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Talk of the bay

Price is no object at popular Tampa restaurant

By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published October 10, 2005

Here's an unusual claim to fame for a restaurant: We're one of the priciest!

Six Tables in Tampa can now add that to its advertising (if it did any). The tiny, fixed-price restaurant on Henderson Boulevard has been named to Forbes magazine's 2005 list of the nation's 20 most expensive restaurants.

Of course, everything is relative. At the top of the heap is New York's ultra-snooty Masa, where the seafood is flown in every other day from Japan and a meal sets diners back an average of $336 per person (not including alcohol). Tampa's Six Tables is an absolute bargain by comparison, at $70 per person for a seven-course meal. Wine is extra.

Chef Richard Bottini, who has owned the Tampa Six Tables for four months, said business has been booming at the 5-year-old restaurant even before the nod by Forbes.

"It's solely word of mouth," he said of his 28-seat restaurant's reputation. "Now that we're hitting holiday season, weekends in November are nearly all spoken for."

Bottini, 33, said Six Tables attracts mostly locals, though he occasionally hosts business travelers in town for conventions. Forbes' list was compiled with the help of the Travel Industry Association, which included Tampa among the 20 American cities with the highest volume of business travelers. That might explain why other similarly priced but independently owned Six Tables in Gulfport, Dunedin and Boca Raton didn't make the list.

Bottini, 33, said he has visited only one of his competitors on the high-priced restaurant list: Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia (average tab of $120 per meal). But during an upcoming trip to Manhattan, he's hoping to wrangle a reservation at Per Se, which, at $210 per meal, may give Masa a run for the title.

"My buddy is the cheese chef there," Bottini said of a former classmate from the Culinary Institute of America. "Hopefully, if a table is available, it might have my name on it."

[Last modified October 7, 2005, 19:21:02]