Over 50 Tampa

Ybor City · $ · bbq, southern, soul food

Al's cooks Tennessee-style barbecue in Ybor City, dry-rubbed ribs smoked over wood with a tomato-based sauce, and it has won best barbecue in Tampa more times than anyone bothers to count. The food is family food in the literal sense, with dishes on the menu named for the people they came from ... Uncle John's smoked sausage, Aunt Nita's black eyed peas, Sparky's pulled pork, Mazie's serve-it-up yellow rice and chicken. The business started as a concession stand in 2003 and became a sit-down restaurant in 2009, and it now runs barbecue and soul food out of one address on East Seventh Avenue after folding the two shops together.

Midtown Tampa · italian, cuban, bakery, sandwiches

Alessi has been baking in Tampa since 1912, working from 'family recipes passed down through four generations'. It is a Sicilian bakery that grew up alongside the Cuban and Spanish bakeries of West Tampa and Ybor, and it sells both traditions ... Italian pastries and cannoli on one side, fresh Cuban bread and scachatta on the other, plus a deli counter, custom cake studio and rotisserie chicken. The business has moved into a single new building on West Cypress Street that puts the bakery, cake studio, deli and cafe 'under one roof'.

Temple Terrace · russian, ukrainian, eastern european

Babushka's started in 2018 because a Russian international student at USF noticed that Eastern European food was missing from a city that had almost every other cuisine, and talked his family into opening a restaurant. The name is the Russian word for grandmother, chosen because, as the restaurant puts it, 'in most families back in Eastern Europe, Babushka is usually a person who cooks the best food.' The kitchen runs borscht, pierogi, piroshki, sweet and savoury blinchiki and a homemade honey cake, and there is a kids' menu and a bar menu alongside the main one. The Temple Terrace room on N 56th Street is a short drive from the USF campus where the idea started.

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.

Downtown · neapolitan pizza, italian

Dan Bavaro opened the first Bavaro's in Tampa in March 2009, and the room on Franklin Street is the one the group prints as its Tampa address. The kitchen calls itself Florida's first traditional Neapolitan pizzeria and works from wood-fired brick ovens built by third-generation Neapolitan craftsmen, a hundred-year-old yeast culture, century-old recipes and ingredients brought in from Italy. Pasta is the other half of the name, which is where the Pastaria comes from.

East Tampa · $ · bbq, southern

Big John's Alabama BBQ has been on 40th Street North in East Tampa since 1968, when the late Rev. John A. Stephens, known as Big John, opened it after moving to Tampa from Eufaula, Alabama with his family. Its own biography page says he came to the area with goals of being an entrepreneur but most importantly a man of God, and that the Tampa Tribune and other outlets recognised his contributions to the community. The restaurant still cooks on an open pit, a technique it says it has kept for over 40 years, and it took Steve Harvey's Hoodie Award for Best Barbeque Restaurant in 2007. His son Fred Stephens keeps the business going, and his widow Sallie Stephens and their children marked a grand re-opening.

East Tampa · cuban, italian, sandwiches

Brocato's opened in 1948 and has worked its way through three businesses in the same family: grocery store, then meat market, then sandwich shop. Its own site puts the arithmetic plainly, that nearly eighty years later 'countless restaurants, diners and sandwich shops have come and gone' and Brocato's has not. The counter is known for the Tampa trinity of Cuban sandwiches, deviled crabs and stuffed potatoes. It sits on East Columbus Drive in East Tampa, closes at 5:30 in the afternoon and is shut on Sundays, which tells you it is a working lunch counter rather than a destination restaurant.

Ybor City · sicilian, italian

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.

Downtown · $ · ice cream, dessert

Chill Bros makes handcrafted small-batch ice cream in Tampa and runs scoop shops around the city, including Water Street, Ybor City, South Howard Avenue, Bay to Bay Boulevard and a counter inside Armature Works. The brothers behind it keep a run of vegan flavours on the board alongside the dairy ones, made with oat milk and coconut cream rather than as an afterthought, which is why Visit Tampa Bay puts it on its plant-based list. The Water Street shop is a short walk from the Riverwalk and Sparkman Wharf.

Palma Ceia · vegan desserts, ice cream, smoothies

Coco Lov is a family-run dessert shop on South MacDill built around coconut milk, dates and sea moss. The ice cream, cheesecakes, chocolate mousse, smoothies and bowls are plant-based, gluten-free and dairy-free, with no refined sugar. The current Tampa Instagram bio publishes daily hours, and the official menu lists the Tampa address and the ingredients for each dessert.

Downtown · cuban, spanish

The Hernandez and Gonzmart family put a Columbia on the ground floor of the Tampa Bay History Center, so the Riverwalk has a table serving the recipes the Ybor City original has run since 1905. The patio is canopy covered and sits on the water in the Water Street neighborhood, beside the downtown arena. The menu is the family's Spanish and Cuban standards, the 1905 Salad, Cuban sandwiches, paella, ropa vieja and croquetas, with flan, churros and guava cheesecake after. Dishes are credited to founder Casimiro Hernandez Sr. and to great-grandmother Carmen Hernandez.

Ybor City · spanish, cuban

Casimiro Hernandez, Sr. opened the Columbia Saloon on December 17, 1903, and it became the Columbia Restaurant in 1905. It is still run by his descendants, now into the fourth and fifth generations ... Richard Gonzmart, Casey Gonzmart Sr., Andrea Gonzmart Williams and Casey Gonzmart Jr. The Ybor City original has grown from a corner saloon into 15 dining rooms across an entire city block, 52,000 square feet with seating for up to 1,700, and the company calls it the largest Spanish restaurant in the world. Flamenco is performed during dinner, with seatings at 5:30, 6 or 6:30pm for the 7pm show Monday through Saturday and 8:30 or 9pm seatings for a second 9:30pm show on Friday and Saturday.

Live music some nights. Go before the band starts if you want to talk.

Seminole Heights

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.

farm to table, sandwiches, bakery

Fat Beet Farm is a working farm on West Hillsborough Avenue with a kitchen and bakery on the property, founded by Jen and Tim Curci in 2013 on what they describe as a ragged piece of coastal Florida land. Vegetables are grown in greenhouses on site, cooked in the kitchen and returned to the soil: scraps go through composting and a bio-digester built with the University of South Florida that turns food waste into fertiliser slurry, with rainwater harvesting and an on-site solar grid behind the rest. The counter serves sandwiches, biscuits, fried chicken and baked goods, and the farm runs tours, workshops, markets and volunteer days. It is the only venue in the Tampa Bay area holding a MICHELIN Green Star, awarded in the 2026 statewide Florida selection.

Hyde Park · $$ · italian, pizza

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.

Live music some nights. Go before the band starts if you want to talk.

Palma Ceia · bakery, vegan, breakfast

HaleLife is a bakery and bistro on South Dale Mabry Highway whose whole kitchen is built around food restrictions rather than around a diet trend. Its own South Tampa page states the rule plainly: 100% Gluten-Free, Vegan, & Allergy Friendly. The kitchen is dedicated free from gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, peanuts, tree nuts other than coconut, and shellfish, traced down to the manufacturer, and the company says it has had no reported reactions since opening in 2017. The board runs to beignets, cinnamon rolls, donuts, breakfast tacos, pizza and cakes. USA Today named it a top gluten free bakery in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

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.'

Palma Ceia · $ · bbq, southern

Jimbo's has been smoking pork and ribs on West Kennedy Boulevard since 1970, and its own site claims the title without hedging: the best barbecue in southern Florida since 1970. It is a family-owned and operated business and describes itself as decades of delectable barbecue rather than anything more fashionable. That's So Tampa has written about it as a pit that has been going for over fifty years.

V.M. Ybor · cuban, bakery

La Segunda was founded in 1915 and still bakes on North 15th Street in V.M. Ybor, just north of the Ybor City historic district. Its own site counts '110+ Years of Family Tradition' and says the business 'started in a small Ybor City bakery'. The bakery says it turns out '18,000+ Loaves Baked Daily', which is why so much of Tampa's Cuban bread, and most of the city's Cuban sandwiches, trace back to this one address. There are now several counters around Tampa Bay, but 2512 N 15th St is the original bake house.

West Tampa · cuban, spanish

La Teresita has been cooking Cuban food on West Columbus Drive in West Tampa for more than fifty years, run by the Capdevila family, who give their name to a page of the site and to the Capdevila Group. The kitchen opens at six in the morning, which is a West Tampa habit rather than a restaurant trend, and the site describes 'delicious homemade Cuban and Spanish dishes'. Alongside the restaurant the family runs a ballroom and a catering operation used for quinces, weddings and parties.

University Area · $ · hot dogs, american

Mel's opened on July 3rd, 1973 at the corner of 42nd Street and Busch Boulevard, and it is still there. Mel was a Chicago musician who came to Florida with his rock band in the early 1970s, and the site tells the origin plainly: after a late night he found himself in Tampa 'craving the comfort food of his hometown: the Chicago-style hot dog,' noticed nobody in the city was selling one, and opened a stand. The Szabo family, described on the site as longtime customers spanning four generations, bought the business on September 6, 2023 and kept the recipe and the room the way they found them. Half a century in, the yellow building on Busch is the kind of place people bring their own kids back to.

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.

Live music some nights. Go before the band starts if you want to talk.

Temple Terrace · palestinian, middle eastern, bakery

Ramallah Market has anchored N 56th Street in Temple Terrace for years as a Middle Eastern grocery with its own in-store bakery, turning out knafeh, baklava and ma'amoul alongside fresh produce and spices. In May 2026 the family that runs it opened a cafe inside the shop called Sufrat Ramallah, which translates as the table of Ramallah, serving a full traditional Palestinian breakfast spread with ingredients imported from Palestine and homemade halal dishes. The coffee comes from Barakah Beans, an Orlando Arabic coffee brand, pouring pistachio and Dubai chocolate lattes. The market's own site describes the whole thing as 'a story of tradition, family, and delicious Middle Eastern flavors.'

Seminole Heights · cuban

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.

Citrus Park · $ · bbq, southern, cuban

Southern Luv BBQ smokes over pecan wood on Citrus Park Drive in northwest Tampa, run by founder and pitmaster Chef Essi Tadrus. His own story on the site starts with a plate of ribs at a gas station in Fort Hood, Texas at age five, where his father was stationed; he opened his first restaurant at nineteen and later brought it home to Tampa. The kitchen took second place for World's Best Cuban Sandwich at the International Cuban Sandwich Festival in Tampa, and it bottles its own Carolina gold and sweet heat sauces and bags its own kettle-cooked chips in small batches. When Hurricane Milton knocked out power, the restaurant fired the pit back up and handed out free pulled pork and mac and cheese to neighbours.

Temple Terrace · mexican, sonoran, tacos

TacoSon cooks the food of Sonora, in northern Mexico, out of a small storefront on N 56th Street, and it opens at 7am six days a week, which is earlier than almost any taqueria in the city. Creative Loafing put it on its list of classic Tampa restaurants and described it as a family owned restaurant 'serving up authentic dishes inspired by life back in Sonora, Mexico.' The burrito panzon and the tres leches cake are the two things the restaurant puts on its own front page.

Westchase · brewpub, american, pub food

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.

Palma Ceia · italian

The Brother is named after a person. Its own site explains that the Brother, or Sylas as the family calls him, is the youngest of three children belonging to owners Ashton and Joel Sanchez, and that he is the reason the restaurant exists. It is a small Italian room on South MacDill in Palma Ceia describing its cooking as Italian cuisine with a creative flair.

Seminole Heights · $ · american, diner, breakfast

Trips Diner opened on March 12, 2012 on North Florida Avenue in Seminole Heights and is named after the owners' triplets, Libby, Will and John. Its own description of itself is modest on purpose: a not-too-fancy neighbourhood restaurant that offers a variety of simple food. Breakfast is served all day, alongside salads, sandwiches, meatloaf, pasta and chicken. The family also runs diners in St. Petersburg and Seminole, which are in Pinellas County and out of this site's scope.

Tampa Heights · florida, seafood, new american, southern

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.

Seminole Heights · $ · bbq

Wicked Oak Barbeque is a counter-service barbecue restaurant on North Florida Avenue in Seminole Heights, founded in 2020 according to the structured data on its own site. It smokes brisket and ribs slowly and makes its sides and sauces in house, and its own line for the neighbourhood is that it is smoking out the Heights. TAMPA Magazine named it one of the winners of Best Barbecue in its 2026 Best Restaurants list, alongside two multi-location groups, which makes it the only single-location Tampa barbecue restaurant in that winners row.

Carrollwood

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.