Osteria Ester: The Red-Sauce Love Letter That Rebuilt Central Boulevard
Good Salt's Italian-American osteria in the former Soco space — housemade pasta, a chef cooking his grandmother's brief, a Michelin listing in year one, and our No. 2 Italian ranking. Why Ester is Thornton Park's new anchor.
3 minute read
Some restaurants open. Osteria Ester arrived. In early December 2025, Good Salt Restaurant Group — the team behind The Osprey, Reyes Mezcaleria, The Monroe, Sparrow and Seito Sushi Baldwin Park — took over the former Soco space at 629 E. Central Blvd. in Thornton Park and opened an Italian-American osteria that Orlando’s critics promptly started calling an instant classic. It ranks No. 2 among Orlando’s Italian restaurants in our Italian rankings, with a Net Score of 93.2, and it joined the Michelin Guide for 2026 in its first year. This is the room that rebuilt Central Boulevard’s reputation.
A love letter, addressed to New Jersey
Chef Michael Cooper, known to Orlando diners from The Osprey, named the restaurant for his grandmother Ester and built it as a deliberate homage to the Italian-American dining of his New Jersey upbringing — the Sunday-dinner, red-sauce-joint feeling, executed with a fine-dining kitchen’s precision. Good Salt founders Jason and Sue Chin, James Beard Award finalists for Outstanding Restaurateur in 2025, gave him the group’s sixth concept and its most personal one. The context matters: Soco, the Southern-contemporary restaurant that held this address for almost eleven years under chef Greg Richie, closed in May 2025, and Thornton Park regulars watched the space with genuine anxiety. What replaced it honours the address rather than erasing it — a neighbourhood restaurant first, a destination second.
What to order
The menu reads like the canon, cooked properly. Start with the wagyu carpaccio, which early reviewers singled out, or the truffle arancini and a crostini that one local review called rich and dangerously delicious. The pasta program is the centre of gravity: lasagna rotolo, braised beef tortelloni, a mushroom gnocchi with the kind of deep, savoury seasoning that gets boxed up to take home when a table cannot finish it — all five pieces, in one documented case. The duck risotto and the chicken alla parmigiana carry the mains, and the butterscotch budino is the documented finish: order it even if you think you are done. Beverage director Lorena Castro’s Italian wine list, mostly available by the glass, is built for exactly this food — ask, and the room will steer you well.
The honours, collected quickly
The recognition arrived in a rush. Orlando Weekly’s critic folded Ester into his top tables of 2025 within weeks of opening and called the experience an instant classic in the making; Orlando Citizen’s 2026 Dining Awards readers’ choice list put it at No. 1 for Best New Restaurant; and the Michelin Guide added it for 2026 — a first-year haul that would flatter a restaurant with a decade behind it. None of it feels accidental. Good Salt is the group behind some of Orlando’s most durable dining rooms, and Ester applies that operational polish to the most emotional brief in the repertoire: the family table. It is worth saying plainly that our own No. 2 Italian ranking sits alongside those honours rather than above them — the critics, the Guide, the readers and this magazine are all describing the same room.
The practical shape of an evening
Osteria Ester serves dinner Tuesday through Saturday and brunch on weekends, and reservations are the sensible default — walk-ins are taken, but this is currently one of the harder Thornton Park tables to improvise on a Friday. The dining room is warm and stylish rather than hushed, the patio faces Central Boulevard, and the whole evening sits a short stroll from the lake: the classic pairing is dinner here, then the sunset loop, or the reverse with a glass at Eola Wine Company first. For the full neighbourhood table, see Where to Eat in Thornton Park Right Now; Ester is pinned, with everything else in this guide, on the Top Spots Map.
Orlando gets a handful of restaurants a decade that change what a neighbourhood means. Thornton Park has been waiting for its next one since Hue and Dexter’s defined the district a generation ago. On the evidence of its first year — the critics, the Guide, the readers’ choice honours, and the room’s own cooking — Osteria Ester is it.
Orlando Citizen by email
The weekly edition, in your inbox
One email, every Saturday: the week’s edition of Orlando Citizen — the week’s stories, rankings and winners, gathered in one place. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Related Stories
Editor’s Picks
Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank