BellyUp! to Tampa’s Best Bars

Ybor City · southern, caribbean, guyanese

7th + Grove sits on East Seventh Avenue in Ybor City and describes itself as the flagship of the 7th + Grove Hospitality group. The cooking is Southern comfort food crossed with Guyanese flavours, served with what the site calls creatively crafted cocktails, and the room runs late on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It is one of the Ybor rooms Creative Loafing Tampa Bay lists among Tampa Bay's restaurants, and it leans into events... a Saturday day party with hookahs and small bites, NFL Sundays, private parties and catering.

Seminole Heights

Angry Chair is a Seminole Heights brewery known well beyond Tampa for big pastry stouts, but its own line about itself is about the name: everybody has an angry chair, work or traffic or whatever, and the beer is the getting away from it. The brewery says it does not always brew to style and calls its beers forward thinking, then notes drily that it won a gold medal for its pilsner, so it can follow the rules if it wants to. The taproom is on North Florida Avenue, has its own food menu and takes private event bookings.

Tampa Heights · food hall

Armature Works is a 1910 streetcar barn on the Hillsborough River in Tampa Heights, rebuilt into the Heights Public Market with close to twenty independent food counters under one roof. Above the market are private event rooms and Rooftop 220, which looks back at the downtown skyline. The lawn outside it runs down to the Riverwalk, and Creative Loafing lists it as a kid stop for the giant chess boards and the family events it runs through the week. Chill Bros keeps an ice cream counter inside.

Ybor City

BarrieHaus is a lager house in Ybor City built on a family brewing line the owners trace back 150 years, and it pours many of its beers through Czech side pull faucets imported from the Czech Republic. The 5,000 square foot space holds a wrap around copper bartop, an indoor taproom, a small room they call the Den and an outdoor Biergarten. Its Vienna lager Family Tradition took a 2022 World Beer Cup gold and the Czech-style pilsner Bublina took another in 2024. Well behaved leashed dogs are welcome outside.

Ybor City · italian, seafood

Bernini has been on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 17th Street in Ybor City for more than thirty years, cooking Italian food with a Gulf accent ... pistachio crusted grouper, eggplant in house made pomodoro, crispy duck with a chianti demi-glace. Owner Jason Fernandez is a fourth generation Tampa native who runs the Historic Hospitality group in Ybor City and got his first restaurant lessons from his neighbour Adela Gonzmart of the Columbia. His great-grandfather Jesus Fernandez tended bar in Tampa in the early 1900s. Fernandez went away to work with Ella Brennan at Commander's Palace in New Orleans and later with Wolfgang Puck before coming home to Ybor.

West Tampa

Cigar City Brewing is named for Ybor City's cigar industry and has brewed on West Spruce Street since 2009. Its own site calls the Spruce Street brewery and taproom 'CCB's home base since batch number one', and says the beers are 'steeped in the unique culture and history of Tampa'. Jai Alai IPA, the beer it is best known for, takes its name from the Basque game the Ybor and West Tampa social clubs played. The taproom pours exclusive draft beer inside the working brewery and has its own food menu.

Ybor City

Club Prana runs five floors on Seventh Avenue, each with its own room and name: the Lounge, the Mezzanine, the Sanctuary, the Night Club and, on top, the rooftop Sky Bar with private cabanas. The first two floors open on Thursdays with open format music; Fridays and Saturdays all five run, with Top 40, hip hop, Caribbean reggae, Latin, Afrobeats and dance. There are more than 30 VIP tables across the building, and floors can be rented individually. Smoking is allowed only on the fifth floor.

Ybor City · new american, bbq

Coppertail brews inside a historic industrial building on East Second Avenue in Ybor City, a 34,000 square foot production brewery with a five vessel brewhouse and more than 1,000 barrels of fermentation capacity. The two-story Tap Room and Kitchen sits in front of it, with exposed brick and steel, a second-storey loft that looks toward downtown, and a patio. The kitchen smokes its own meats and makes its own sausages, and the taps carry Coppertail beer alongside Fallen Fruit Hard Cider and High Dive THC Seltzer. The brewery also runs tours and keeps a live music and events calendar.

Ybor City · american, cuban, sandwiches

Gaspar's Grotto sits on Seventh Avenue in the middle of Ybor City and builds its whole identity on Jose Gaspar, the legendary Gulf pirate Tampa throws Gasparilla for every January. Its own site says the bar pays homage to the legendary local pirate Jose Gaspar and celebrates Tampa's immigrant past. There is an indoor bar and dining room plus two outdoor patios with live entertainment weekly, and Sunday brunch has become the thing it is known for. The bar also runs a pig roast, a VIP bottle lounge, weddings and its own Ybor Gift Company merchandise shop.

Ybor City

Gasparilla started distilling in Ybor City in 2018 and calls itself the oldest rum distillery in Tampa, working from Florida sugarcane molasses and leaning all the way into the Jose Gaspar pirate story the city celebrates every January. The cocktail bar pours its own rum, vodka and gin, and the distillery runs tastings and tours of the production floor alongside private events. It calls its spirits farm to bar top.

Tampa Heights

Hidden Springs opened to the public on 18 September 2015, but the first beer was made in the garage of Josh and Jacqui Garman after Josh's mother Marsha gave them a Mr. Beer kit one Christmas. She died soon after, and the brewery still tells that story. It is family owned and run, on Franklin Street in Tampa Heights, and the tasting room is bookable. Its manifesto is printed on the site: 'Hidden Springs is a place where we abide no hatred and exist to create community, great tastes, and connections.'

Hyde Park

Jekyll is a hidden cocktail room in Hyde Park built on the split-personality conceit, with plush velvet seating, dim light and drinks that are as much performance as pour. The house signature, 'Lost in Translation', is brewed and smoked at the table. The soundtrack runs to nostalgic hip hop and rap rather than lounge jazz. It also runs themed high tea seatings with a full afternoon service made by its own pastry kitchen, which sell out fast. Jekyll is the sister bar to Ciro's Speakeasy, which closed in 2026.

Seminole Heights

The newer and larger of Magnanimous's two Tampa taprooms, on the corner of Sligh and Nebraska, with 24 rotating taps and a room built for sticking around: classic arcade games and pinball, cornhole, board games, a projector with sound for games, a covered outdoor patio and a free parking lot. Sliceadelic Wizard Pizza parks there Tuesday through Sunday. The brewery says this is where most of its events and live music happen.

University Area · german, swabian, deli, brewpub

Dunderbak's has been serving Tampa since 1974 and sits in the Oak Ramble Shopping Center on Bruce B Downs, which is a plain strip plaza and exactly the point: this is a German beer hall, brewery, deli and European market behind a strip-mall storefront. It started as one of about 30 franchise locations nationally, and co-owners James and Christina Ellis bought this one in the 1990s; the franchise folded and they turned it into a brewery with a dozen or so house beers on tap, told to That's So Tampa. The kitchen cooks from family recipes, with the potato pancakes made fresh every morning from James's Oma's recipe and the coleslaw from his mother's. Live polka plays on weekends, the beer hall room on the left seats 32 for private bookings, and the site's own parking advice is to arrive by 6pm on a Friday if you want a space.

Hyde Park · new american, coffee, tea

The building went up in 1891 across the street from Henry B. Plant's Tampa Bay Hotel, held an arcade of local shops from the 1920s, then sat empty for decades until the century-old brickwork was restored. Brother and sister Blake Casper and Allison Adams reopened it as Oxford Exchange on September 24, 2012, and Casper's line for how it started is that it started with a bookstore and an office. Under one roof now are the restaurant, the bookstore and shop, a coffee bar, the TeBella Tea Bar, a champagne bar, the Commerce Club membership workspace, and the OE Studio and podcast room. The design takes its cue from the old London clubs and shops, and the stated intent was a place to belong.

Ybor City · new american

The Bricks opened in 2010 at the corner of East Seventh Avenue and North 14th Street, which Ybor City also calls Avenida Republica de Cuba. It was started by a local team in partnership with the Skate Park of Tampa, and the idea was a hangout for skaters, artists and musicians rather than a bar chasing the Seventh Avenue club crowd. There are two performance spaces ... an open-air courtyard and a small Cafe Stage that overlooks the bar and the front windows ... and most shows are listed with no cover.

Ybor City

The RITZ is the big room on Seventh Avenue, a 1917 theatre that has been a cinema, a church and a nightclub and now runs as Ybor City's main concert hall under Sunset Events. It takes VIP table reservations and runs a guest list, and the same company puts on Sunset on the River and Holiday Riverfest. With Crowbar closed since August 2026, it is the largest live music room left in the district.

Ybor City

A wine bar on the Seventh Avenue strip that sells itself as a neighbourhood room rather than a nightlife stop, with small plates alongside the list and staff who are expected to talk you through it. It runs a weekly Wine Society gathering at 7pm on Wednesdays and four tiers of wine club membership. The site also advertises franchise opportunities.