June: Live Fire, Yucatán Soul, and Thornton Park’s Loudest Debut
A wood-fired contemporary Mexican kitchen in the old Graffiti Junktion space — seed-oil free, largely gluten-free, and already Restaurant of the Year. Inside June's remarkable first year on Washington Street.
3 minute read
June did not ease into Thornton Park. The wood-fired contemporary Mexican restaurant opened in July 2025 at 700 E. Washington St. — the former Graffiti Junktion space — and within months had been named Best New Restaurant of 2025 by Orlando Citizen’s readers, the Orlando Sentinel’s 2026 Restaurant of the Year, and a place in the 2026 Michelin Guide. Orlando Weekly’s critic put it at the top of his year-end tables list. For a neighbourhood that has lately specialised in quiet excellence, June is the loud debut: live fire, Yucatán soul, and a dining room that fills like it means it.
Fire first, everything else second
June comes from Team Market Group, and its kitchen — led by chefs Jason Campbell and Nick Greco — is built around live fire. Nearly every protein on the menu is cooked over Florida oak, and the cooking draws on the Yucatán’s layered inheritance: Mayan roots, Caribbean brightness, Middle Eastern and European threads woven through centuries of trade. The result is contemporary Mexican food that tastes of smoke before anything else. The Orlando Weekly critic’s year-end list of the twelve best bites of 2025 included June’s Hawaiian kanpachi — yellowtail meeting fire — and the raw and cured side of the menu (ceviche, crab and lobster tostadas) gives the smoke something cool and bright to play against. Fish tacos and tostadas keep the table shareable; this is food designed to be passed, argued over and reordered.
From burger-joint bricks to the city’s loudest room
The address carries its own Thornton Park history. For years, 700 E. Washington St. was Graffiti Junktion, the neighbourhood’s cheerful burger-and-beer hangout — the kind of place that anchored the street’s casual end. Team Market Group’s rebuild kept the bones and changed everything else: an airy, polished dining room, an inviting patio on Washington Street, and a kitchen organised around a live-fire hearth rather than a flat-top. The Weekly’s critic, walking through his year-end best bites, lingered on what the fire does here — proteins kissed by Florida oak flame, the kanpachi above all — and on the Yucatán’s deep pantry behind the menu: Mayan foundations layered with Caribbean, Middle Eastern and European influences, the product of centuries of trade through the peninsula. It is a serious culinary argument delivered as a neighbourhood night out, which is exactly the register Thornton Park rewards. The room fills early and stays full; the street outside, brick-paved and oak-shaded, has a new centre of gravity.
The clean-ingredient brief, taken seriously
What separates June from every other ambitious Mexican kitchen in the city is its discipline about inputs. The restaurant cooks without seed oils, keeps refined sugars to a minimum, avoids industrial processing and builds a menu that is roughly ninety percent gluten-free — not as a marketing garnish but as the kitchen’s founding brief, using traditional cooking fats and unrefined ingredients instead. The remarkable part, and the reason the awards followed, is that none of this reads as restriction at the table. The food is bold first and virtuous second; most diners learn about the seed-oil rule from the press coverage, not from anything missing on the plate.
How to do June well
Book ahead — a Restaurant of the Year with a Michelin listing does not leave many Friday tables to chance — and aim for the patio if the weather allows: airy inside, relaxed outside, and squarely on Washington Street’s evening circuit. June anchors the east end of the street the way Osteria Ester anchors Central Boulevard, and the two together make the strongest one-two dinner punch in downtown Orlando right now; our full table is in Where to Eat in Thornton Park Right Now. Start or finish the night a block away with the wine-bar circuit, and find June pinned on the Top Spots Map. Thornton Park has had celebrated openings before. It has rarely had one that collected this much hardware this fast — or deserved it this plainly.
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