Philip Fibiger

In LA I had built a wiki, ordered by dining category, of all the notable places I’d eaten and of information gleaned from chowhound about places I wanted to try. It was rewarding, a lot of people found it through google, but it was a pain to maintain. Wikis are even more fertile ground for link spammers than blog comments. In one instance a page was overwritten so many times that I lost the edit history and a ton of data.

I started the wiki for Orlando, but it’s suffering from the same problems. For now I’m going to try to replicate that functionality through Backpack. It won’t have the anyone-can-edit benefit of a wiki, but the truth is that I think the LA restaurant wiki was edited once by someone who wasn’t me and who wasn’t a spammer.Here’s the backpack-driven list of Orlando Restaurants. I’d love to hear suggestions if you’ve got any.

The two most available bagels in Orlando are those at Einstein Bros. and at Panera. Both of these are like high-end Lenders bagels, they’re really just bread with a hole in it. The bagels don’t have any bite to speak of. I did some pretty exhaustive searching online, and found reference to a place called “Bagel King” in two different locations nearby, neither one existed when I drove by. Yahoo Local pointed me toward a Bruegger’s location six or seven miles south of me. I used to drive an hour and a half each direction for Bruegger’s Bagels from Los Angeles to deep in Orange County, so that would have been fantastic. When we got there, I found a sub shop that looked very much like it used to a Bruegger’s at some point in the near past. Neither Whole Foods nor Fresh Market had particularly good bagels. All was lost.

As expected, Chowhound came to the rescue. Someone pointed out that there’s a Bagel King in a shopping plaza at the corner of Semoran (436) and Howell Branch Rd. The bagels are a little salty, which could have been an isolated case of over-salting the boiling water. This is a minor quibble, and overall the bagels are excellent. The woman behind the counter had to go to the back to get my bagels (the baskets were empty) and ended up giving me 20 bagels to my dozen. Without question we’ll be back.

We met up with my parents last weekend in Las Vegas and ate one night at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in the MGM Grand casino. Robuchon is widely considered one of the greatest living french chefs, having hung up his toque ten years ago after being the youngest chef to consecutively win 3 michelin stars. A couple of years ago he opened a less formal restaurant in Paris, L’Atelier, where the food was still impeccable but the restaurant was sort of like a sushi bar, with an bar seating and an open kitchen.

He opened another restaurant in Tokyo, and then a pair in Las Vegas (A L’Atelier and a much more formal restaurant that recreates the michelin starred dining experience in the US). My dad and I were both feeling committed, so we went with the 10 course tasting menu.

Every dish was fantastic, but the two that really stood out were the poached baby kumamoto oysters and Robuchon’s signature free range quail stuffed with foie gras and served with truffled potato puree.

It was, without question, the greatest meal I’ve ever eaten.