March 29, 2024

Dining

St. Pete Alfresco

Chris Sherman | 1/1/2010
Parkshore Grill
Parkshore Grill along St. Petersburg’s Beach Drive has dozens of outdoor tables. [Photo: Mark Wemple]

For a long time, Steve Westphal was a beach guy, not a downtowner. He lived on the Gulf beaches and worked the restaurants there for decades, eventually opening his own bustling seafooder on Indian Rocks Beach. But after finding himself driving downtown often for a growing number of events in the city, he turned his gaze eastward. As he told St. Petersburg’s previous mayor, Rick Baker, “Eight years ago I would never have opened downtown. But five years ago ...’’

And so Westphal moved across the county to a condo in a new high-rise on Beach Drive with a different waterview, that of downtown St. Petersburg’s Tampa Bay, and soon linked up with native son chef Tyson Grant to plan a 250-seat restaurant overlooking the sailboat-packed harbor. In 2006, they opened Parkshore Grill, with a polished wood interior, dozens of outdoor tables and a high-end spread of beef Wellington and goat cheese salad that packed in the city’s top-dollar diners.

By 2009, “I needed another Parkshore and a half,” Westphal says, so he and Grant opened 400 Beach Seafood & Tap House plus a banquet room, two blocks north, giving him 700 seats total on Beach Drive. The two are working on a third venue five blocks south, refurbishing the municipal airport’s concessions area into The Hangar Flight Lounge, across from the new location of the Salvador Dali Museum.

Westphal’s moves are at the heart of a boom that has turned a once-genteel stretch of shops into a restaurant row that’s busy from noon past dark.


Moon Under Water’s chicken curry platter: Chicken curry, pita and yellow rice
Between Westphal’s restaurants is the true pioneer, Moon Under Water, an Anglo-Indian cafe that Welshman Alan Lucas built 11 years ago with a commonwealth of curries (and Cobb salads, of course). He had considered the beaches but wanted a steady traffic of residents, not tourists. He decided on his downtown location because of the restoration of the nearby Vinoy Resort, a grand vestige of the 1920s.

“We sell a huge amount of curry,” Lucas says. But his biggest contribution may have been sidewalk tables. He didn’t see them as innovative, but “nobody had sidewalk tables. In Europe no matter where they are, people sit outside. Here we had to get permits and all the hoops to jump through.”

Lucas stood alone for years until Tampa’s Ceviche opened a few blocks away. Attempts at reviving downtown with the BayWalk mall and the arrival of baseball never produced a broad sustained restaurant scene or mustered more than rare spots of sophistication. But then the real estate boomlet jump-started Beach Drive with half a dozen towers in the last five years. The Museum of Fine Arts across Beach Drive expanded, and soon the Dali and a new Dale Chihuly gallery will add to the crowds.

Downtown dining is still hit or miss, however. Inland from Beach Drive, success beyond workday lunch is harder, but the best and bravest are creating smaller clusters of new dining. While Asian fusion restaurant Pacific Wave is gone, there are two dramatic newcomers, Z Grille for California flash and Red Mesa Cantina with its modern twist on regional Mexican dishes.

On Central Avenue, the dramatic Table pulled out but was replaced quickly by St. Pete Brasserie, a rare French offering (a second is planned for Beach Drive). Proprietor Andrew Wilkins says mussels, frites and cassoulet will be down-to-earth and affordable. At neighboring Bella Brava, new chef Domenica Macchia is upbeat, too. She’s been through several kitchens and has seen tastes change. “I found people were ready for duck fat fries.’’

She now considers St. Petersburg her “mini-Manhattan. We’ve even got very fierce parking enforcement.”

Tags: Dining & Travel

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