Florida Foodie

Chef Lewis Lin did not plan on being a restauranteur.

“I moved here in 2006,” Lin said. “I was coming for my master’s degree.”

Lin came to Florida from Taiwan, pursuing a master’s in finance. Unfortunately, he graduated in 2008, just as the recession hit the U.S.

“I gotta find a job and I love food. I love food — always have. Old foods connect me to family and friends,” he said.

So, Lin started working in restaurants. Eventually, he purchased his first restaurant, Jade Sushi & New Asian in College Park.

Jade remains a fairly traditional sushi restaurant, but Lin was looking to bring something more unique to Orlando’s dining scene.

“Back then, all the restaurants in Orlando, especially Japanese restaurants, they only did sushi rolls, nothing else but sushi rolls,” Lin said. “I was thinking there is something better I can serve to friends or customers — bring some different culture, food to the city.”

This led Lin to open Susuru, a Japanese-style izakaya restaurant decked in Showa-era pieces of pop culture.

“It’s more close to where I can always go when I go to Japan (or) when I go to Taiwan,” he said.

Susuru sells Japanese-style street food such as yakitori, which is skewered chicken grilled over coals, and ramen. The name actually comes from the sound people make while slurping noodles.

The Showa era refers to a period in Japanese culture following WWII that saw the creation of Japan’s popular culture that persists to this day, such as Godzilla, Ultraman and Power Rangers.

“I grew up in Taiwan. We’ve been influenced by Japan so much — the culture, the pop culture, the anime, those things — when I grew up, it was everything,” Lin said. “Showa was so different compared to the history of Japan.”

Lin is keeping a similar aesthetic as he opens his third restaurant, Juju, which is now in its soft opening.

“Soft opening will be August,” said Lin, the chef and owner of Juju. “After soft opening, when we are fully staffed, we will probably announce the grand opening.”

Juju is opening up at 700 Maguire Blvd., a building that used to house a Pizza Hut, right across the street from the Fashion Square Mall.

The construction saw the former Pizza Hut transformed to have the appearance of a Shōwa period-style Japanese house.

“We separate the whole restaurant into three different areas,” Lin said. “First, we have a really more high-end Kappo bar, a chef’s table — six seats, reservation only, serving 10 courses with a premium sake pairing option.”

The other sections are a traditional izakaya setting, which will serve drinks and snacks for a more casual dining experience, and another section focused on serving a late-night crowd.

Lin said he wanted to make Juju distinct from his other two restaurants.

“The reason for doing that in the Milk District is because I want to bring different concepts and share different kinds of food themes with (the people there),” Lin said.

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Lin talks about the food he wants to share with customers. He also talks about the struggles of trying to open a new restaurant amid labor shortages and supply chain issues.

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Dave Manuchia may not be a household name, but he has played a big role in the restaurant industry for the past 40 years.

Among his many accomplishments, Manuchia was one of the founders of the Olive Garden franchise.

“(I) got a degree in business, got an MBA and ended up working for General Mills — General Mills restaurants back then — here in Orlando, when I moved to Orlando in 1981,” Manuchia said. “So we were doing accounting, and all of a sudden, this guy came through my department and sat there for two days. (He) left. Two months later, he called. He goes, ‘Hey, remember me?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘We’re starting this new Italian chain. I’m the first employee. I have one other employee, and I’d like to bring you on the team.’ And he said, ‘You know, if it doesn’t work, we’re probably all going to get fired, and I can’t give you a raise,’ and I say, ‘Oh, man, let’s go. Let’s try it.’”

What followed was a flurry of 120 work weeks for the small team working to create a new restaurant chain.

“We each had our own booth to sleep in and our wives didn’t see us,” he said. “They’d have to show up at 11 o’clock at night to say ‘hi.’”

Manuchia said everyone involved played multiple roles in making the chain a success.

“I was the CFO, administrative guy, policy guy, taste tester, dishwasher, you know, whatever it took back then,” he said. “I was the Ringo Starr of the group. I was in the back, just keeping the beat and made sure all the paychecks went out, and bills got paid and all that kind of stuff.”

Manuchia ended up staying with the company, which would eventually become Darden Restaurants, for 11 years before striking out on his own.

In 1992, he started Restaurant Partners, Inc. The company operates and manages restaurants around the country. It also provides consultation and support services for chefs and other restauranteurs.

“One of the things that I learned at Darden is you have to have an infrastructure to support a restaurant business,” Manichia said. “You can’t just be a chef and have a great spaghetti recipe. That’s fine, but what about paying the bills? What about the rent, what about all those things — taxes and all? So we set about to set up what we call a ‘chassis.’ Our chassis has marketing operations, policies and procedures, purchasing, accounting, HR — that chassis is now available to all our clients and all our managed properties, as well as our own properties.”

The businessman said his company’s structure supports several one-off businesses, but it has also helped restaurants expand their footprints and grow into chains.

“We can’t guarantee success, but what we can guarantee is the foundation that you can worry about doing what you do best and let us take care of everything else,” Manuchia said. “And that’s worked out really well for a lot of folks.”

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Manuchia talks about the changes in the restaurant industry over his career. He also talks about how his restaurants are weathering ongoing inflation and supply chain issues.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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When you work in a kitchen and the tickets are piling up, a mistake can cause a panic.

For Count and Jessica Foreman, it was the start of a 23-year-long relationship.

The couple met while working at a Don Pablo restaurant. She was working in the front of the house, waiting tables, while he was a cook in the back of the house.

“Her tickets were falling behind,” Count Foreman said.

“Something happened and didn’t bring a quesadilla,” Jessica Foreman said. “I was like ‘Give me a quesadilla,’ and I kid you not he had a quesadilla right there. I don’t know he probably gave me somebody else’s quesadilla. So, we fell in love with a quesadilla.”

From there, the couple’s relationship blossomed, not just romantically, but also into a business.

“I started a cleaning service a long time ago and Chef used to help me,” Jessica Foreman said. " But I also did it as a concierge. So a concierge is basically — I used to run errands, do everything and then that’s when I introduced chef and I say, ‘Well, my husband cooks’ and I say ‘We can do personal chef (catering).’”

The couple started catering for holidays and special occasions. They also started street vending

“We would actually pop up a tent — all we had was our six-foot table and a grill,” Count Foreman said. “That was that’s how we started with the vending. So that’s also how we got our product to the streets.”

Eventually, the couple was able to open a catering kitchen.

“Actually, it was a two-car garage,” Jessica Foreman said. “I kid you not.”

Despite that, the couple had high hopes and determination.

“Everybody that are multimillionaires started from a garage. That’s a sign,” Jessica Foreman said.

The catering kitchen legitimized their business, but the Foremans wanted to give themselves some more exposure. They started entering cooking competitions around Florida.

“When you participate in those type of local events, it gives you a good connection to your community,” Count Foreman said.

Eventually, they were able to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant, Saute Kingz, in Daytona Beach — 200 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Now, they are getting ready to expand their business with a food truck

“We’re gonna be out here hoping that Orlando opens up (Its) doors — we’re looking into Tampa, Jacksonville,” Jessica Foreman said. “We’re really ready to travel and bring our food out.”

“To be able to travel around — and that’s one of the reasons why we caterers, you’re always in a different place, and you’re experiencing different people and it’s the same thing with a food truck,” Count Foreman said. “We’re going to be able to meet some different people all over Florida and that’s gonna be fun.”

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, the Foremans share some of the struggles they went through while trying to build their business. They also talk about their early days in the restaurant industry and their recent run on the Food Network’s Great Food Truck Race.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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A little more than a decade after opening a small ice cream cart in Portland, Oregon, Kim and Tyler Malek have built a small frozen treat empire that stretches from coast to coast.

Kim and Tyler Malek are cousins and co-founders of Salt & Straw.

“We had this dream of creating space for people to get together,” Tyler Malek said. “They get to meet their friends and neighbors, learn about the food around them, and we curate it that way — providing an experience for people.”

The pair felt that ice cream in particular was the perfect vehicle to bring people from all walks of life together.

“We realized really quickly that an ice cream shop is this really cool community gathering place where you can come as you are, regardless of how you look, what your political viewpoints are, what your food preferences are — there’s always something to (make you) feel welcomed at an ice cream shop,” Tyler Malek said.

Beyond just bringing people together, The Maleks also hope to get those people talking and considering the world around them.

“A really great example is like two years ago. We worked with nonprofits up and down the west coast to talk about food waste,” Tyler Malek said. “And we had flavors that were made with foods that were about to get thrown away — like 3-day-old bread or grains from a brewery that were gonna get tossed. All these things, we were able to play with — fun, interesting ingredients that cause people to kind of stop and ask, “How did you do that? Why did you do that?’ And it provokes this conversation in a really safe space around (a) really, really interesting and delicious flavor.”

Salt & Straw recently opened its Central Florida location at Disney Springs. Tyler Malek said it is essential to find the Florida flavors to incorporate into Salt & Straw’s ice cream.

“We have to find those fun stories also in Florida, and we have to infuse those into our flavors,” he said. “So finding farmers that are doing guava. We’re always working with local coffee roasters — like really kind of figuring out how do we take our foundation, our philosophy of using flavor and making flavor and actually allow that region to inform us and guide us.”

Salt & Straw has worked with Disney in the past, at the company’s park in California. Tyler Malek said he excited to join Disney Springs, as it has become a foodie destination.

“Disney Springs is — it’s wild,” Tyler Malek said. “(Disney has) made this, like, concerted effort to lean into becoming a food experience. And you can even see how many new restaurants are opening in Disney Springs. It’s really bonkers.”

In the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Tyler Malek talks about developing Salt & Straw’s unique and funky flavors, including a new fried chicken ice cream. He also talks about how his company came to partner with Disney and an ice cream subscription service.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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Florida: Where some of the best stories in the country are born. 

Based in Orlando, journalist Katrina Scales voices a selection of the day's top headlines, along with a nugget of Florida knowledge you may have never heard before. 

Ready by 7:00 a.m. every weekday morning.

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FusionFest is a nonprofit in Orlando aimed at celebrating the diverse cultures and heritage that can be found around Florida.

“Our whole mission is for people to learn about different cultures — like to showcase and share their backgrounds, but also learn from different cultures,” Thali Sugisawa, the executive director of FusionFest said.

As part of that mission, the organization has developed Diversitastic Dining.

“Each month we celebrate a culture,” Sugisawa said. “We kind of try to align with whatever celebration is going on at the moment. So for Hispanic Heritage month will try to do a Latin/Hispanic restaurant. For Asian and Pacific Islander month we would try to do an Asian restaurant.”

The monthly events offer more than just food.

“What we do is we go to a restaurant and we talk to the owner/ managers/chef, and we say, ‘Hey, we would like to bring a lot of people here that had never tried your food,’” Sugisawa said. “‘In addition to that, we will bring some entertainment, some artists and we’re going to have some storytelling, could you put together a full course menu, starting with appetizers, and then different entree options, and a dessert and a sample of a drink. And, and then we’ll just organize everything and bring those people here.’”

The events can get fairly specific, focusing on just one region of a country.

“In January, we did India, and but we did Punjabi area — which is totally different from other areas, the northern part of India,” Sugisawa said.

FusionFest then had the chef explain the difference in the cuisine and other guest speakers and entertainment were brought in to illustrate the culture of the region.

All of the upcoming Diversitastic Dining events can be found here.

In addition to Diversitastic Dining, the organization runs a yearly festival in downtown Orlando which celebrates the cultures of Central Florida.

“We’re just so excited to have this festival,” Sugisawa said. “So then we will have about 15 food vendors and we curate all of them. So you will not see three vendors selling tacos or empanadas. We will have the best empanada and the best taco and the best sushi and the best of all regions.”

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Sugisawa talks about her favorite region she has sampled during a Diversitastic Dining event. She also talks about how she never expected to be working in the nonprofit sector.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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A wife’s wish for a good bagel quickly spiraled into a new business and career for a couple who had spent much of their working life in retail.

Jeff and Danielle Perera are the owners of Jeff’s Bagel Run.

In 2019, Jeff Parera found himself out of work. His wife, Danielle Parera, had been a stay-at-home mom for a few years at this point and had been planning to rejoin the workforce, allowing Jeff Parera to take over the stay-at-home parenting duties.

“We were both home — we had that overlap and neither of us were working,” Jeff Parera said. “And we were driving to Winter Park, 45 minutes to get bagels. And (I said) ‘This is silly — Like, there’s no bagel shop on our side of town.’ So she said ‘Why don’t you make me one?’”

Danielle Parera said she wanted her husband to have something to do so that he wouldn’t get depressed after being laid off.

“I wanted to make sure that he just maintained a good sense of worth,” she said. “I also, truthfully, did not think it would last. I thought it would be something that he would try, he’d be like ‘Whatever, didn’t work out,’ and go play golf.”

But, Jeff Parera found a passion in trying to perfect his bagel baking skills.

“I just started making different batches with slightly altered ingredients and Danielle would come home and say, ‘This is horrible. This is better. This needs more salt,’ and I would take (her) feedback, and I would make slight adjustments,” he said. “And I mean, you should have seen the counters. It was like just glass and plastic and metal bowls full of different doughs with all the ingredients written on the paper on top.”

Eventually, Jeff Perera hit on the right recipe.

“I handed it to her like pretty fresh from the oven and she bit into it and her eyes rolled back in her head,” he said.

Within a few months of perfecting his bagel recipe, Jeff Perera was looking into selling his boiled and baked rings online. The bagel sales saw some early success, but once the pandemic hit, the pair started looking at the business in a different way.

“It was March of 2020 and it was actually our anniversary,” Jeff Perera said. “We went out to dinner and she was working at Ross Dress for Less and they had a big meeting planned — like this huge conference in Vegas where thousands of people, tens of thousands of people were going to come from all over the country to come to this meeting. And she gets text messages. They just start coming in her phone doesn’t stop going off while we’re at dinner. That conference had been canceled. Like something big is happening don’t know anything — but yeah, obviously the beginning of March was starting to get scary. Danielle immediately goes, ‘We need to stock up on bagel supplies.’”

The couple started selling more bagels through their social media page and were quickly overwhelmed by the amount of business they were receiving.

“We’d get, you know, 200 to 300 messages all at the same time (asking for bagels),” Jeff Perera said.

Eventually, the couple settled on moving forward with the business, opening their first brick-and-mortar shop in Ocoee. Now, only about a year later, the couple are planning to open their second location in Orlando.

In the latest episode of Florida Foodie, the Pereras talk about how they got the opportunity to set up shop in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood. They also share how some of their diehard customers braved flash flooding for their bagels.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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The pandemic continues to cause issues across multiple industries, but agriculture has faced several unique challenges — from crops rotting on the vine during shutdowns to having to find new ways to sell their produce.

Dr. Christa Court, director of the Economic Impact Analysis Program at the University of Florida, is an expert in regional economics and works in the school’s Food and Resource Economics Department. Court has been studying the impacts of the pandemic on the state’s growers and farmers.

“One of the things that we did early on — we have some a rapid assessment process that we go through for hurricanes and we retooled that survey that we use to be specific to the pandemic early on in the shutdown stages,” Court said. “So we released that in March to mid-May of 2020. It happened to be peak harvest season for a lot of producers — especially in that Southwest Florida area that were producing fruits and vegetables — and we estimated at the time — again, just in that one period of March to mid-May of 2020 — $895 million of losses for producers.”

Court explained that the full impact since the start of the pandemic is still being calculated.

“We don’t have a specific value beyond doing that first estimate,” she said. “You have several other projects underway though that looked at what happened throughout 2021.”

Court pointed out that different parts of the country had different rules for reopening, impacting how farmers sold their produce. She also said that consumers changed their buying and eating habits.

“We consumed food differently during the shutdown and that might have affected what we go back to permanently,” Court said. “Do we go back to behaving exactly like we did before the pandemic or are we still eating at home more often than we did before? And that’s going to affect the overall impact of the pandemic.”

Court called the pandemic a “demand-side disaster” for the state’s growers, meaning there was plenty of supply but the demand dried or changed. She pointed out that changes in the way restaurants function are also causing issues for the agricultural industry.

“I think you have to consider, again, some of the infrastructure changes that took place when we had the same experience,” Court said. “We go to a restaurant and it seems like it’s packed, but maybe they’re not seating all of the tables that they would have said before, right? If they’re spacing things out a little bit more, where they’re making adjustments for having fewer servers on staff, or to try to accommodate a carryout order line. It’s a lot more detailed, to look into how much food the kitchen is putting out the window versus what we’re seeing being served at the tables there. But it does seem to be — a not going to see a permanent shift — but we haven’t seen it go all the way back to eating as much away from home as we were pre-pandemic.”

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Court details more of her research into the pandemic’s impacts on Florida’s agriculture. She also shares thoughts on how the state might prepare for another disaster like the pandemic and other issues, like the war in Ukraine, that are hurting growers in Florida.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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Traditional cuisine is very important to Jess and Elizabeth Calvo, the owners of Thai Farm Kitchen.

The couple is offering a menu of traditional Thai cuisine which they said is hard to come by, even in Thailand.

“Elizabeth, my wife, she the chef and she inherited (these) very old traditional (recipes) from her ancestors — her great grandmother, from her grandmother and from her mother as well, " Jess Calvo said. “So this kind of cuisine is it’s a very authentic Thai dish(es) and most of them (no) longer exist in any ordinary cuisines in Thailand anymore. It’s a very special one.”

The pair opened their first restaurant while they were still living in Thailand.

“In the beginning, both of us were corporate employees and we were in the executive level,” Jess Calvo said. “But then after doing it for a while, we find that we ask ourselves, ‘What is going to be our life five years from now? Ten years from now?’ And then we say to ourselves, ‘We want to early retire by doing something that we are passionate about.’”

Jess Calvo said his wife was always cooking and he had an interest in agriculture. The two combined their passions to start their first restaurant.

“The reason our restaurant is named Thai Farm Kitchen is because, originally, we planted almost every single ingredient and we serve it fresh to the table,” Jess Calvo said.

The Calvos said they no longer plant every vegetable they serve but do still grow some important items. The rest comes from local farmers, according to Jess Calvo.

The couple then brought their business to New York City, where they quickly received recognition from the media there, including the New York Times.

They still maintain their original location in Brooklyn but have now opened their second U.S. location in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood. The Calvos said the pandemic showed them it was important to diversify their locations.

“We wanted to start another business and we said, ‘You know what? We need to spread the risk. We cannot put all eggs in one basket,’” Jess Calvo said. “So we said, ‘We better start another business somewhere else which is out of New York.’ If something happened (in) New York, we have another one.”

The couple admitted that the weather in Florida was part of the attraction as the harsh winters in New York were far from what the Calvos were used to.

“First time in my life I saw snow was four years ago,” Jess Calvo said.

Though they are maintaining their business in New York, the couple is now living in Florida full time and plan to move into Orlando in the near future.

In the latest episode of Florida Foodie, the pair talk about what makes their dishes so special. They also talk about Elizabeth Calvo’s international recognition as a chef and some of the special items guests can expect at their Orlando restaurant.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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A past girlfriend first introduced Shaun Noonan to the idea of switching to a vegan diet, but it’s a lifestyle that has come to define his work.

“That (relationship) was young in my teens, so I had never really formed that classic negative opinion of vegetarianism,” Noonan recalled. “I grew up playing ice hockey, and martial arts and things like that — and I was also eating vegetables. So I never really got that classic masculine thing that vegetables equal weakness or anything like that.”

Noonan now owns and operates Dharma Southern Kitchen, a vegan restaurant chain aimed at turning Southern-inspired food into completely plant-based meals.

“One-hundred percent plant-based and Southern cuisine was the most ridiculous thing that I could tackle,” Noonan said. “Plant-based foods at the time — everyone was trying to sell you these like, carrot sticks and hummus dip and convincing you that these collard wraps were food, and I’m like, ‘Man, come on. No one has to eat that garbage.’”

Noonan wanted to bring people vegan food that hit all the high notes of cuisine — sweet, savory, salty, spicy and umami. He points out that many dishes commonly associated with Southern food are already vegan at their core.

“A lot of its accidentally vegan in the first place, like mashed potatoes are mashed potatoes until you pour cheese and milk into it,” Noonan said. “You know, that’s just something that the dairy industry forced us to do. Fifty years ago, we all were told that if we didn’t consume dairy, somehow our bones were going to liquefy or we weren’t going to grow up properly or some nonsense like that.”

Noonan said he also naturally gravitated toward Southern cuisine for it “hardiness.” The chef lived around the world and the country through his work in the culinary world and even before that as a self-described “Army brat,” including stints in Central Florida.

“I was raised mostly in an Italian household and so and I love Italian cuisine. I just thought that Southern cuisine was gaining such a reputation of being meat-focused that I wanted to be a disruptor brand,” he said.

Ultimately, Noonan said he does not expect to turn the masses into vegans. He also said he doesn’t want to shame people for eating and enjoying meat.

His real goal is to make vegan food a part of the conversation.

“I just want it to be part of that dialogue, where it’s like, ‘Man, I haven’t had good vegan food in like two weeks, let’s go get vegan,’” he said.

As he looks to expand that dialogue, Noonan recently secured funding to expand Dharma’s footprint across Florida. Noonan hopes to have three new locations open up by the end of 2022.

On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Noonan talks about his expansion plans and his goal of franchising Dharma. He also shares his love of Bulgarian cuisine and why he is encouraged by fast-food chains adding plant-based options to their menu.

Please follow our Florida Foodie hosts on social media. You can find Candace Campos on Twitter and Facebook. Lisa Bell is also on Facebook and Twitter and you can check out her children’s book, “Norman the Watchful Gnome.”

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