I can’t really see the difference between this place and similar restaurants specializing in Cuban cuisine. But I can tell you I liked the food very much. And the casual picnic-style atmosphere. And especially the way I was welcomed by the staff of Cuba 1800’s.

Inside the Meat House (which may or may not now be The Local), Da Kine is a mostly takeout purveyor of the Hawaiian poke, basically fresh raw fish in a bowl with other ingredients.

At Designer Greens, which occupies a small storefront space in the Waterford Lakes area, not far from the Home Depot, you have your own personal salad builder at your beck and call. She does the tonging and tossing — think of it as a salad bar without a sneeze guard.
You design your own salad in several steps. First you decide if you want a half salad or a full salad, which for our purposes we’ll call the Pittsburgh. (Go with a half; it’s plenty.) Then you choose the lettuce, romaine or spring mix.
In step three, you get to choose three toppings (five if you’re headed for Pittsburgh) from a list of about 36. You’ve got everything from artichokes and avocados to mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and various cheeses. If you can’t limit it to just three, you can add others at 50 cents each, but this is a slippery slope if you’re going the salad route as part of a dieting regimen.
Step four is optional — you can add a meat, such as turkey, ham or tuna. Chicken-fried steak is not an option, but chicken tenders are. Beware.
The last step is the dressing, which you can have your salad maker add and toss or request on the side. There are a baker’s dozen options, including some so-called light dressings.

Domu, the popular East End Market ramenerie, has opened a new concept, Domu Chibi Ramen, in Waterford Lakes. It’s meant to be a quick-serve operation, but they’ve managed to make it quicker serve in at least one aspect.

Instead of giving an order to someone at the counter, customers are prompted to use electronic tablets in front of it to place and pay for an order. Heck, you might even want to leave yourself a tip as you pay, because unlike other quick-serve restaurants, you must go back up to the pick-up counter to fetch your own food. I’m guessing if they could, they’d find away for a non-human to call the names.

There’s more to the name here than just a play on a historical figure. John Montagu, the 11th Earl of Sandwich, is involved in the business, although the project was started by his son Orlando, who is not in line to inherit the title. There’s another Earl involved: Robert Earl, founder of Planet Hollywood. Legend has it, of course, that it was the fourth Earl of Sandwich who came up with the idea of slapping meat between some bread. The usual story is that he was a gambler and didn’t want to put down his cards, but Lord Sandwich, the current one, told me over sherries in the House of Parliament a few years ago, that his ancestor was also a womanizer and it may have been a lady in his other hand. Whatever, the sandwiches here are very good and impressively thick. You may actually need both hands. The 4th Earl would not approve.

If you overlook the inclusion of fajitas on the menu, this little hole in the wall (not that wall) serves authentic Mexican food.

A small storefront location for what is a Jamaican franchise out of New York. Very friendly staff serving hearty Islands food. The oxtail stew is a specialty.

Serious grilled cheese sandwiches.

What is served in this little eatery in downtown Orlando has a lot more in common with Tex-Mex than Mexican, with a definite leaning to the, uh, gringo side of the border. But they do serve some decent food in a delightfully grungy atmosphere.
The menu is a bit salacious, with such entries as Dirty Sanchez, Drunk Gringo, Mouth Hugger and 1 Night Slam. Mainly, it’s tacos and burritos. I had the Drunk Gringo, which has nothing to do with alcohol. Instead, it simply means that it is the burrito into which everything is loaded. (Drunk. Loaded. Get it?) So instead of just one meat — or protein, as it is prosaically referred to on the menu — you get roast pork, ground beef and chicken. You also get beans and rice and lettuce and cheese and onions and…you get the idea.

Like other market/cafes of this type, Los Hermanos offers a variety of foods as lunch specials, each visible for your inspection through the condensation on windows of the steam table. The young woman behind the counter lifted the lids of each pan so that I could see what was underneath. It all looked good, but when she lifted the cover from the chilaquiles, my mind was made up — that’s what I’m having, I told her.
Chilaquiles are essentially strips of tortiallas that are fried and mixed with salsa and cheese. It’s a sort of Mexican comfort food. (It’s comfort food for at least one gringo, too.) Los Hermanos’ chilaquiles were served with two fried eggs on top. And because it was part of the lunch special, it also came with a load of refried beans and yellow rice. As I carried the container to the grocery checkout counter to pay for it, I was struck by how heavy it was. That was a lot of food for $6.39!
And a lot of good food, too. The chilaquiles had just the right amount of peppery heat, not to much that it burned but enough that you knew it was there. My only disappointment was that the fried eggs had cooked while sitting atop the chilaquiles in the covered pan, so the yolks had hardened a bit. I would have preferred freshly cooked eggs so that the yolk could have blended with the tortilla strips.