The beloved College Park restaurant, Taste, is gone.
It closed last week. And it sucks.
It will now sit there as a reminder of all of the things wrong with Orlando. Like a gravesite, it will be yet another testament to the perils of being a small business in this town.
Fabulous restaurants like Taste are not supposed to close. Taste was an icon with a local ethos. Taste was spontaneous, welcoming and comfortable. Taste was tastefully ours: locally-owned and beloved.
But its gone now. Closed.
TEDx OrlandoSalon will no longer meet there. Neither will the Ted Hollins writers group and a host of others.
And I am pissed! WTF!
We couldn’t save this restaurant, this place, this authentic community resource?
Maybe, the closing of this restaurant should serve as an indictment of the real Orlando. The Old Boys network could have done something. They should have done something.
But they didn’t. They hate small business. The visceral disdain for small business is so great that they wouldn’t even intervene to save a beloved community establishment only blocks from the Mayor’s own residence.
As long as there is a Buddy Dyer City Hall, this champion of big business will continue to flaunt its callousness toward local small business. What a legacy for a man who proffers empty words of Orlando becoming a world-class city.
Some of you will object to laying this at the City’s feet. But, why wouldn’t you? When the Orlando Magic wanted a new facility, they got one. Disney, UCF and the City of Orlando are incestuously conspiring in their dreams of a soon-to-be gentrified Parramore. Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts anyone?
This is a city that allows neighborhoods to rot. This is a city that has singlehandedly done more to harm locally-owned small business than even the overall economy.
But it won’t change. This is after all, Orlando.
And Taste is gone.
