When asked what makes The Strand resonate so deeply with guests, Alda Rees pauses, thoughtful.
She and her husband, Joe, have been running the place since 2014, and their staff, like the eatery itself, is small.
“Obviously, we want people who can do their jobs and know their steps of service,” she says. “But we don’t want drones. We want them to be themselves, to be who they are.”
Personalities run the gamut.
“And Joe and I, probably without even knowing it, are perhaps like a mother or father. It has kind of created a family atmosphere here. And that probably resonates to the floor – to the customers.”
Because of its popularity, The Strand has been named the 2022 Orlando Sentinel Foodie Awards’ Restaurant of the Year.
It does resonate with people.
I can vouch. Not only because I’ve been coming here for years, but in the wake of a recent write-up, fans of the Strand came crawling out of the woodwork to testify, many local chefs among them.
“It’s always busy, but it still feels like this hidden gem when you go.”
“The vibe is so chill.”
“It’s one of the only places I go for date night when I’m off.”
Rees chuckles when I tell her.
“We do get a lot of industry people here,” she says. “I think on the whole people like us – we are adventurous, we do want to try new things – but we also don’t want to take a chance. We want to go somewhere we know we’re going to have fun, feel comfortable and get a good meal.”
And also feel a sense of place. It’s precisely where so many of us, ripe for connection as the effects of the pandemic drag on, find solace – the predictable excellence of restaurants that are both superb and safe. Places that make us feel welcome. Faces we know and who know us.
For the Rees’, places like Black Rooster Taqueria are local and inviting. Or Little Saigon, which she says still feels just as it did when they discovered the place decades ago. They like Tori Tori, too, “but we like to go early, before it gets crazy,” she says, chuckling.
Pizza Bruno is another.
“We love it,” she says, laughing. “I think it’s because I was courted on pizza. When we were dating, Joe used to take me to Pepe’s every Sunday.”
Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana has been a casual, beloved staple in their hometown of New Haven, Conn., since 1925. Definitely a neighborhood joint. That theirs is, too, Rees believes, was a critical element in The Strand surviving the toughest parts of COVID – a situation that had no playbook.
Being small gave them advantages, allowing the pair to be nimble, to find solutions and implement them immediately, “but the main thing that really helped was the loyalty of the clients. They continued to support us. They came for takeout. They bought gift cards. They really carried us through.”
It’s a two-way street, she notes.
“We’d already been in business for years when COVID hit. We’d been there for them. They trusted us. They were willing to go through it with us.”
It’s easier, she says, for a small place, a neighborhood place, to build those kinds of relationships.
“When we first moved to Florida, almost 30 years ago, there was nothing like this. We were desperate,” she says. “I’ve said this before, but when we opened The Strand, we were creating the restaurant that we wanted to go to,” she explains.
In older, more concentrated cities – cities like the Rees’ New Haven – “there are second, third, even fourth generation operators keeping them open.”
Recent circumstances have seen two of their children return to Orlando. They’re now working at The Strand, too. Like her husband, who was bitten by the restaurant bug when they moved here to help out at her parents’ place, “I’m starting to see them get that glazed look in their eyes that says, ‘I kind of like this,'” she says, though it’s nothing they ever expected.
“It’s a wild thing to think about,” she admits, “but this – the neighborhood joint – is sort of the niche that everyone is looking for, especially now. We’re all looking for the comfort of a place that feels familiar, but it’s not your home – it’s like your home away from home.”
Rees is thrilled that so many new restaurants are starting to fill that void, even with the irony that most are closed on the same nights, so they haven’t been able to go be social themselves.
“That’s what people want. We’re social creatures. There’s the virtual world, where we’re all on our phones, but nothing beats sitting at the bar – ‘Hey, what are you having? ‘Where are you from?'”
The Strand encapsulates that humanity and intimacy. It always has, but the pandemic – which served as a power-up to tech-induced isolation, put countless bricks in the walls between us – has driven up the stock of such traits.
“It’s nice to get back to those very basic interactions,” she says. “I love that I get to see it here, every day.”
