing. (Note to self: Consider how to hold tapas potluck party. Will need endless stack of saucers and large crock to hold all silverware.)
The next night we went downtown, which for Orlando is really a challenge, as it's suffering from serious revitalization challenges. But we saw Napasong Thai restaurant with tablecloths and took a chance. It was fabulous. As I liked the soy cakes so much from the night before, I tried a soy tempura appetizer, that really showed off how the blandness of the soy and the tempura batter allows the traditional Thai garnishes to show off. I also ordered Pha Naam, and ate it all, something I can usually never do with oriental food. It was a peanutty and surprisingly sweet sauce with chicken and vegetables, and gorgeous sticky jasmine rice pressed into the shape of a heart. I was so full!
The next night we went back up International Boulevard, and found an Italian restaurant called The Timpano Chophouse . I'm normally not impressed by high concept, but this fiction was really amusing. The idea is obviously Mafia - overstuffed black leather booths and tables, and the hostess/bar waitress costume was so cute. They were all Gangster Molls, with low necklines, tight bodices, short black skirts, and black boots. I started off with an incredibly smooth raspberry vodka martini while we waited for them to throw together a table. The place was packed.
I had a beautiful spinach salad with sun-dried tomatoes, mushroom, red onion and bleu cheese, and we all shared a tower of really well-done onion rings. Then I splurged on a salmon steak with pesto on mesclun, and shared some more gorgeous asparagus with mozzerella. Two bottles of Rancho Zabaco, a 2002 red zinfandel. And finally we did 'dessert for four', a gigantic slice of Tartufo, aka a bowl of fudgy cake upended over chocolate and vanilla cream, and frosted with chocolate ganache.
On our way out of town, we stopped to look at Celebration (more on this later), as a new division is just opening up. So we did tea and lunch at Sherlock's (yeah, I know, Disney, but just hang on), which offered a fabulous spinach quiche with mesclun salad, a cheese-and-yummy-roll-with-something-pickle, some gorgeous broccoli cheese soup, and another giant chocolate slice for four - a multilayered black and tan cake, with rum in the tan. Tea was Formosa Oolong and Citron Green - with gingery hints in the Green.
I'm going to be dining out on these memories for a long time - thanks so much Felix and Paul for being who you are, incredibly generous and warm-hearted people who love to share the wonderful things they like about life.