310 Park South
Our second day in Orlando found us traveling to Winter Park, a small city just north of Orlando, to meet friends for a day of good eating and culture. We started out the day enjoying lunch at 310 Park South, one of many shops and restaurants and bars on Park Avenue in Winter Park and directly across the street from Winter Park’s main park, aptly named Central Park.
Once our collective hunger was satisfied, we walked up Park Avenue to our cultural venue for the afternoon, the Samuel Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. We were mainly interested in the large collection of Tiffany art – stained glass, lamps and artifacts from Louis Comfort Tiffany‘s home Laurelton Hall. We decided to attend the curator talk, where an expert on Tiffany led us through the galleries of Tiffany art and explained the intricacies of the art to us. I learned so many things about Tiffany I didn’t know; for example, the vast numbers of artisans on Tiffany’s staff who were responsible for executing his designs. Therese had told me that many of those artisans were women, and we don’t know anything about them. There is definitely a story to be researched, to find out who these women were and what their collaboration with their boss Mr. Tiffany was like.
After getting our heads filled with Tiffany images and Tiffany facts, it was time for some refreshment, so our friends Bob and Michelle, who live in the area, directed us to the Wine Room (another one of the fine establishments on Park Avenue in Winter Park).
The Wine Room
The Wine Room offers wine tasting machines where you can, for a couple of bucks, get a small pour of any of many dozens of kinds of wine. Rather than having to buy a whole bottle of wine – or even a whole glass – for the price of one or two glasses of wine, you can taste several different kinds of wine. Then, if you find something you really like, you can go back and get a whole glass from a tasting machine, or get a clerk to help you buy an entire bottle of that wine.
To pay for wine in the tasting machines, you buy a card from the cashier, and then can put more money on the card to buy more wine from tasting machines. The one thing about this that I found a little annoying is that when you put money onto the card, the amount you put is taxed. For example, to add $5.00 to our card, we had to pay 5.33.
I tried 4 different kinds of wine and spent about $10. The one I enjoyed the most was something I’ve never seen before, a Mosella Black Riesling.
Mosella Black Riesling
I had no idea that there are rieslings that are red wine. I understand that it is not actually made with a riesling grape – I don’t know the whole story, but it does have a flavor much like a riesling, but with a profile like a red wine. Now that I’ve heard of this, I am going to track down a bottle for us when we get home at one of our neighborhood wine shops.
We finished up our very enjoyable day with dinner at Bosphorous Restaurant. As the title indicates, this was Turkish cuisine. We had an appetizer sampler filled with familiar Turkish dips like hummus and tabouli, as well as some less-familiar items like tarama (or taramasalata), made from fish roe, lemon juice and olive oil. For a main course, I had stuffed cabbage – the menu listed yogurt as one of the ingredients, but I was able to get them to make the dish dairy free, without the yogurt. This was a really good stuffed cabbage, with mint I believe. Bob was excited that his wife Michelle, who had never had Turkish food before, enjoyed several things she tasted during the meal.
Before I came to Orlando and connected with our friends, I had never even heard of Winter Park. I was the one who tracked down the Morse Museum, after seeing the Maxfield Parrish-Tiffany collaboration “Dream Garden” in Philadelphia during our New Years visit. Now that I’ve been there, I have a good feeling for Winter Park. I hope that we will return to Park Avenue in the future, and try out some of the other restaurants on the street!
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