Going Beyond Disney in Orlando

Seth Kugel The medianoche sandwich at Melao Bakery in Kissimmee, Fla., near Orlando.

Quick, name five reasons to go to Orlando. Here are mine: Puerto Rican delicacies, alternative cinema, craft beer, African-American history and psychic readings.

Perhaps you were thinking of something else, like Disney’s recently inaugurated New Fantasyland, where the Little Mermaid poses for pictures with deeper-pocketed travelers like my colleague Stephanie Rosenbloom.

In Florida last week for a hunting trip (stay tuned to this space), I scheduled two extra days in the Orlando area with the intention of discovering an alternative (or supplement) to a theme park-themed visit. Here is what I found. (Exploring Orlando requires a car, so I rented one from Fox Rent a Car for $7.95 a day, plus tax and insurance — about $75 total.)

Mofongo and Medianoches

Seth Kugel Waiting for service at Unidos Supermarket in Kissimmee, which serves huge portions of rice and beans with meat for $5 to $6.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered Orlando had a huge Puerto Rican population. Fortuitously I have an ever-present craving for Puerto Rican dishes like mofongo, fried plantains mashed with garlic and sometimes served with pork crackling; and medianoches, filled with pork, ham, cheese and pickles — like a Cuban sandwich but on sweet, eggy bread. And Puerto Rican restaurants are almost always informal, friendly and very affordable.

It turns out the Orlando area has the second-largest Puerto Rican population outside the island, second only to New York City. Research pointed me to Kissimmee, a town just south of Orlando – home to many hotels serving Disneygoers – where a third of the 60,000 residents are Puerto Rican. Freddy A. Vélez Colón, a shuttle driver for Fox Rent a Car and self-proclaimed “comilón” (big eater), narrowed down the list I had and added a surprising recommendation: Unidos Supermarket, a Latin supermarket whose deli steam table packs them in every day for lunch to go and at a few tables next to the Goya aisle.

He left out one detail: the cooks at Unidos (2433 Pleasant Hill Road) are Dominican, but to outsiders like me, Puerto Rican and Dominicans cuisines seem very similar, sharing many dishes, even as seasonings and other details may differ. And Puerto Ricans ordering huge portions of rice and beans with mountains of meat (easily enough for two) for $5 to $6 were not complaining. There are heaps of chicken and beef in roasts and stews, but I decided to go for two of the more unusual dishes, having half a portion of meaty chunks of goat stewed in the aromatic base known as sofrito, and three huge pieces of morcilla, or blood sausage. The meal came to $5.50; 50 cents extra got me a side of sweet plantains. (There is another Unidos location at 1200 Simpson Road.)

Seth Kugel At Trópico Mofongo, a statue of a farmer holding a mortar and pestle (traditionally used to mash the plantains that are the main ingredient of mofongo).

For my mofongo fix, I chose Trópico Mofongo (3160 Vineland Road), whose mention had made Freddy practically slobber. But for the statue of a farmer holding a mortar and pestle (traditionally used to mash the plantains that are the main ingredient of mofongo), the place looked like any old diner. But then there’s the mofongo, made to order — no pork crackling, but with your choice of meat on the side and three sauces: spicy-and-creamy, garlic-and-parsley and mayo-ketchup. The monfongo was hearty and plenty garlicky, though some might want it a little crisper. For my side meat I got pernil ($6.99), or pork shoulder, which came as I like it – not too fatty and topped with glistening piece of pork skin, like a cherry on top of a sundae except more glorious.

I ate my final Kissimmee meal at Melao Bakery (1912 Boggy Creek Road), which opens at 6 a.m.; by 7:30, when I arrived, it was hosting a meeting of people in business suits tapping at laptops, under Cubist-influenced paintings by the  local Puerto Rican artist Pedro Brull. The restaurant offers ham-and-eggs-style breakfast specials, but I ordered maizena, a comfortingly thick, slightly sticky custard made from cornstarch and sprinkled with cinnamon ($1.25), and a not-overstuffed, nicely pressed medianoche ($4.25), perfect for a hearty breakfast with fresh-squeezed orange juice and café con leche.

Screen and Suds

The evening started with an unexpected and quirky event – a free outdoor movie at a nonprofit art house theater, the Enzian, in Maitland, just outside Orlando. I say unexpected because an outdoor movie in December is not possible in the frigid Northeast, and quirky because the main feature was “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” a famously awful 1964 film that, thanks to my poor taste in movies, I actually enjoyed.

The Enzian shows free outdoor movies twice a month on its sloping lawn, and once a month in nearby Winter Park, Orlando’s historic neighbor. Otherwise, its films range from $5 for cult classics to $10 to well-chosen features.

In a city where mainstream night life means $1 Bud Lights and sugary frozen drinks, it’s probably not common to walk into a bar that offers a long list of craft beers and find yourself sitting next to a guy reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea.”

“Welcome to Orlando counter-culture,” said Amir, the Sartre-reading, half-Iranian, half-Puerto Rican can’t-wait-to-graduate-and-move-to-Brooklyn college senior I befriended at Redlight Redlight Beer Parlour.

Located in Audubon Park, a self-proclaimed “unique and funky” neighborhood, Redlight Redlight serves draft beer (23 choices that change so fast the menu can’t keep up) that are mostly $4 to $6, a bargain from a New Yorker’s perspective. Alas, the need to stay sober and drive forced me to stop halfway through my Terrapin Liquid Bliss, a chocolatey porter from Athens, Ga., and half my Cigar City Roaring Lion, a smooth and balanced IPA from Tampa. Amir suggested I continue the evening at Lil Indies, a recently opened bar five minutes away. It had just as surprising a vibe, though instead of Sartre readers, I found a woman knitting (after midnight!), a guy dancing by himself, facial hair galore and art covering the walls. I also found very cheap and very good beers, including a Stone 06-06-06 Vertical Epic Ale for $4. (The bar is attached to the older Will’s Pub.)

Hurston and History

Long before Interstate 4 made the trip from Orlando a 15-minute drive, a winding carriage road led there from Eatonville, and a young Zora Neale Hurston perched on a gatepost outside her childhood home to watch traffic go by — sometimes hitching rides, much to the chagrin of her grandmother.

Seth Kugel The exterior of the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts in Eatonville, Fla.

Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer and author, most famously, of “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” is the main reason people have heard of Eatonville, a town of 2,000 that was one of the earliest incorporated all-African-American towns in the United States. But it would be an interesting place to visit even if it had not produced the mischievous child that became an engaging writer beloved by Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and more recently, me.

To survey the town, which is still mostly black, you can take a walking tour using a brochure from the donations-only Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts. The name is charmingly deceptive – the museum is housed in a simple storefront that looks more like the back entrance to a Walgreen’s than a “national museum,” but what’s inside is appealing small-town-friendly. I got a personal greeting from the head docent, Cyria Underwood, who showed me the donation box and told me about the photography exhibits currently on view: spirited, colorful portraits of town residents by John Pinderhughes, and shots of intriguing artifacts owned by town residents, including a copy of the town charter, a receipt written out to Hurston when she repaid a loan, and, as Ms. Underwood put it, “spectacles before they were called glasses” and “a pail before it was called a lunchbox.” Hurston’s work is for sale in the gift shop; I bought a copy of her autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road” — which would have been perfect to read before my visit.

The town hall, practically next door to the museum, has two pretty interesting exhibits. One, fascinating if presented much like an elementary school class bulletin board, tells the history of the town, including a newspaper dated June 22, 1894, encouraging “Colored People of the United States” to “Solve the Great Race Problem” by coming to live in Eatonville, “a full-fledged city, all colored and NOT A WHITE FAMILY in the whole city.” (The town is now about 7 percent non-Hispanic white, according to the 2010 census.)

If the City Council chambers, located inside the town hall, are open, another very fun exhibit lies within, one prepared by local families about their relatives. The highlight is the cleverly captioned photographs of Arelee Richardson, known as the Peanut Man – he sold peanuts flavored with ham hock – who died in 2010 at age 100.

For a lunch stop, try Gordon’s Be Back Fish House – as in, so good, you’ll be back – where I had a $9.95 fried combo of catfish, shrimp and hushpuppies, and eavesdropped on town gossip.

Serenity and Psychics

I’m not big on psychics, because I don’t believe anyone can foretell the future – and I predict I never will.

Seth Kugel Hazel Tomim, “Spiritual Counselor.”

But since parents taking kids to Disney can suspend disbelief for a day, I decided to keep an open mind when I visited the Spiritualist Camp at the little town of Cassadaga, about 30 minutes drive from Eatonville and my last stop in the Orlando area.

Cassadaga got its start when a “trance medium” from New York, George P. Colby, established a Spiritualist Camp in an unsettled area of Florida in the late 19th century, 20 years after being led to the spot by a Native American spirit guide named Seneca. Or something like that – the real history is a bit more complicated. These days Cassadaga is a small community of cute but aging clapboard cottages – some lovingly maintained and others a bit decrepit – inhabited largely by mediums and psychics.

After I walked around the uncannily peaceful little town, peeking into little gardens and admiring some of the cuter houses, I stopped at the bookstore, where mediums available that day scribble their names on a white board along with their phone numbers.

I called Hazel Tomim, “Spiritual Counselor,” on the basis of her handwriting alone. She agreed to see me right away, for $50, toward the low end of the Cassadaga readings range. We met in her home, and Ms. Tomim, a grandmother with long blond hair, immediately divined that I traveled a lot and was in the news business. Sure, I had told her I was in Orlando on business and I was carrying a fancy camera, but still, not bad. It felt mostly like a therapy session – but she did have some predictions for me, including one that my mother is not going to like: I will never settle down and get married.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 27, 2012