Where to Eat in the Hourglass District Right Now
MICHELIN-listed pizza at one end, tamales and doughnuts at the other, wood-fired Italian and an Irish pub kitchen in between. The complete Curry Ford corridor table, in walking order.
3 minute read
The Hourglass District makes one promise most food neighbourhoods cannot: you can eat the whole district. The corridor along Curry Ford Road, from Bumby Avenue east toward Conway Road, holds a MICHELIN-listed pizzeria, a top-ten bakery, a wood-fired Italian kitchen, a Mexican street-food favourite, a traditional Irish pub and a scratch taqueria — most of it inside a short walk, all of it independent. Here is the table, in the order you will meet it.
Hourglass Social House: Foxtail Coffee and Tamale Co.
At 2401 Curry Ford Road, the Social House converted a former gas-station site into the district’s front room. Foxtail Coffee pours locally roasted coffee from the main counter, in a rustic-industrial room with shared tables and a patio. Beside it, Tamale Co. Mexican Street Food at 2411 Curry Ford Road serves the gourmet tamales that Fernando and Jennifer Tamayo first sold from a food truck founded in 2012 — the Hourglass restaurant, their first Orlando brick-and-mortar after Altamonte Springs, opened in 2019. Order the tamale plates, the birria grilled cheese and the Ay! Guey fries, and treat the room as the district’s all-day base camp. More in our Social House profile.
Cilantro’s Taqueria, on Bumby
Just off the corner at 1427 South Bumby Avenue, Cilantro’s Taqueria is the corridor’s quiet overachiever: a small, family-owned storefront doing tacos, burritos and quesadillas on proper corn tortillas, with carne asada, carnitas and shrimp among the fillings reviewers return for. Food critic Scott Joseph visited in its early days and found a compact menu executed with care. It is closed on Sundays and keeps lunch-and-dinner hours the rest of the week — plan accordingly, and plan to go.
F&D Woodfired Italian Kitchen
At 2635 Curry Ford Road, F&D Woodfired Italian Kitchen is the district’s sit-down Italian: Neapolitan-style pizzas from the wood fire, handmade pastas including cacio e pepe and pesto cream tortellini, cast-iron mussels, chicken piccata and shrimp with polenta, with a covered patio split between couches and full tables. OpenTable lists executive chef Jimmy Solano. Dinner is the main event most nights, with lunch joining at weekends and a brunch service in the mix — the natural choice when the evening calls for a table, a bottle and no hurry.
Shaka Donuts and Pizza Bruno: the ranked bookends
Two of our ranked tables reach into this small district. Shaka Donuts at 2641 Curry Ford Road is No. 9 among Orlando bakeries (Net Score 88.0; Best Bakeries in Orlando) — malasadas, maple bacon and banana pudding doughnuts, and a breakfast sandwich built on a glazed ring. At the corridor’s east end, Pizza Bruno at 3990 Curry Ford Road is No. 9 for pizza (Net Score 91.4; Best Pizza in Orlando) and MICHELIN Recommended, with naturally leavened wood-fired pies and the garlic knots Orlando argues about. Profiles: Shaka Donuts and Pizza Bruno.
The pub kitchens: Claddagh Cottage and Roque Pub
Claddagh Cottage Irish Pub at 2421 Curry Ford Road serves proper pub food — cottage pie, steak and ale pie, Scotch eggs, sausage rolls — from late afternoon, with traditional music in the room. Roque Pub at 3076 Curry Ford Road pairs its 30 rotating craft taps and 450-plus bottles and cans with a gastropub menu built around burgers like the Pub Dub. Either one turns a drinks plan into a dinner plan without changing buildings. Plot every stop on the Orlando Top Spots Map, start at whichever end your appetite dictates, and walk the middle. That is the whole trick of this district: the middle is five minutes long and there is no filler in it.
A note on range: the corridor’s kitchens cover more of the map than its size suggests — Neapolitan and Italian from two different ovens, Mexican in two distinct registers, Irish pub cooking, Hawaiian-leaning baking and locally roasted coffee, with the brewery pouring the local beer to match. That breadth, in a five-minute walk, is the district’s defining statistic.
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