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Dessert steals our hearts, quakes our diets and unleashes torrents of guilt, but it also brings insurmountable pleasure. We have our own dessert goddess here in town. She's Patti Schmidt, "The Dessert Lady," who recently opened her namesake store, after baking her way around Orlando for the last seven years.
I appreciate our relationship with fermented grape juice from the standpoint that it is slightly hedonistic and brings us together. The evenings when I sit down to enjoy a slow dinner with a bottle of wine and stimulating conversation are my most luxurious. A 2-liter bottle of Coke just doesn't have the same charm. But I come from the renegade school of wine drinking – more Jack Kerouac than James Bond – and I spurn the snobbery.
When I called Stella's to find out their hours, a man said, "I'm not sure ... hold on," muffling the phone. "Today we're closing at 2." So what time do they normally close? "Whenever," was the reply. Any hope was quickly dashed that this cursed location -- former tenants include My Beautiful Luncheonette and Mad Lyn's Café -- had finally found a match. While I was lucky that they didn't close before I got there, the smell that met me at the door foreshadowed doom.