Manny Tato, owner of Spice Modern Steakhouse at Lake Eola (and formerly, originally, on Park Avenue), plans to open Spice Burgr in a space at the Plaza in downtown Orlando. Tato says the intentionally misspelled business will feature all natural, all beef burgers. Other sandwiches, too, will be hormone free, he told me.
He said he hopes to open in two weeks, on October 29. That’s a quick turnaround, but Tato says he’s been planning this for a long time. “Five or six years we’ve been wanting to do a burger concept,” he said, and when he said it I’m pretty sure there was an e in burger. However, the recession being what it was five or six years ago, Tato put the idea on the back griddle. Now, he believes, the timing is right.
Price point for a single cheeseburger with shoestring fries will be $5.95. Other side items, including onion rings and and totted potatoes, will also be available. You can download the front of the menu here and the back of the menu here.
If you blinked — and if your blinks last, say, a few months — you probably missed the last business that occupied the space that will soon be home to Spice Burgr. That was Meltz, a melted cheese sandwich concept. I asked Tato if he thought the location presented any particular challenges. He said he expects to have slow days on holidays when nearby offices are closed. But he thinks that with numerous condominiums close by and the movie theater just upstairs there will be plenty of people looking for a burger. Or burgr.
I hope he’s right, though one would have thought the same thing about Cafe Red just a block away. That was the burger business that went out of it not long after that location’s previous tenant, a Five Guys Burger & Fries, closed.
In the meantime, Tato said that Spice Modern is doing well on Central Boulevard. “We’ve come around in our consistency,” he said. “One thing I’ve learned is that consistency is the key to success.”
