1983
South MacDill restaurant, bar and arcade from a Tampa hospitality group. Publishes Bucs and Gators schedules, NFL and college football all season, and Premier League on weekends. Says it has 80 TVs.
7th + Grove
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.
Angry Chair Brewing
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.
Armature Works
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.
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BarrieHaus Beer Co.
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.
Casa Santo Stefano
Casa Santo Stefano is Richard Gonzmart's Sicilian restaurant, set in a former 1925 Ybor City macaroni factory a few blocks from the Columbia. Gonzmart says on the site that it 'pays fond tribute to the Sicilian food I ate every Sunday with my best friend Vincent Palori', and the kitchen calls what it cooks not just Sicilian but Tampa Sicilian. The wine, cheese, olive oil and salt are imported from family businesses in Sicily, the hand-painted backsplashes and tabletops were ordered in person from a family in Caltagirone, and the vintage photographs on the walls were lent by descendants of Tampa's founding Sicilian families. The bar side, Santo's Drinkeria, serves Sicilian street food, cocktails and wine on its own schedule.
Common Dialect Beerworks
Common Dialect was started by husband and wife Mike and Kendra Conze on the Seminole Heights stretch of Florida Avenue. The brewery says it set out to make a colourful, welcoming room rather than another minimalist industrial one, which is how most of Tampa Bay's taprooms look. There is no kitchen; rotating food trucks park there through the week.
Forbici Modern Italian
Forbici sits on Snow Avenue in Hyde Park Village and takes its name from the Italian word for scissors. Its own story is about a family table rather than a chef: sharing meals was our family's language of love, and the restaurant is meant to put guests at that table. Practically, it runs Italian food and pizza with handcrafted cocktails and live entertainment through the week, opening at 10 for weekend service. There is a second Forbici at 183 2nd Ave N in St. Petersburg, which is Pinellas and out of scope for this property.
Hidden Springs Ale Works
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.'
Mr. Dunderbak's
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.
Soul de Cuba Cafe
Soul de Cuba opened on North Florida Avenue in Seminole Heights and cooks from what it calls authentic family recipes, built around the Cuban sandwich, slow-roasted lechon and Sunday brunch. The kitchen puts on themed evenings rather than just service, including a Taste of Havana plate of ropa vieja, lechon asado, arroz moro, beef empanada and platanos maduros, and an Evening in Havana night of Cuban food, music and stories. There is a bar, a patio and catering for celebrations and corporate events.
Tampa Bay Brewing Company Westchase
The Doble family founded Tampa Bay Brewing Company in 1995 and opened its first brewpub in a two-story brick building on 15th Street in Ybor City in February 1997, in a room that used to house horses. The Westchase site came in 2015 as a production brewery with a restaurant attached, tucked into a business park off Linebaugh, and it is where most of the beer is now made. The own site says it is 'still a family run company with David Doble as the leader for all operations.' Both taprooms run 24 rotating taps, a full service kitchen, and what the brewery calls large outdoor patio spaces, with a food menu built to use its own beer rather than sit next to it.
Ulele
Richard Gonzmart of the Columbia Restaurant Group opened Ulele in August 2014 in the old Tampa Water Works building on the Hillsborough River, next to the natural spring the restaurant is named for. He calls it his legacy and points out that it sits four blocks from where his family lived and about 300 yards from where he was born at St. Joseph's Hospital. The kitchen works off a ten foot barbacoa grill and builds the menu from Florida produce, seafood and other proteins, with native-inspired dishes behind the name of the Tocobaga princess Ulele. Ulele Spring Brewery operates inside the building and was the first on-site brewery in Tampa Heights, pouring Rusty Red, Water Works Pale and Hydration Station Lager.
Wulfaven Brewing Company
Joseph Lazzara and his father Santo had the idea for Wulfaven in 2017 after a combined thirty-odd years in the drinks business, secured a site in 2019, then watched Covid stall it for two years before breaking ground on Perez Drive at the end of 2021. The name is Wolf plus Haven: the wolf for knowledge and the pack, the haven for a third place to unwind. The taps run to crisp and clean styles alongside IPAs and pale ales.
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