Where to Eat in Maitland Right Now: Two Italys, One Oak Fire and a Nordic Roastery
Antonio's two floors, Francesco's Sicilian oven, Luke's Park Avenue-grade American cooking, sushi and Greek around City Hall, and KOS's Scandinavian coffee: Maitland's compact, serious food scene, mapped.
3 minute read
Maitland eats above its weight. Along a mile of South Orlando Avenue and the new lanes around City Hall, a small city of lakes and art colonies supports two serious Italian dining rooms with entirely different accents, a chef-driven American kitchen from Winter Park royalty, a sushi bar, a Greek taverna built for groups, a decades-old roasted-chicken counter — and a Nordic coffee roastery that ranks among the best coffee shops in the metro. Most of it sits within a short walk of Lake Lily. Here is how to eat your way through it.
The Italian axis: two rooms, two Italys
Antonio’s, at 611 South Orlando Avenue, is really two restaurants stacked in one building — an Italian market and café downstairs, an elegant dining room with a balcony over Lake Lily upstairs — and it has run both registers since Greg Gentile founded it in 1989. Our full profile is here. A few blocks north at 400 South Orlando Avenue, Francesco’s Ristorante & Pizzeria cooks the Sicilian way. Chef-owner Francesco Aiello, a native of Palermo who watched his father work as a pastry chef and trained at Italy’s Instituto Alberghiero, has cooked in Central Florida since 1998 and opened his own room in 2012. The kitchen’s signature is open flame: pizzas ride a 700-degree wood-burning oven and come out thin with poofed, charred edges; hand-made pastas, grilled octopus and a daily fish special round out a menu that fills the room with neighborhood regulars. Two Italian answers, five minutes apart — Antonio’s for the occasion upstairs or the market lunch below, Francesco’s for the fire.
The chef’s table in the suburbs
Luke’s Kitchen and Bar, at 640 South Orlando Avenue, is the third concept from Park Lights Hospitality — the team behind Luma on Park and Prato in Winter Park — led by James Beard regional semifinalist chef Brandon McGlamery. The brief here was classic American cooking executed at Park Avenue level: carefully sourced oysters and a raw bar, deviled eggs, crab cakes, prime rib, rotisserie chicken turning on a vertical spit, and a burger that local reviewers praise precisely because nothing foams or fizzes on top of it. We profile it in depth. Its patio faces Lake Lily Park, which makes it the natural dinner half of a lake-loop evening.
Around City Hall: the new cluster
Maitland City Centre, the mixed-use development on Independence Lane, gave the city something it never had: a walkable dining cluster beside City Hall, the same lane the Sunday farmers’ market now fills. Boku Sushi & Grill, at 140 Independence Lane, serves nigiri, signature rolls — the Drama Queen and Out of Control among the regulars’ calls — and grilled dishes, with a pet-friendly patio on the lane. Around the corner at 111 South Orlando Avenue, Parea Greek Taverna plates the sharing menu its name promises — parea is the Greek word for a circle of friends: a hummus trio, tirokafteri spicy feta dip, saganaki, grilled octopus, slow-braised lamb shank and cast-iron moussaka, in a handsome room where the owners work the floor. And for the neighborhood’s everyday register, Athena Roasted Chicken at 487 South Orlando Avenue has been family-run since the late 1980s: rotisserie chicken with Greek salad and the roast potatoes locals swear by, at counter-service speed.
Coffee, done the Nordic way
Start the day at KOS Coffee, 449 South Orlando Avenue — No. 2 in our Best Coffee Shops in Orlando rankings with a Net Score of 92.5 (category winner feature: Haan Coffee). KOS roasts light and Scandinavian in-house, pours guest beans from roasters such as Morgon, La Cabra and Tim Wendelboe, and plates Norwegian waffles and house-baked sourdough. Our profile is here; it is the morning anchor of the avenue and the correct first stop before a Lake Lily loop.
How to run the crawl
Breakfast at KOS, the market on Sunday, lunch downstairs at Antonio’s or a bento at Boku, dinner at Luke’s or Francesco’s, and a Greek nightcap spread at Parea — all of it plottable on the Orlando Top Spots Map, and all of it in our Maitland hub. Small city, serious table.
Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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