A Guide To Properly Experiencing The Best Food The Bay Has To Offer

Food in Tampa Bay is a peculiar thing. My advice to the Tampa novice would be to experience it, in all of its idiosyncratic ways. I visited Bella’s Italian Cafe (a traditional style italian restaurant that lives around the corner of the expressway off South Howard Ave) this past weekend and found perhaps the best pasta dish I’ve had in my time pursuing worthwhile food. The dish was served with chopped chicken breast in a sauce of roasted garlic, heavy cream, sun-dried tomatoes and fresh sage. Served over starburst pasta with a garnish of reduced balsamic vinegar and a fresh sage leaf. Part way through my audibly enjoyable consumption, the owners son stopped by my table and explained that the dish was one of the restaurants first and has been a staple for over 25 years. Jackson's Bistro, a massive riverside steak and seafood restaurant located in the heart of Tampa City, surprised me with an impressive salmon dish that featured a grilled salmon filet with roasted garlic herb fingerling potatoes, grilled asparagus and whole grain mustard cream sauce. A dish I would recommend to any seafood connoisseur. 

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In Vermont, the place I was born and have lived for the greater part of my life, food exhausts its environment, it’s as though you could hear the maple trees whisper recipes along a hike through Stowe mountain. Apple pie, cider donuts, maple candy, rhubarb, fiddleheads, and cheese. Foods that cook leniently, foods that aren’t partial to where they’re put. I like to imagine that Vermonters grew an interest to these foods as they so fittingly correlate with the states heavy seasons. Apples serve well hot or cold, as do maples and cheeses. Though you’ll find more frequently a warm apple crisp in the cusp of falls reach to winter, while a cold glass of fresh cider lives happier in June. Tampas food doesn’t follow a regimen, it has no seasonal syllabus. Sure I’d prefer a lemonade in the summer, but there is no monthly ordinance on citrus refreshments in the sunshine state. 

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It is for this reason that I wish to extend such advice to the nascent food follower in the crest of our little bustling bay. With such an eclectic palate of food, there is no correct way to eat. Accept the fluster and enjoy it. Find yourself in Ybor eating street tacos upon a drunk late night excursion. Experience true Colombian cuisine at the award winning Colombia Restaurant off 7th Ave. Or maybe take out a loan and enjoy an aged steak from Bern’s Steakhouse. Tampa Bay is known particularly for its so un-particular culture, its dichotomy between wealth and poverty, ethnicities that range exceptionally and people both foreign and local. It is precisely the differences in cultures Tampa Bay exhibits that allows its food to prosper in all of its inconsistencies. So try it all, don’t let your biases get in the way, and enjoy the food for its true purpose and authenticities. And if the pizza at N.Y. N.Y. isnt N.Y. enough for you, there’s always 36oz margaritas at Green Lemon just down the road.