Kaya

The Restaurant

Kaya occupies a small bungalow on the corner of Thornton Avenue and Maury Road in Mills 50 — Orlando's central-district restaurant corridor — and opened in mid-2022 under chef-owner Lordfer Lalicon (formerly of New York's Pig and Khao and Maharlika) and operating partner Mike Collantes. Within seven months of opening, the restaurant received Florida's first Michelin Green Star — the award the Michelin Guide gives for outstanding commitment to sustainable and ethically sourced cuisine — making Kaya the first restaurant in the state to hold one and one of fewer than fifty in North America.

The kitchen serves a modern Filipino menu built around central-Florida produce and Atlantic-coast seafood, with about ninety percent of the produce sourced from named local farms — Frog Song Organics, Lake Meadow Naturals, Lady Moon Farms — that the staff lists by name on the menu. Signature plates include the kinilaw of Florida cobia with calamansi and coconut milk, a pancit Canton with octopus and house-made noodles, a sisig of pork cheek served on a cast-iron plate at temperature, a whole pompano with banana-leaf wrap and ginger broth, and a lechón kawali with chicharron crackling that the kitchen has held on the menu since opening.

The wine list runs to about seventy labels with a deliberate natural and biodynamic emphasis — small Loire, Sicily, and southern-Spain producers that match the menu's acid balance — and a parallel cocktail programme built around Filipino spirits and local citrus. Service is warm, career, and educational without being didactic: the staff narrates the sustainability work the kitchen quietly does, but never overstates it. The Mills 50 patio is the year-round photograph. For Orlando dining outside the resort gates, Kaya is now the room every visiting food editor asks for by name.