Fresco Pizzeria Finally Gives Windermere a Dinner Hour

For decades, Windermere’s running joke was that downtown could do coffee beautifully and dinner not at all. Fresco Pizzeria, which opened at 527 Main Street on December 1, 2025, is the punch line landing at last: a full Italian restaurant on the town’s brick main street, serving lunch and dinner in a place that used to go quiet by mid-afternoon.

A Dr. Phillips family, a second home

Fresco is the Scialoia family’s second act. Their original, Fresco Cucina Italiana on Turkey Lake Road in Dr. Phillips, grew from a deli into one of that neighborhood’s staple Italian restaurants over roughly two decades — the family’s own site dates its craft to 2006. The Windermere restaurant is run by Achille Scialoia alongside his mother, Teresa, and brother, Luigi, and it was designed as a sibling, not a copy: the family calls it a full Italian experience on Main Street, built around handmade pasta, fresh mozzarella and wood-fired pizza.

The pizza program is the technical heart of the place. The dough ferments for 48 hours before it meets the wood fire, giving the pies the kind of blistered, digestible crust that shorter proofs cannot. Around the pizzas sits a broader Italian menu — handmade pastas, Italian classics, pastries — pitched at neighborhood frequency rather than special-occasion ceremony. This is a restaurant built for the school-night dinner and the Friday family table, in a town full of both.

What to order

Start where the kitchen’s identity is clearest: a wood-fired pie on that two-day dough, and a plate of the handmade pasta the family built its name on in Dr. Phillips. The menu ranges wider than the pizzeria name suggests — listings for the Windermere room include lamb chops and empanadas alongside the pizzas and pastas, a reminder that the Scialoias are running a full Italian kitchen, not a slice shop. Fresh mozzarella, made central to the original restaurant’s cooking, carries over. Desserts and pastries close the loop back to the morning counter’s Italian cafe habits.

Because the room was built for frequency, the smart play is to treat Fresco the way the neighborhood does: pizza night with the family one week, pasta and a glass of wine the next, a cornetto grabbed on the way to the Friday market in between. Nothing about the place asks you to dress up or plan ahead, and in a town where the nearest comparable Italian room used to be a drive east to Restaurant Row, that ease is the luxury.

Cornetti in the morning, pizza at night

The detail that tells you Fresco understands Windermere is the morning counter. Before the lunch rush, the restaurant serves cornetti and cappuccino — an Italian cafe ritual transplanted to Main Street — and runs a grab-and-go counter aimed squarely at parents threading the needle between school pickup and dinner. It is the rare new restaurant that studied the town’s actual daily rhythms before writing its menu.

Fresco also arrived as part of a larger moment. It anchors the new development at Main Street and 6th Avenue, alongside Solvino and a returning cast of local shops, and it has already formed the kind of cross-block alliance that marks a real neighborhood district: Windermere Brewing Company, a few doors away, brews an Italian-style beer designed as Fresco’s house pairing. Dinner here, a pint there, and a walk home under the oaks — that loop did not exist in Windermere before this restaurant opened.

Fresco serves lunch and dinner daily, with a later Sunday start; check the family’s site for the day’s hours before you go. Find it, and the rest of the town’s table, on our Orlando Top Spots Map and the Windermere hub.

Filed under Italian · Main Street · Pizza · Restaurants · Windermere

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