Inside the Hourglass Social House: Coffee, Tamales and a Gas Station Reborn
Foxtail Coffee opened here in August 2018 and Tamale Co. followed on Cinco de Mayo 2019. Together they turned 2401 Curry Ford Road into the district's front room.
3 minute read
Every young district needs a front room, and the Hourglass District built its one inside a former gas station. The Hourglass Social House, at 2401 Curry Ford Road on the northeast corner of Bumby Avenue, took a convenience-store footprint and opened it up into a shared hall: a coffee counter at the front, food counters behind, shared tables between, and a patio doing quiet work all day. It is the first place most visitors actually experience the district, and it still explains the district best.
Foxtail Coffee: the anchor tenant
Foxtail Coffee Co. opened the Hourglass location in August 2018, with its grand opening on August 4 that year — at the time, a second Orlando-area home for the Winter Park-born roaster after its original shop. The company’s own description of the site stresses the open footprint of the converted store, with room for a traditional Foxtail counter serving its locally roasted coffee and the full run of espresso drinks, cold brews and seasonal specials Foxtail regulars expect. The room’s rustic-industrial fit-out — reclaimed wood, a dimmer work-friendly zone, a large shared table, board games in circulation — turned it quickly into the neighbourhood’s laptop-and-meeting default, with a dog-friendly patio that the surrounding streets have adopted as their own. It opens in the morning and runs through the day, which makes it the corridor’s metronome.
Tamale Co.: from truck to this room
Tamale Co. Mexican Street Food, at 2411 Curry Ford Road, Suite B, is the Social House’s other founding flavour. Fernando and Jennifer Tamayo started Tamale Co. as a food truck in Orlando in 2012, opened a first permanent restaurant in Altamonte Springs in 2017, and brought the truck’s following to the Hourglass District in 2019, opening on Cinco de Mayo. The menu translates street food into a dining room without sanding it down: gourmet tamales in rotating fillings — the Dos Amigos plate pairing chicken and pork is the sampler to start with — carne asada tamales served on a hot skillet, a birria grilled cheese with consommé for dipping, Ay! Guey fries, elote and fish tacos. The room leans in, with lucha libre masks on display. It serves lunch and dinner through the week, with a Sunday pattern that starts earlier and ends earlier — a brunch-friendly shape that suits the building.
What the Social House proves
The Social House also carries the district’s honest history of change. Its original third tenant, the vegan eatery Leguminati — crunchwraps, burgers and bagels, sharing the Foxtail counter from 2018 — closed in 2025 after a long run, and the hall has continued around its anchors. That is worth stating plainly rather than airbrushing: shared halls live on their strongest counters, and Foxtail and Tamale Co. have proven strong enough to carry the address. For a first visit, the move is simple: coffee at Foxtail, tamales next door, a box from Shaka Donuts a short walk east for later, and the rest of the corridor plotted on the Orlando Top Spots Map. Start here, and the Hourglass District makes sense in about twenty minutes.
The building itself is part of the district’s founding story. Reporting from the corridor’s early days describes the developers — National Real Estate, owned by Giovanni Fernandez and Elise Sabatino — assembling the Bumby and Curry Ford corners building by building, clearing a former church site for restaurant space and converting the gas-station store into this hall, with early plans that even imagined the forecourt keeping a retro service-station character. Foxtail and Tamale Co. were the plan’s food-and-drink core from the start, announced together well before either opened. That the hall still runs on those same two anchors, seven years on, is the strongest evidence the original idea was sound: give two proven local operators one shared room at the right corner, and the neighbourhood will do the rest.
It also helps that the two anchors cover the whole day between them. Foxtail owns the morning and the working afternoon; Tamale Co. owns lunch, dinner and the Sunday brunch pattern; the shared tables and patio serve both without a seam. Visitors arriving mid-afternoon, in the gap between the district’s lunch and dinner services elsewhere, find the Social House is the one address on the corridor that never feels between shifts.
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