I was standing outside Brother Jimmy’s earlier this week and as a group went in ahead of me, one of them said, “I am really excited about this.”

Mind you, this was the Brother Jimmy’s in New York’s Murray Hill neighborhood, not a place exactly teeming with barbecue restaurants. I had already visited the Brother Jimmy’s in the Marketplace at Dr. Phillips and figured I should check out a New York location since the concept began there.This is the place with the slogan “Put some south in yo’ mouth.” There are indications that Manhattan had multiple Brothers Jimmy’s – the first was on the Upper East Side and another was on Eighth Avenue, but it appears that only the one on Lexington Avenue still exists.

In fact, when another Brother Jimmy’s opens at Icon Park, Orlando will have twice as many as Manhattan. Is that something to get really excited about?

Milkhouse certainly has a splashy presence. Located, as the name clues, in the Milk District, the area of town surrounding the T.G. Lee Dairy facility at Bumby and Robinson Avenues, its name is spelled out in a blaze of marquee-like light bulbs as though announcing the production of a lactose-tolerant Broadway musical.

It has the trappings of being another in our continuing line of food halls that have opened or are planned for the area, albeit a smaller one than most of the others. But Milkhouse operates more like a restaurant, with customers invited to have a seat at a table or at the bar and order food and drinks from a server.

The main food option, at least in the evenings, is provided by Cicchetti Kitchen, or Cicchetti by Bruno depending on where you’re looking. The Bruno in question is Zacchini, of Pizza Bruno, who also has a Bagel Bruno outlet here. (Zacchini had previously opened a Bagel Bruno inside a Foxtail Coffee Co. in College Park; Foxtail is also in residence at Milkhouse.) But for evening comestibles, only the Cicchetti menu was available – well, along with Kelly’s Ice Cream, a perfect choice for a place called Milkhouse.

Chicken Guy!, the exclamation pointed partnership project between Orlando resident and global restaurateur Robert Earl and celebrity chef and tv host Guy Fieri, has opened its second area location.

They’ve taken over a former Steak ’n Shake structure on Orlando Avenue in Winter Park, removed all things cow and chickened the place up. (There are still shakes, but we’ll come back to that.)

You’d think Itsa Chicken would be a sufficiently self-identifying name for a restaurant. But it’s actually a little too succinct. Maybe Itsa Chicken Sandwich would be better, or Itsa Fried Chicken Sandwich, because that’s essentially what this new Milk District eatery offers.

And before we go any further, I feel compelled to mention that the logo for the business includes the apostrophe that makes the name more grammatically correct. But all other references on the business’s web and Facebook pages are Itsa, so it’s how I’ll refer to it here. Grudgingly.

Itsa Chicken is a hole in the wall, literally. It occupies a corner of Whiskey Lou’s Lounge, a longtime cocktail slinger from pre-Milk District designation days. A window was punched out for walkup orders. There are a few stools at a railing overlooking Bumby Avenue, and Lou’s, which recently went smoke-free (perhaps you saw the headlines about Hell freezing over), put in a back patio, so I assume chicken sandwich eaters would be welcome there as long as they’re also drinking from Lou’s. Heck, you may even be allowed indoors with the nonsmokers as long as you’re imbibing. But walking your sandwich across the parking lot to the new Milkhouse food hall would be bad form.

I have just enough time to induct the Catfish Place of Apopka into our list of Orlando Classics before it goes away forever. After 38 years, the restaurant has been sold and will soon change its name to Nauti Lobstah.

Michael Rumplik and his wife, Cara, along with Christine Gonzalez purchased the landmark eatery from Bob Johnson last month. Rumplik’s name should be familiar to longtime readers as the executive chef at Rosen Centre, where he oversaw Everglades restaurant. So he knows seafood (though one of my favorite Rumplik dishes is his focaccia-crusted lamb).

But devoted Catfish Placers should take heart: Rumplik says that although he’s adding to the menu – a live lobster tank is now on premises and he’s featuring more oysters and clams – he has no intention of deleting the erstwhile eponymous items. Translation: Catfish will still be available. “I kept many of Bob’s recipes and favorites on the menu,” Rumplik told me by phone. “I want to keep everybody happy and content.”

I hadn’t visited Francesco’s, the Maitland ristorante and pizzeria, since it opened in 2012, so I thought it was time to go back and see how it’s doing.

Nicely, for the most part.

The restaurant was doing brisk business on a recent cold and drizzly night with people glad to accept outdoor tables. My guest and I preferred a table inside and waited patiently between the host stand and the counter of the open kitchen, which was strewn with packets of tablecloths (though tables were covered with sheets of paper), bins of flatware and various wine bottles, some full, some not.

I got Chinese food from Lu Garden the other day.

“Leu Gardens sells Chinese food?”

No, not Leu Gardens, Lu Garden.

“You mean Chuan Lu Garden?”

No, but Lu Garden has some good food to chew on.

Lu Garden is a compact, unassuming restaurant in a small strip mall on Conroy Winermere Road between Kirkman road and Dr. Phillips Boulevard. It seems the space was previously occupied by a business called Magic Wok, but Magic Wok apparently went poof.

I needed to order some food to take to a business meeting and found Lu Garden’s website. It was easy to navigate and had a user-friendly ordering feature. I grabbed some items and put them in my cart, easily choosing the side selections for each entree.

OK, this is going to get a little confusing, so stay with me.

There’s a new business occupying the space in downtown Orlando that most recently was the food hall Market On Magnolia and before that Frank ’n Steins, which opened in 2011. Taking a cue from its location at the intersection of Magnolia Avenue and Church Street, the new place is called The Corner Pizza Bar. It is owned by Diana and Alejandro Ranalli, who also own a restaurant called Italian House on Crystal Lake Drive just north of Curry Ford Road in a former Pizza Hut hut.

The Ranallis bought Italian House in 2019 after selling Ragazzi’s on Edgewater Drive in College Park. What’s confusing to me – and I’ll admit to facile befuddlement these days – is that the website for the Italian House states that it has been “serving Orlando since 1989.”

But in May of 2001, I reviewed a restaurant with the same address as Italian House called Cherazi’s. It may still have been a Pizza Hut before Cherazi’s because I mentioned in the review that I had once walked in while it was a PH and found it so unkempt and unclean-looking that I turned around and left. And in between Cherazi’s and Italian House, the restaurant was known as Italian Pie and Pasta House.

(Property records, by the way, would suggest the hut was constructed in 1971.)

So what does all this mean? I was hoping you could tell me. At the very least, you can take the “serving since...” with a grain of salt, or in this case sale.

But I left you waiting on the corner, so let’s go back there.

At Shanghai Lane it’s all about the soup dumplings. There are other things on the small menu of this quick-serve restaurant in west Orlando’s Chinatown mall at Westside Crossing, but it’s the soup dumplings that have fascinated most of the people who come here.

Officially, they’re known as Nanxiang soup dumplings, and they look like any other pot sticker except that they are filled with broth. The fascination comes from a curiosity similar to anyone who has studied a ship model inside a bottle – how did they get that in there?

Every so often, I like to stop by Shakers American Cafe, the longtime College Park diner, to remind myself what great food it serves. I go in expecting good, basic fare and I’m always impressed that it rises a few levels above that.

That was the case recently when a friend and I stopped in for a between breakfast and lunch meal – we didn’t call it brunch because that sounded inappropriately tony, and we were definitely there for breakfast.

My eyes were drawn immediately to the blackboard outside the restaurant that listed short rib hash as one of the day’s special. I’m a sucker for breakfast hash. If you’re ever sitting in a diner that has hash on its menu and you see me walk in, make a bet with your dining companion on what I’m going to order; you’re almost sure to win.