Mike Trudnak, who was the opening executive chef for the Celeste hotel at UCF and its restaurant, Aurora, but then left last spring to become exec chef at Daytona Grande hotel (taking his executive sous chef, sous chef and other kitchen staff with him) has returned to the Celeste. Trudnak said in a post of Facebook that he returned March 1 – and so have six of his original team members.
He posted: “Yes i am going to bring back holiday brunches (starting mothers day), yes we will bring back weekend brunches, yes I will eventually bring back custom tasting menus, yes we have a new menu starting tomorrow, it has a few heavily guest requested items back but mostly brand new, yes I have lowered all of the prices as a gesture of good will in hopes that you will come give us another shot, yes bite30, yes magical dining, wine dinners you name it!”
He also said that “Any management from my time away have ‘moved on to new opportunities’” and acknowledged that some diners had expressed disappointment in Aurora in his absence. In my updated review last year, I found the food to be good but those prices were higher than they should have been.
Aurora, and the Celeste, opened in 2020 – mid pandemic – on the campus of UCF.
