New restaurant in Tampa is Cheap, but not easy
A new small-plate restaurant in South Tampa brings hip, late-night fun, but the menu needs fine-tuning.
By Laura Reiley, Times Food Critic
Published October 4, 2007
TAMPA -- What's not to like about small plates? You can play the field, be adventurous. It's communal and fun, usually affordable. The concept now spreads beyond Spain to numerous cuisines and price points.
The new South Tampa restaurant named Cheap has most of the elements of an exciting small-plate restaurant, but it needs to tinker.
An obvious place to start is with the name - it's irreverent and cheeky, but did they think through how hard it will be to have a Web presence? It's like calling a restaurant Restaurant.
Is it cheap? Not exactly.I'd say affordable. One meal for three totaled $86.57, another rang in at $77.13.
What are small plates anyway? Just small portions?
They aren't meant to be. They're intended to be shared and should be easily divisible and easily consumed, sometimes even as finger foods or on skewers, toasts or toothpicks. This idea is that a small bit of something packed with flavor and panache is appealing, where a bigger portion might not be.
This is why olives, sardines, crumbly slabs of manchego cheese, a curl of salty ham and wedges of tortilla espanola are all iconic small-plate foods.
Big bang in a little package, everyone gets their own portion.
Cheap hasn't quite figured out the personal portion part. Its dishes aren't served in a way for easy, no-double-dip sharing.
An example: Tuna tartare $12 brings a mound of tiny tuna cubes mixed with fresh thyme and a few capers, topped with a little dab of olive tapenade. There are no toasts on which to eat the tartare, so each person ends up dipping his or her fork repeatedly.
If they put the tartare in a ramekin and offered toasts or crackers, then everyone could scoop a dab with a knife or spoon.
Half the menu is "crudos," cold raw seafood dishes like tartares, ceviches and sashimis.
All the ones I tasted had the same problem. There was a pile of something on a plate from which everyone excavated bites. This also holds true of most of the dishes on the "epulae" (a Latin word that means loosely "feast") side of the one-page menu.
Most plates lack the textural contrast of something crunchy (an exception is the baked goat cheese, $9, which comes with a single, strangely sweet rusk).
Strange sweetness is another trend here. The butter that arrives with the bread is candy-sweet strawberry flavor. Pork tenderloin ($9) gets a caramel sauce, scallops ($12) come with an apple-coriander sauce, and miso-marinated black cod ($17) is cloyingly sweet.
Even the single green salad ($5) gets a too-sweet honey mustard vinaigrette.
The salad and the goat cheese are the only non-meat or non-seafood dishes. No vegetable - or vegetarian - dishes at all.
Still, all is not lost. There are laudable items.
The tuna tiradito ($8) showcases a fan of raw tuna, each slice topped with a thin round of serrano chili pepper, the heat nicely contrasting a tangle of citrus-accented jicama slaw.
Grilled lamb slices ($12) are paired with a piquillo pepper marmalade, the soft, smoky peppers not too sweet, elegantly balancing the juicy lamb medallions.
Chicken "lollipops" ($7) bring saffron-marinated wings, dotted with Sriracha on a bed of romesco. Not bad, but the romesco lacked the almond-paprika-garlic-red wine vinegar punchiness I usually associate with that sauce.
For dessert, the short square of flourless chocolate cake ($5) comes with a deliciously rich quenelle of olive oil ice cream.
The best thing on the menu is a beverage. Sangria is offered in a pleasant red or white, but the finest is the Champagne version ($15 half pitcher, $30 full), a bottle of sparkler popped tableside and stirred into a pitcher of fruit, juice and ice. Delightful. The rest of the very short wine list is interesting, globetrotting from Argentina to Chile to the Rioja, all modestly priced.
Cheap opened in August at the site of Cappy's on S Howard, an industrial-chic, low-light, loud-music place with good buzz.
A high funk factor is provided by wonderful found-object murals and the use of minivan banquettes in the booths, complete with seatbelts. Servers aren't totally versed in finer points like wine service or when to clear, but those are the kinds of growing pains to be expected of a young restaurant.
Tommy Ortiz and some of the same folks that run the Hyde Park Cafe, Strings and Rings, Whiskey SOHO and Whiskey North are behind Cheap. That's a lot of collected experience. There's reason to hope that the team can fine-tune.
What's your favorite area small-plate restaurant? Tell Laura Reiley at her new blog: www.blogs.tampabay.com/dining. Reiley dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays all expenses. A restaurant's advertising has nothing to do with selection for review or the assessment. She can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.
Cheap
309 S Howard Ave., Tampa
(813) 258-5878
Cuisine: Small plates
Hours: 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday
Details: Amex, MC, V; reservations not necessary; beer and wine
Prices: $7-$17