Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Restaurant review

Tampa's menu offers new flavors

Mise en Place, one of downtown's old favorites, puts on a fresh face for its 20th anniversary, while a newcomer, Fly Bar and Restaurant, is playing to a packed house.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published August 10, 2006

[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]

Marilyn Randazzo and Megan Graham look over the menu during the grand opening of the Fly Bar and Restaurant last month in downtown Tampa. Fly sits in a small brick storefront dating to the 1920s.

	[Times photo: Melissa Lyttle]
	Mise en Place puts a new twist on an old favorite, using graham cracker shortbread, Scharffen Berger ganache and brulee marshmallows for its s’mores dessert, which is accompanied by a double shot of malted milkshake and costs $7.
	[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
	Jennifer Dolan of Tampa prepares to sample some of the appetizers at the Fly Bar and Restaurant during the grand opening.
	[Times photo: Melissa Lyttle]
	For its anniversary, Mise en Place revamped its decor using rich brown and gold tones. The textured wallpaper in the dining rooms involves a six-layer process that includes a chocolate lacquer glaze and an 18-karat gold leaf pattern.

It is the dead of summer, yet there's new life in downtown Tampa. Well, new, old life at Mise en Place, wearing sparkling duds for its 20th birthday, and new, new, new everything at Fly restaurant and bar.

Mise en Place

This pioneer of modern dining, started by chef Marty Blitz and Mary Ann Ferenc, took a week off last month and came back gilded for its anniversary. What started as an ambitious catering cottage in 1986 became the place to eat-and-be-seen in the '90s. Now it glitters with big gold flecks on dark walls and wild centerpieces of underwater Thai orchids and strands of golden wire.

The menu is a bit new too. Over two decades, Mise's cooking and popularity have cycled up and down. It's good the revision has started.

Blitz's food remains creative, handcrafted and exotic: rices of many colors and shapes, Moroccan peppers, escolar, baby fennel and habanero pineapple sorbet (get it if they've got it). Mise still has L.A. pizzas of fig or asparagus, spa plates of grilled fish with vegetables and other high-Cal favorites that it debuted in Tampa two decades ago.

This culinary gazetteer of a menu comes in three courses, yet a main plate entree gives a solid taste of invention, spicy sides and polished sauces. Say a filet mignon with olive-parsley chimichurri, hash of foie gras and yucca, cooked greens and sauce of cumin and Spanish red wine. Pecan-crusted lamb remains a favorite, and duck breast with hazelnut rice cakes satisfies brain and belly.

Smaller dishes may be more luxurious than ever. Certainly a "first plate" of lobster ceviche with three slices of a slender tail are precious for an item whose description takes up more space on the menu than the food does on the plate. Innovative succotashes, like radish, onion and fennel, deserve more than a bite. "Second plates" are larger, while "smalls" are like an appetizer or tapas; grilled shrimp and a squash risotto with corn sauce makes a good starter.

Power lunchers can, and often do, go dainty, although the chopped Cobb salad with duck confit was dull. The heartier fare is better: steak focaccia or, better, country-fried chicken and crisp fennel onion rings on the planet's best chili cheese grits.

For dessert, the old chocolate mousse with caramel will fill your Heath bar quotient for a year. Indulge only after hearing the ice cream list.

Mise en Place sticks to an image of supper club sophistication in rustic times, but there are farmhouse flavors too. Tampa needs both.

Fly Bar and Restaurant

Before the Fly finished its first week, it was packed to its exposed brick walls and downtown boosters and would-be hipsters shouted from the rooftop deck, "Tampa . . . the next edgy city!"

As edgy as you can be when Lincoln Town Cars and Porsches must detour through the dust of unfinished condo projects. Hard hats displaced the homeless only months ago when luxury development pushed north of the Tampa Theatre.

No matter, this small brick storefront from the 1920s already houses all the trends of big city bars and restaurants.

Thanks, Leslie Shirah, the Tampa native who set up three hip-hot bars in San Francisco. She returned with an all-day and night menu (lunch til 3 a.m.), food made for sharing, super-sized booths and tables, $10 to $15 food prices, savvy servers and utilitarian/glitz decor. Rough wrought iron, plywood tables, industrial wheels, cement floors, booths, lime and tomato colors, primal paintings and sleek Venetian lamps create an unprecedented downtown vibe - and racket.

Eating's up to date too, clever and bright with pea shoots and rainbow chard but comfy and generous. You can't beat frites a trois, crispy Idaho, sweet potato and fresh chips of Peruvian blue are good too, great with saffron aioli or watercress jalapeno dip; the chipotle ketchup's not nearly as good. Other small plates include ribs with a lemongrass glaze (a touch too sweet, but fun) and fish cakes and shrimp have a playful jicama slaw and chili cream. All are $8 or less and enough for two or three snackers.

Full plates of hanger steak (still too rare here) with crisp green beans, and sliced lamb with white beans and cabbage in a stew fired up with turmeric are smallish, but $15 or under and enough for more sharing or light dining.

Much is still in the works on the side: mushroom hash on the sea bass disappointed, salads and desserts are unfinished, and bread is limited to focaccia.

Yet after two years of culinary inertia, Fly is a double shot of Belvedere that may bring Tampa back in the cross-bay battle. This is a restaurant of the kind downtown has long pretended it had.

Think the Hub meets SideBern's, or Blue Martini crossed with Pane Rustica. Too urban for you? Food and drinks are the same and the noise a lot less on Sundays.

Chris Sherman dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays for all expenses. A restaurant's advertising has nothing to do with selection for a review or the assessment of its quality. Sherman can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com.

*   *   *

Mise en Place

442 W Kennedy Blvd., Tampa

813 254-5373

Hours: Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; dinner, seating 5:30 to 9:45 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 5:30 to 10:45 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Details: Reservations suggested; credit cards; full bar.

Prices: Starters $6 to $14; entrees, $18 to $32.

*   *   *

Fly Bar and Restaurant

1202 Franklin St., Tampa

(813) 275-5000

Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday; 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. Saturday, Sunday.

Details: Reservations for large parties, credit cards, full bar.

Prices: $6 to $15.

[Last modified August 9, 2006, 10:46:40]