At the 2011 Winter Park Harvest Festival Conference, we discussed Central Florida’s local food system gaps and assets. One of the noticeable gaps was the lack of a permanent, scalable venue for enterprising food entrepreneurs, tradespeople, chefs and artists.
A week after the conference, Harvest Festival founder John Rife and Gabby Lothrop, Audubon Park’s Community Market director, hatched an idea to fill this gap: East End Market. A few months later, a two-story former church building in Audubon Park was purchased on the corner of East End Ave and Corrine Drive, with the hopes of creating Orlando’s first Local Food Hub.
This community and local food hub will house twelve of the best local food merchants in a market hall, a farm-fresh restaurant by Spanish River Grill’s award-winning chefs, an incubator kitchen, market garden, and an event space.
PLEASE NOTE: With a flashy new event space in the works at East End we have decided to reschedule the Farm to Table dinner that normally accompanies the Harvest Festival in November for the Spring of 2013. In the same way that the festival serves to showcase the best of Central Florida’s local food scene, it is our desire that the event space at East End Market will serve the same mission.
In addition, many of the chefs who have participated in previous farm to table dinners will be cooking for the upcoming James Beard dinner in Winter Park this October. In an effort not to duplicate efforts, and to also begin a new tradition of quarterly Farm to Table Dinners at East End, we are relocating and rescheduling our dinner.
