Antonio’s Since 1989: The Market Below, the Ristorante Above
Greg Gentile stacked a formal Italian dining room on top of a market café in 1989 and the critics sniggered — three decades on, the format looks like prophecy, and Maitland still climbs both staircases weekly.
3 minute read
Some restaurants are a meal; Antonio’s is a routine. At 611 South Orlando Avenue in Maitland, across from Lake Lily Park, Antonio’s runs two businesses in one building — an Italian market and café downstairs, an elegant dining room upstairs — and Maitland uses both, daily, for different reasons. It has done so since 1989, which makes Antonio’s not just a restaurant but a piece of the city’s operating system.
The gamble of 1989
Founder Greg Gentile came to the concept through significant travels in Italy, where he learned Italian cooking at the source. What he built in Maitland raised eyebrows at the time: he took a one-story building that had been part of the Bonanza Sirloin Pit steakhouse chain and added a second floor to it. Downstairs went an Italian deli serving sandwiches, pizzas and casual plates, an imported-goods market, and a retail wine shop. Upstairs went a full-service, formal Italian dining room. Local culinary wags sniggered, as longtime Orlando critic Scott Joseph has recorded. Three and a half decades later, the format reads less like a gamble than a prophecy: the shop-and-dine hybrid the rest of the industry now chases was running on Orlando Avenue before it had a name.
Downstairs: the market and café
The ground floor remains the genius of the concept. Tables and chairs are set throughout the market itself, among shelves of imported Italian specialties and a boutique wine selection — you dine inside the pantry. The café serves multi-award-winning pizzas from the wood-fired oven, rotisserie chicken, antipasti, salads, fresh pastas and daily specialties, plus made-to-order deli sandwiches. One house tradition deserves its own line: pick a bottle from the market shelves and the café will cork it at your table, a wine deal Gentile instituted at opening and never withdrew. It is the lunch move for half the offices on the avenue, the provisioning stop for Lake Lily picnics — Orlando picnic guides keep recommending exactly that play — and a full wine and liquor store for the neighborhood’s dinner parties.
Upstairs: dinner over the lake
The upstairs dining room is the special-occasion register: comfortable, warm and classic, recently expanded in a renovation that added a larger bar and lounge and a balcony overlooking Lake Lily — notably, without adding seats; the space went to comfort instead of capacity. The kitchen cooks Northern and coastal Italian: house pastas including the lobster ravioli and a gorgonzola-walnut pasta with its own following, fried calamari to start, chicken piccata, fresh seafood, and Certified Angus steaks and salmon off an oak-wood grill, poured alongside one of the deeper wine lists in the area. Private dining rooms hold groups of up to sixty. Readers named Antonio’s the top Italian restaurant in Orlando Citizen’s 2025 Dining Awards, and the upstairs room serves dinner Monday through Saturday — the balcony at dusk, with the lake going gold, is the reservation to ask for.
The Maitland original also proved exportable. The family grew to include Cafe d’Antonio in Celebration and a Sand Lake Road dining room modeled on the upstairs format — but the two-story building on Orlando Avenue remains the flagship, the one where the concept’s whole argument, market below and ristorante above, is still made in a single address.
How Maitland uses it
The genius of the format is the ladder it builds into a week: café lunch on Tuesday, a market run and a bottle on Saturday, upstairs for the anniversary. Few suburban restaurants manage to be both the everyday place and the celebration place without diluting either; Antonio’s has held both registers on the same corner since before some of its regulars were born. It anchors the Italian axis in our Maitland eating guide and the classic dinner slot in our date-night itinerary. Find it on the Orlando Top Spots Map — and if you go upstairs, ask for the balcony. The lake does the rest.
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