Omo by Jont

Omo by Jont is a genuinely different kind of restaurant for Winter Park, a standalone tasting menu concept from chef Ryan Ratino’s Jont restaurant group, best known for its Michelin recognized flagship in Washington, D.C. The Winter Park outpost brings that same fine dining sensibility to a small storefront on East Lyman Avenue, close to Hannibal Square, offering a progressive tasting menu built around simple but genuinely luxurious ingredients drawn from around the world, with deep inspiration from Japanese cuisine and French technique.

This is not a casual drop in restaurant. The format is a tasting menu, which means the kitchen sets the pace and the sequence of the meal rather than guests building their own plate from an a la carte list. That structure suits diners who want to hand over control for the evening and trust a kitchen with a serious pedigree to walk them through a series of small, deliberate courses rather than a large single entree.

The restaurant has picked up Michelin recognition as well as a Wine Spectator award, which places it in a different tier from most of the casual and mid range restaurants that make up the bulk of Winter Park’s dining scene. That level of recognition tends to draw a specific kind of diner, people planning an anniversary, a milestone celebration, or simply serious food enthusiasts who track where chefs with real technical training are cooking.

Hours run Wednesday through Sunday in the evening only, which reinforces the idea that this is a dinner destination built around a focused kitchen rather than a restaurant trying to cover lunch, brunch, and dinner all at once. Reservations are effectively necessary given the format and the restaurant’s small footprint, so this is not the kind of place to walk into on a whim expecting an open table.

For Winter Park diners who want access to the kind of tasting menu experience usually associated with much larger cities, Omo by Jont fills that role locally. It brings a nationally recognized chef’s technique to a compact Lyman Avenue address near Hannibal Square, and while the ownership traces back to the Jont group rather than a purely local operator, the restaurant itself is a singular, standalone concept rather than a repeated chain format. It stands as one of the more ambitious dining experiences currently available in Winter Park.

The intimacy of the space is also part of the draw. A restaurant this focused, seating relatively few guests per service in order to give each course the attention a tasting menu demands, tends to build a different kind of relationship with its regulars than a larger, higher volume dining room ever could. Guests who return often find themselves recognized, and the pacing of a multi course evening naturally encourages the kind of unhurried conversation that a quick weeknight dinner rarely allows.