Loading… Gastrobrunch: Brunch With Ambition Inside the 1927 Hunter Arms Hotel
Chicken and waffle tacos and Cinni-bun French toast in a Florida land-boom hotel: how Loading… Gastrobrunch became downtown St. Cloud's destination kitchen.
3 minute read
The most interesting kitchen in St. Cloud works out of one of its oldest buildings. Loading… Gastrobrunch, at 1023 New York Ave, occupies a small space inside the Hunter Arms Hotel — the Mediterranean Revival hotel that Ohio mausoleum builder Grover C. Hunter opened in January 1927, in the Florida land-boom years, when it ran winters only at a flat seasonal rate covering a room and two meals a day. Nearly a century later the building is feeding people again, and the meals are considerably more playful.
Brunch, taken seriously and not solemnly
Loading… opened in 2020, in the teeth of the pandemic, owned by friends James Brady, Matt Rody and Jahnae Allen, and it also serves as the in-house dining room for the renovated hotel next door. The menu, built under chef Vaughn Collins, starts from the breakfast-and-lunch canon and then wanders off in the best directions: basic egg dishes are listed, honestly, as the “boring” section, while the kitchen’s energy goes into chicken and waffle tacos, Cinni-bun French toast and Macho Nacho tacos. Critic Scott Joseph, reviewing the room for his long-running Orlando food site, noted the rustic fit between the cooking and the historic hotel around it — this is a small, characterful space, not a polished chain brunch box, and the front patio on New York Avenue is the seat to angle for.
From brunch house to dinner table
The name undersells the evening. Loading… began as breakfast and lunch, then added dinner — a second act Joseph returned to review — and the restaurant now runs brunch daily with dinner service through the week. That makes it the downtown kitchen with the widest useful range: the place to take out-of-towners at 11 in the morning, and a legitimate answer to “where’s dinner in St. Cloud?” after the sun goes down. In a downtown our St. Cloud dining guide otherwise fills with red-sauce Italian, a saloon steakhouse and barbecue, Loading… is the modern counterweight — the chef-driven room in the veterans’ colony.
The Winter Garden comparison
When Loading… opened, co-owner James Brady told Scott Joseph that people were comparing downtown St. Cloud to Winter Garden before it bloomed — a comparison that would have sounded like flattery in 2020 and reads more like a forecast now, with the historic district on the National Register and the avenue’s dining bench deepening around the hotel. Loading… deserves a share of the credit: it proved that a chef-led, idea-driven kitchen could draw from beyond the town’s borders into a veterans’-colony downtown most Orlando diners had never visited. Joseph himself opened his review with the confession that in nearly 33 years in Central Florida he had never been to downtown St. Cloud before this restaurant gave him a reason. That is what a destination brunch room does for a small downtown — and why this one matters beyond its menu.
The building is part of the meal
Part of the pleasure is the address. The Hunter Arms takes up three-quarters of a city block, its arches and stonework pure 1920s “Spaniflora,” and the state historical marker outside tells the whole boom-and-restoration story: winter hotel, decline, a 1990s bed-and-breakfast rescue, and a full restoration after 2016 that the marker credits as a key element in downtown’s revitalization. Eat brunch, read the marker, then walk the National Register historic district it anchors — our historic downtown guide starts practically at the hotel’s front step. If you are building a St. Cloud morning, pair Loading… with Madilynn’s Craft Coffee a block away and the lakefront path; our breakfast and coffee roundup lays out the route. However you schedule it, this is the reservation — walk-in, usually, but the room is small — that shows visitors what St. Cloud’s downtown revival actually tastes like.
Photo: The Hunter Arms Hotel, 1029 New York Avenue, St. Cloud — home of Loading… Gastrobrunch. Photo: Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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