Canopy Cafe is the new name on the restaurant space that previously was known as Tolla’s. That’s the small, freestanding building on Pennsylvania Avenue a little farther north than the Coop.
It’s a pleasant enough place, and it makes full use of the outdoor seating area, which is actually larger than indoors. Not really a canopy — a hard roof covers the patio — but the open air space has roll-down scrim shades that allow it to be as climate controlled as possible.
Have you ever wondered how to make macarons, those tasty little French pastries? There are many steps involved, but master pastry chef David Ramirez of David Ramirez Chocolates walks us through it in this episode of The Daily Chew. Click on the video link above, and then find the macarons recipe at icFlorida.com.
You go to enough brunches and you start to expect to find certain items on the menu. With luck, and a skillful chef, you might get one or maybe two items that rise above the usual suspects.
At American Gymkhana, which indeed has a skillful chef in Aarthi Sampath, the entire brunch menu is filled with inventive creations that give a nod to classic brunchtime fare but stay true to the Indian theme.
Take the French Toast Gymkhana, for example. Instead of using a white bread, as in a classic French toast recipe, Sampath uses naan. The Indian bread, of course, is not as spongy as a white western bread so the texture is more akin to hardier crepe. But when filled with the cinnamon-raisin mawa, it becomes a sweet treat. A brilliant invention.
We're constantly being told that we shouldn't eat certain foods if we want to live past next Tuesday. Eggs, chocolate, whole milk -- they've all been given the thumbs down before the thumbs up. This article from Salon has a fun list of foods that were once considered death warrants that are now seen as just dandy to eat.
Coffee is once again on the good list. A recent study by the National Cancer Institute, as detailed in this article from Medical News Today, actually says drinking coffee could reduce your chance of getting melanoma.
That's this week, anyway. Someone is bound to come out with a new study detailing coffee ills. So we should take all of this with a grain of salt. Or, as the Salon article suggests, as many grains of salt as we want.
You'll be glad to know that Rock & Brews, the restaurant founded by rockers Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, is not exclusively a tribute to their band, Kiss. That is, you'll be glad to know that unless you're diehard Kiss fans, in which case I'm not sure there's anything that can truly make you happy.
Instead, Rock & Brews, or R&B, as it is misleadingly abbreviated, is a paean to rockers of all stripes. Nearly every inch of wall space in the massive space — and there are a lot of inches in the two-story open room — is covered with photos and album cover reproductions of everyone from Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Bruce Springsteen to The Rolling Stones and, yes, Kiss. (Maybe even Yes.) I should say every inch of wall space that isn't also sporting a big screen tv, most of which are tuned to sports channels, though interspersed among them are screens that play vintage music videos. Not the sound from those videos — that's supplied by a constant stream of rock music played loudly over the restaurant's sound system. And when you have a restaurant that is dedicated to rock music and has partners known for for their heavy metal style, you can't fault the place for the sound level. Expect it to be a tad noisy.
The Central Florida Rock & Brews is the first of the small chain's locations to open east of the Mississippi. According the the website, Oviedo was chosen for its "energized music and restaurant scene."
The menu is...
Wait. What?
