Do you find it odd that a restaurant that bills itself as “100% Plant Based” would have artificial turf out front?

Maybe I should have taken that as an omen and fled from Plantees, a new fast fooder with a limited menu of meat-free items in the Mills 50 District.

Now before the die-hard vegans get poised to tap out a poison-pixel letter let me assure you this is not an anti-vegan review. In fact, I would love to introduce more plant-based foods into my diet. Obviously, someone in my profession can’t entirely eliminate animal products from his diet and still present a wide variety of restaurants for your consideration.

But on my nights off, those evenings when I don’t have to go to a restaurant, I’ve been striving to be more meatless (meatlesser?).

I was hoping to find the food at Plantees to be so good that it could offer a vegetarian option if I didn’t feel like cooking. I did not.

(more…)

I smiled when I first walked into East End Market and up to Winter Park Biscuit Co. Yes, East End Market is in Orlando, not Winter Park, but if we niggle about that we’ll also have to bring up WP-based Orlando Meats and we just don’t have enough time.

Anyway, on the wall over the counter of this quick-serve operation is a banner that reads: “To Order: Line Starts Outside” and includes a pointing finger just in case you can’t see where the door is.

What made me smile was that several years ago, John Rivers told me that when he opened his first restaurant that would lead the way to his 4 Rivers Smokehouse empire, in the free-standing building on Fairbanks Avenue where Hunger Street Tacos now resides, he engineered the space so that there would always be a line outside, even if there were just a few customers waiting to order.

(more…)

Have you heard about Dryuary? It’s where people pledge to go alcohol free – or stay dry – for the month of January. I’m sure that January was selected because it’s after the holidays when so many people tend to overindulge, but personally I think February would be a better choice because, you know, it’s shorter.

Now some people are pushing Veganuary, which means to follow a vegan diet for the first month of the year. Is there a meatless equivalent to dry? Vegged, maybe?

Anyway, if you’re among the carnivorous community attempting to eat a more plant-based diet, whether for a month or just a day, you might want to check out V.L.C. Vegan Eatery, a small restaurant on the east side of Orlando that recently celebrated its first anniversary.

(more…)

I had been wanting to try DaJen Eats for a while and now seemed like the appropriate time.

DaJen is a Jamaican tinged vegan cafe in Eatonville, owned and operated by Jenn Ross, an ebullient and enthusiastic proponent of a vegan lifestyle and an irie outlook.

Irie, pronounced EYE-ree, is a word in Rastafarian and Jamaican dialect that means nice or pleasant. With that being the case, everything at DaJen Eats is perfectly irie.

(more…)

I have no idea why it’s called Hungry Pants. It could just as easily have been named Famished Footwear or Starving Sweater.

I also can’t say what it is that makes these particular pants so peckish. That will just have to remain a mystery.

Hungry Pants is the project of Joey Conicella and Alex Marin who were the original owners of the Yum Yum Cupcake Truck, one of the early entries in Orlando’s food truck scene. They describe Hungry Pants as offering “a plant-curious menu in a fast-fine setting.”

(more…)

The chicken was good enough to fool us; the burger not so much.

I was dining with a colleague at Humbl, a new restaurant next to Windermere High School on Winter Garden Vineland Road. It’s a fast fooder that looks like many other quick-bite eateries but for one major twist, spelled out on the sign out front just below the misspelled name: plant based eats.

That means that it’s entirely meat free. So the chicken that my lunch companion chose as an add-on to the Humbl Bowl of rice, cauliflower and crushed pistachios, should have been listed as “chicken” on the menu. Or it could have been spelled chickun, you know, like sushi bars spell krab when it’s really surimi.

(more…)

There’s probably no better way to begin this review of Proper & Wild than with the owners’ Mission Statement, even though I generally am not a fan of mission statements because they’re so general and ethereal and lacking in specifics that they usually are meaningless.

But I like what Chelsie and Jamie Savage have to say here: “We believe community matters, food matters, and health matters, so we make damn good food that’s good for you, and we hold the space for Central Florida to come together and enjoy it.”

It still isn’t very specific in details, but the “damn good food” pretty much gets to the heart of what they’re doing with this Winter Park restaurant.

(more…)

The Hourglass District, the not-yet-officially-designated area radiating from the intersection of Bumby Avenue and Curry Ford Road and named for an eponymous lake that’s supposed to look like an egg timer but looks more like the silhouette of another E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial), is starting to take shape. (But not that shape.)

Claddagh Cottage was one of the first businesses to open in the area. It came after a pizza joint that had a brief tenure and closed when the owner became ill. That freestanding building is under renovations and will reopen as F&D Wood Fired Italian Kitchen. Over on the northeast corner of the intersection, the gas station and storefronts have undergone the most dramatic upgrading, with an attractive slatted facade and bold white lettering announcing a Foxtail Coffee shop and the Hourglass Social House.

The latter is the designation for the shared space that also includes the coffee shop and eventually other food and beverage vendors. One of them, Leguminati, opened in August and has been seeing brisk business from Hourglassians hungry for its all-vegan menu.

(more…)

Today we welcome Jamba Juice to the flog. Everybody say “Hey, Jamba!”

Jamba Juice, as many of you already know, is a smoothie specialty restaurant. I have to admit that it’s a food sector with which I’m not all that familiar. Or at least I wasn’t until I spent some time with the folks who operate the Jamba Juice stores in Central Florida. It’s clear I’ve been missing out on some pretty tasty — and healthful — options.

Which is not to say that every smoothie operator in town is offering healthful foodstuffs. In fact, knowing that some jack up their shakes with sugars and additives is what prevented me from becoming a fan.

So what impressed me about the folks at Jamba Juice was their dedication to using “simple and honest” ingredients. That simple honesty is also an identifiable characteristic of the operation, from the clean, crisp, vibrant decor of the stores to the friendly, no BS folks who work there.

(more…)

Anyone who questions whether there is a market for vegetarian restaurants only needs to visit The Sanctum, a new meat-freetery in the Mills 50 district whose slogan is “Real, damn good food” and whose online description calls its menu plant-based. It seems that it is always packed.

Admittedly, it doesn’t take a lot of people to fill the space, which is set back from Colonial Drive at the northeast corner of Fern Creek Avenue. The space is small and narrow, with a bar and communal seating up front and a few tables hugging the wall down the side, across from the kitchen area. But it was clear to me when I lunched with colleagues there recently that more than a few were repeat customers hungry for vegetarian and vegan options.

That may be one of Sanctum’s secrets of success: It isn’t totally vegan but offers several items that can easily be veganized. As long as you’re not concerned about the purity of the kitchen as far as your food commingling with mere vegetarian offerings, you should be just fine.

(more…)