Orlando Restaurants, Tamboras Cafe Grill

Tamboras grill cafe is a nice small restaurant in Ocoee, open since December 2007. Although it is only 1.8 miles from our home, this is our first visit. It did not help that this cute little restaurant is in a cheesy retail strip across from West Orange theaters, a 1970's style movie theater on Maguire Road in Ocoee, and it still has the equally cheesy beer neon signs from a failed italian restaurant I am not sure ever opened.

Nevertheless, the ambiance was nice-it has a "I like what you have done to the place" feel to it with nice dark colors and pastels, soft music, etc; it is cozy and comfortable. The food, although pricey, showed potential, in spite of a churrasco that needed a steak knife to cut (the sauce was good) and a burnt espresso creme brulee. The mac and cheese was "too cheesy"-a recurrent theme in this blog- as determined by Central Florida's authority on this favorite kid's staple: my daughter Natalie.

Are we going back, maybe. If it is still there in December, then it it will mean it was good enough to survive high gas prices for folks to shed their discretionary income on a nice meal in Ocoee.

Contributor: Edgar