Pizzeria Valdiano is a local chain in Central Florida. I've been to their Winter Park and Baldwin Park stores on several occasions and recently gave their Lakeland store a try. We started with garlic knots. Definitely not the best. They were those mushy, interconnected rolls that had some garlic salt on top. With garlic in the name, I want some actual garlic! Pizza came next. Valdiano's has one of the best pizza's in Central Florida in my opinion. Definitely within the top 10. While this particular pie wasn't the all time best I've had from a Pizzeria Valdiano, it was still really tasty and better than most of the other pizzas around...
Driving home from New York, after sitting in almost non-stop traffic all day long, we stopped and ate some Indian food at Taste of Tandoor in Woodbridge, VA.
The meal was started with a garlic naan appetizer. They called it garlic naan, but I didn't taste any garlic. I tried the Tandoori Salmon for my main course. The salmon was brought out on a sizzling skillet and was transferred to another plate by the waiter. I had never tried seafood from an Indian restaurant and I was pleased. The salmon was really good in it's orange yogurt sauce, cooked with onions and lime. I wonder how many other people traveling along I-95 during an 1800 mile trip stop to eat Indian food?
I ate at Cafe Paisano in Longwood, FL. I ate here a few times before when they first opened and always ordered pizza. I was never too impressed with the pizza, so after a few visits I found other Italian restaurants to get my pizza from. Recently, I decided to return to Cafe Paisano and ordered a dinner on this visit. After reading over the menu, I settled on the Eggplant Rollatini, and started the meal with a side salad and garlic rolls.
The main dish soon came out and consisted of breaded eggplant rolled around ricotta cheese and plenty of fresh spinach, then topped with melted cheese and tomato sauce. Also served with the meal (but not listed on the menu) was a side of spaghetti in tomato sauce. I don't like tomato sauce on pasta all that much, so I could have done without this part of the meal. When I initially ordered the eggplant, I didn't quite know what to expect, but I really liked it. I would gladly get the eggplant rollatini again!
The next table was eating a pizza which looked better than I remembered it being. I think I need to return here again to give Cafe Paisano's pizza another try.
I have heard good things about Giordano's Pizza. It is Chicago style stuffed pizza with multiple layers of crust with the sauce on top. I really have very little experience with Chicago style pizza, and I had never tried a pizza quite like what Giordano's sells. The restaurant was on my list to try for a while, an I finally made it to the location on Apopka Vineland Road near Disney.
The meal started out with some garlic bread. There was a decent amount of garlic on here, unlike some other Italian restaurants that just use garlic butter and no actual garlic. Although I was planning to just have a cheese pizza, I realized that would defeat the purpose of the stuffed pizza if it had nothing but cheese. It was agreed that my half of the pizza would have ground beef, pepperoni, and black olives. The meat was baked into the pie in between the layers of crust along with cheese. On the top layer, Giordano's put more cheese, sauce, and the black olives. I came across this video of how Giordano's makes their pizzas:
The pizza was definitely unique, but I think I still prefer the more traditional New York Style pizza. This pizza had far too much cheese that all oozed out of the slices. Perhaps if it was given time to set, the oozing wouldn't be as big of a problem, but it was still too much. One slice on this pizza probably had just as much cheese as a few slices of a traditional pizza. The crust on this pizza was pretty good though. It was sort of flaky, sort of like a pie crust rather than the bread that normally makes up a pizza crust. I didn't think Giordano's pizza was anything great compared to traditional pizza, but it's definitely a novelty. Because of the uniqueness, I would gladly return and give their pizza another try. This visit to Giordano's also introduced me to another Chicago specialty that I now need to try: The Italian Beef Sandwich...
A $5 off coupon brought me into Limoncellos Waterfront Restorante in the Sanford Marina along Lake Monroe.
Garlic bread was ordered as a appetizer. Rather than the normal Italian restaurant garlic bread, Limoncellos gave slices of bread with a bowl of roasted garlic in oil. It was unexpected, but was a nice surprise. I really like roasted garlic. I was debating about whether to get gnocchi or a calzone, and finally ended up ordering the Calzone Primavera. The calzone was filled with red peppers, onions, eggplant, broccoli, ricotta, and mozzarella. I enjoyed it. If you eat outside on the restaurant's patio, you get this wonderful view of the St. Johns River. I liked Limoncellos. The view was great, the food was better than many other local Italian restaurants, and the prices weren't bad either.
UPDATE: I did like Limoncellos a whole lot on my first visit, which I wrote about above. Second visit, not so much. Horrible service, bad food, and the bottle of vinegar for my salad was filled with flies...
I ate dinner at the Papa Joe's located in the Target/Publix shopping center on Lake Mary Blvd in Lake Mary, FL. Their other Lake Mary location was already discussed here on Watch Me Eat, so I'll be comparing a bit.
My dining experience started with some bad air. One of the employees was sitting right outside the restaurant's entrance puffing away at a cigarette. Every customer entering the the restaurant had to walk through her cloud of smoke.
Once inside, garlic knots and pizza was ordered. I was impressed with the garlic knots. Compared to the garlic bread that I had at the other Papa Joe's, these were delicious. The was plenty of garlic, and the bread was cooked to perfection. No complaints here.
I wasn't very impressed with the pizza. I found the sauce to be really sweet (like at the other Papa Joes), and the pizza seemed very hastily made. Everything was uneven about the pie. Some areas of the pizza had hardly any sauce and too much cheese. Other areas had pools of sauce and no cheese. Even how the pie was sliced was uneven, resulting in some huge slices and some tiny slices. Overall, the pizza was edible, but was a disappointment after the good pizza that I had on my last Papa Joe's dining experience.
I did notice that Papa Joe's has some pizza lunch specials that I think I'll need to return for. They advertised having Grandmas pizza and stuffed pizza, both of which aren't very common in Florida.
On the way out, the same employee was still sitting outside, still smoking her cigarette. I wonder if she was getting paid to give lung cancer to Papa Joe's customers? I made sure to do lots of fake coughing as I walked by...
I ate at Imperial Dynasty in Longwood, FL for lunch. I ordered the Chicken & Eggplant with Garlic Sauce lunch special. It came with the chicken, rice, and a choice of a side.
Fried noodles were served first. They were followed by the side. I went with some Wonton soup. In the past, I've always been happy with the soup from Imperial Dynasty, but on this visit I found it to be way too salty. The soup was followed with the main dish. The Chicken & Eggplant was pretty much what the menu described it to be. There was lots of chicken and lots of Chinese eggplant, and not much else. There was a side of brown rice, but I felt the meal needed more variety. There was way too much of the same thing, and it would have been better if there was some other types of vegetables in with the chicken and eggplant. Just something to mix up the monotony of the meal a bit.
It did taste good though, so I guess that's all that matters for the most part.
Like Sanford's China Wok, Imperial Dynasty also had posters hanging up to be one of the Top 100 Chinese Restaurants. The 2008 contest is over, it looks like Imperial Dynasty made it into the top 100 on the winners list. I don't see China Wok...
I ate at Planet Hollywood in Downtown Disney on January 30, 2008. The restaurant at Walt Disney World is the biggest Planet Hollywood that I've seen. Compared to the Planet Hollywood in Myrtle Beach, this restaurant is humongous. The whole restaurant is housed inside of a giant 5-floored globe filled with tables and lots of movie props. Not only is this Planet Hollywood larger than Myrtle Beach's restaurant, it also has a larger menu, and everything costs a few dollars more.
My meal was started with an appetizer of Chicken Crunch. It was basically fried chicken strips dipped into a sweet batter. Sweet and chicken don't go together in my opinion. For the main course, I had the Garlic Shrimp. This consisted of soba noodles topped with shrimp, sugar snap peas, onions, peppers, garlic, and ginger in a slightly spicy sauce. I liked it, but at a price of $19.99, I didn't feel it was the best value for the food given. A few hours after I ate the meal was a problem though. Something in the Garlic Shrimp caused me to repeatedly burp out a horrible smell that reminded me of salami, meatballs, and Pepsi, all combined into one foul smelling gas. Beware... After eating, I took the steps down from my 5th floor table and looked at some of the movie props. Before heading downstairs, this was my view from where I sat: And here are some of the movie props I took pictures of. Here's a witch from Hocus Pocus: Woody from Toy Story: A giant moth from the original Dr. Dolittle: A robot from some science fiction movie that I don't recognize: One of the buildings from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Much of the sets and puppets from this movie used to be on display at MGM Studios. Rumor is that when Disney decided to update their exhibit, a few of their minimum wage employees got very lucky when they found a slew of Jack Skeleton puppets and most of Halloweentown in a dumpster somewhere on Disney property. Imagine what that stuff would go for on ebay... And then there was this saw blade from a David Copperfield TV Special:
And finally, in the pond outside of Planet Hollywood was The Jenny from Forrest Gump:
Someone recommended that I give Digino's Pizza in Lake Mary, FL a try. I did and it was an okay pizza experience. When I first picked up the cheese pie, I didn't think it looked too attractive when I opened the box. It appeared that there was way too much cheese on the pie, with a small puddle of sauce showing through in the center. Looks can sometimes be deceiving though, because I was pleasantly surprised when I got home and tasted the pizza. The cheese and sauce were well proportioned, with just the right amount of each. My only two complaints was that I found the sauce to be a little too sweet, and the crust could have been a little bit thinner to get more like true New York Style Pizza as advertised in the restaurants window. Otherwise, it was an okay pizza. It was far from the best pizza I have eaten, but I have had many far worse pizzas as well. On my second slice, I decided to add some toppings that hardly anyone else will eat. I put about three cloves of fresh chopped garlic and almost half of a can of anchovies on the slice. I have discussed the my thoughts on anchovies in the past, and I will restate that they are one of the most unappreciated pizza toppings out there. The slice was stinky, but it was good!
I ate at Gio's Cafe I in Sanford, FL for dinner after someone had read about it in an Orlando Sentinel review. It was a Greek/Italian restaurant which sounded interesting, and it got a positive review.
I was actually expecting more Greek food and less Italian. The Greek food probably took up a quarter of the menu, while Italian took up the remaining three-quarters. Nothing Greek sounded too impressive to me either, and it seemed kind of overpriced. Everyone ended up getting garlic knots and pizza, both of which were recommended in the newspaper. The garlic knots were okay, but they could have definitely used triple the amount of garlic that was given on the rolls. The pizza was served, and I definitely disagreed with the Orlando Sentinel review. I thought it was a pretty bad pizza. The crust was a little thick for my liking, but that's just based on my personal preference. My real issue was with the cheese. The layer of cheese that was put on top of the pizza was very thick and dense. While the pizza was hot, all of the molten cheese poured off of the crust onto the plate. As it cooled, the cheese's chemical bonds solidified, but they didn't stick to the pizza. As I would take a bite, all of the cheese would pull right off of the slice. It was very chewy, and a lump of this chewy cheese is still stuck in my throat hours later as I am writing this. Another issue that I had was that the restaurant wouldn't sell me a side salad with the pizza. According to the waiter, side salads were only available if I was eating an entree. Otherwise I would have to buy a much more expensive meal-sized salad. Perhaps I should have ordered an entree though. It seems you can't go wrong with spanakopita, and I'm sure it would have been better than the pizza (that I'm still working on freeing from the back of my throat)...
I returned to the Olive Garden in Altamonte Springs, FL thanks to a $10 gift card that had to be spent. In the past, I'm not normally too impressed with what Olive Garden serves, but today was slightly better. I had the featured item, the Grilled Garlic Shrimp. There were several nice sized shrimp over angel hair pasta with peppers & onions all in a garlic sauce. It was good, but the dish was so simple, I don't think it was worth the $15 for something I could have easily cooked at home...
