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.
220 East
220 East sits on Davis Boulevard in the small village strip at the top of Davis Islands, and its own site calls it a locally owned American kitchen 24 years strong. The menu runs wider than most neighbourhood rooms: shrimp and grits, a hand-cut New York strip, pizzas including a dill-pickle one the site tells you to trust it on, and a weekend brunch with chicken and waffles. Its Cuban sandwich is built on Cuban bread from La Segunda, which it names on the menu. Several dishes are marked GF on the menu itself.
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.
Go early. It turns into a late-night spot later in the evening.
Al's Finger Licking Good Bar-B-Que & 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.
BellyUp! Tampa / Over 50
Over 50 Tampa
Nobody publishes the noise level, and it is the thing that decides the night.
Good places to eat and drink in Tampa, minus the nightclubs. When a spot gets loud later or draws a lot of kids, the card tells you.
2 spots
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.
Vuon Xoai
Vuon Xoai is a Vietnamese farm, tropical nursery and restaurant on a residential street off Westchase, and the name translates as Mango Garden. From the road it reads as an ordinary block; behind it are fruit trees, thatched huts, hammocks and vintage Vietnamese scooters, and walking the grounds costs nothing. The kitchen serves whole grilled chicken, crawfish, snails, chicken feet salad, noodles, fresh sugarcane juice and coconut water, and the farm sells tropical fruit in season with mangoes usually ready in July. That's So Tampa found it in July 2026 and called it a hidden Vietnamese farm most of the city has never heard of.
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