Siro: Urban Italian Kitchen in Lake Buena Vista, FL

Siro: Urban Italian Kitchen is a new restaurant that recently opened in the Orlando World Center Marriott. Siro uses fresh farm-to-fork ingredients, many of which come from local sources in the Central Florida area. Just before they opened to the public, I was invited to try Siro during their media preview dinner. I was excited to try some new Italian food!

The evening started with a tour of Siro's huge kitchen where Chef Anthony Burdo was introduced.

Back in Siro's dining room, we started to try a selection of the foods offered in the restaurant. I'm separating the food pictures below as they are described on Siro's menu.

Boards 

Siro had three different menu items called Boards. These included meat, cheese, pork roast almonds, and olives.  

The Americano: La Quercia prosciutto, tartufo, and capicola:

The Toscana: Finocchio, Pecorino Toscano, and Bresaola.

Pizza

Siro Sausage and Peppers: Topped with hot and sweet peppers. The sausage had nice flavor and the hot peppers caught me a little off guard because they were actually spicy. Spicy toppings on pizza is good.

Green, Eggs & Ham: Arugula, prosciutto, and sunny side up egg. The egg was from a local farm and there were greens on the pizza. Green eggs. Get it?

Antipasti

Ripe Tomatoes: Heirloom tomatoes, ricotta salata, basil, and mint. I love being served tomatoes that are other colors than the standard red.

Golden Beets: Served with pistachio and soft goat cheese. Beets are good. Yellow beets are better (for the same reason that colorful tomatoes are better)!

Eggplant Caponata: Eggplant, greens, and whipped ricotta served on bakehouse bread.

Arborio Fritters: Robiola, black garlic, and arrabiata sauce. Arborio is apparently a type of short grained rice. It must be obvious that I've never cooked risotto because I did not know this prior to this dinner. Nor did I know that black garlic was a thing. This dish was very educational for me...

 Crisp Baby Artichokes: With a yogurt mint dip.

Salads

Big Green Bowl: Local lettuces and greens, soft herbs, simple vinaigrette.

Meats

Burdo's Famous Veal Meatballs: In a pomodoro sauce.

Pork Belly: With pink lady apples. It seems like everyone loves pork belly. Perhaps I'm weird, but this part of the pig doesn't do it for me. This was one of the tastiest pork belly dishes that I've been served, but I still don't think I'd order it again. I think it's the consistency of thick cut pork belly more than anything that I don't care for. I'm guess I'm not a pork belly person...

 

Seafood

Tuna 2 Ways: Ahi over tomato. The tuna itself was shaved in very thin slices, but I didn't like the sauce. It was a bit too much like mayonnaise. Take a really nice, high quality tuna and put it with a sauce that is sort of like mayonnaise and our brains may play tricks on us giving flashes of tuna salad...

Daily Roast: This was a whole roasted market fish. I believe the fish of the night was snapper. The fish was nice and flaky.

Plates

The Burger: OWC bakehouse bun and handcut fries.

Braised Pork Shank: Served over white beans. Another pork dish from a more enjoyable part of the pig in my opinion. The meat was tender enough to easily fall off the bone.

Veal Saltimbocca: With garlic rapini.

Pasta

Cheese Tortellini: Butternut squash and sage brown butter. As simple as it was, this was one of my favorite dishes of the night. The large, cheese filled dumplings were topped with cubed squash and basil leaves.

Cocktails

I tried two drinks at Siro, both of which were non-alcoholic from the Refreshers section of the menu.

The Understudy: Fresh lemon, basil, simple syrup, and Fever Tree tonic water. This was like a lemonade that was a bit heavier with the tart lemon flavor as opposed to the sweeter flavors that are normally more prevalent in lemonades. I liked it!

Italian Soda: Blood orange, simple syrup, and club soda. This reminded me of a carbonated orange juice. Again, it wasn't overly sweet with a strong orange flavor.

Dessert

Cake Pops: These had a very intense, rich chocolate flavor. Almost bordering on the chocolate intensity of fudge.

Cannolis & Zeppole: Two classic Italian desserts. Everyone seems to love the custard filled cannolis and the sugar coated doughnuts that are zeppole.

And that concludes the food pictures from Siro: Urban Italian Kitchen. It is always refreshing when an Italian restaurant gets creative and does more than the stereotypical dishes like spaghetti & meatballs and lasagna. Siro definitely moved away from the boring Italian standards, which was a very good thing!

The Grand Food Court at the NCED

The NCED, or the National Center for Employee Development is a hotel in Norman, OK. The hotel is used by Marriott to train their employees, and to ensure that the hotel is always crowded, Marriott made a deal with the Post Office to train the postal workers on the property. A postal worker that I know was going for some training, so I went along for a week long vacation. It cost next to nothing for me to go along, and the minimal price they charged included three buffet meals per day in their restaurant called The Grand Food Court.

Breakfast on my first day consisted of pretty standard breakfast foods. Scrambled eggs, breakfast meats, hash browns, strawberries, and some orange juice. It was way too much food, but that is what happens with breakfast buffets. I took the banana to go as some sustenance for my day of exploring Normon.

I returned for lunch and tried a slice of pizza and a custom made turkey sandwich. The pizza was halfway decent tasting, topped with pepperoni, sausage, green peppers, and black olives. I had no complaints about the sandwich.

Later that night, I returned to the hotel for dinner. Pretty much everything that I tried on this night was horrible. There was fish (flounder if I remember correctly) that was very hard. So much so that I couldn't eat much of the fish. I choose some rice from the buffet and that was a bit crunchy. I also tried some butternut squash, and that too wasn't cooked properly and was really hard. The dinner roll was half decent, but I don't know if that counts. I also tried some freshly made mussels. They were better than the pre-made buffet items, but I still wasn't too impressed with them. The only thing I really had no complaints with was the salad from the salad bar since I picked out everything that went into it.

 

On the second day I was staying at the hotel, I had some fruit salad, scrambled eggs with jalapenos, and a blueberry waffle for breakfast. It was all good.

I didn't get my money's worth on this day since I was on a whirlwind day of seeing the sights in Oklahoma City and skipped lunch here. When I returned for dinner, it seemed the hotel had a barbecue theme. They had quite a bit of meats covered in barbecue sauce, but not much of it interested me. I took some salad, baked beans, corn, and pasta off of the buffet. I also took one of the featured items of the night, their buffalo chili. It was really tasty, but who knows what kind of meat was actually in the chili. Buffalo is an African ox-like animal. Going by the theme of the night, I would assume that they meant the North American Bison. They also could have used normal cow in the chili and nobody would be able to tell the difference...

For dessert, I had a cup filled with pieces of cake, whipped cream, and berries...

In addition to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the hotel also did late night buffets. I was trying to go to bed pretty early so I could get an early start the next day doing touristy stuff, but on one night I stayed up to check out the buffet, all thanks to a tornado that passed very close to the building and resulted in lots of blaring sirens and everyone sitting in the hotel hallways. The choices were very limited on the late night buffet, but I ended up with a slice of very meaty pizza and a brownie.

The next morning, I ordered an omelet with cheese, onions, green peppers, jalapenos, and black olives. I'm not big on omelets although if you put enough stuff in them they taste okay. I also took a piece of bacon, hash browns, a biscuit and a few of the biggest strawberries I've ever seen. These things were bigger than some apples that I've come across.

After breakfast, I ventured back to Oklahoma City and visited the Art Museum and explored the underground tunnels running under the city, and then made it back to the hotel for lunch. They were serving Cajun themed food and everything was pretty tasty. I tried some Cajun chicken, okra, assorted rices, cheesy potatoes, and an andouille sausage.

For dinner later on that night, I got a sense that there was an Italian theme going on. I had fettuccine Alfredo, fried ravioli (why do they ruin ravioli by deep frying them?), beans, fish stuffed with spinach and cheese, and a salad. I would have to say this was the best tasting dinner of my whole stay.

The next day consisted of my last meals at the hotel. For breakfast, I tried some new stuff such as french toast and corned beef hash. I've heard good things about corned beef hash, but I found that stuff to be disgusting. I imagine that is what dog food tastes like. I made sure to take some more strawberries, but they weren't nearly as large as the previous breakfast.

Because I took a tour of the National Weather Service that took longer than expected, I missed lunch on this day. I got back for dinner pretty close to the cafeteria closing for dinner, so it seemed like everything was sitting out too long. Because of this, I had another freshly made turkey sandwich. I tried a little paella that tasted like it was sitting out too long as well as a slice of really good chocolate cake.