The Kitchen, St. Petersburg
Chef Margaret Guidicessi, adds flair and flavor to even the most simple of dishes at this downtown spot.
By Laura Reiley, Times Food Critic
Published October 18, 2007
The Kitchen
409 Central Ave., St. Petersburg
(727) 895-3300
Cuisine: Eclectic
Hours: 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday
Details: Amex, V, MC; no reservations; no alcohol
Prices: $4-$9
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To understand the Kitchen, you need to know about Margaret Guidicessi.
She studied at California Culinary Academy, worked at Campanile and Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.
She gutted ducks in a basement in New York. She ran the kitchens of swanky Miami nightclubs. She taught celebrity chef Michael Mina, pre-celebrity, how to make mashed potatoes.
Then, a few years ago, Guidicessi arrived in St. Petersburg for family reasons. She looked around for inspiring work and found Mazzaro's, the archetypal Italian market - bustling, high-spirited, with delicious crystalline Parmesan, fabulous soppressatas and stuff in jars to jump-start the salivary glands.
She got the job of head chef in charge of all prepared food and catering, each day allowing the bounty of the walk-in fridge and her own imagination to inform what was on offer.
But after a while, she felt the call to make granola.
She leased the smallest space she could in downtown St. Petersburg and went to work at dawn mixing oats, nuts and so forth, selling the results in the teeny shop called Bowl of Granola and at the Saturday market.
She was itching to do more, to create a gourmet food market where she could improvise, see where the muse took her and keep making the granola.
Mark Gross, half owner of nearby Z Grille, invested in her vision and the Kitchen was born.
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What's good about an independent restaurant is that the spirit of the chef seeps into the details. If you peer in the front of the Kitchen, Guidicessi's effervescence and moxie are apparent.
Boisterous music adds a soundtrack to the bustle, which verges on tumult. The room is anchored by huge glassed cases of cold salads, pastries and desserts, plus stainless inserts of entrees.
At lunch, the clientele is mostly people ordering sandwiches and salads to eat at one of the no-fuss little tables or to carry back to the office.
At other times it seems like more people are ordering dishes to take home. I could catalog all of the salads and entrees I've eaten there, but it wouldn't do much good because it's shifting sands, blowing with Guidicessi's whim.
She likes eggplant Parmesan, marinated in a salad, and grains (bulgur, couscous, quinoa, etc.), cold marinated calamari and shrimp, roasted peppers, fingerling potatoes, lots of good olives. Go in, point to something, and you can have a little taste before you decide.
For lunch, cold and hot sandwiches are more fixed, listed on a board and printed menu.
Of these, my favorites have been an "Asian Persuasion" ($8.95) pressed sandwich with slices of rosy seared tuna heaped with a sesame seed-flecked cabbage slaw and accented with tangy pickled ginger sauce, andthe "Moca Java" roast beef ($8.50) that assembles meat (supposedly with an espresso crust, but this was too subtle for me) with onion marmalade and sharp cheddar on pressed, crunchy focaccia.
These are big, plucky sandwiches, all wrapped to go with a habanero chili tucked into the wrap as garnish and credo.
Like the performance space in New York of the same name, the Kitchen seems somehow experimental and gutsy.
It's easy to picture the Kitchen in the future: hungry downtown workers jostling elbows at noon for a housemade falafel-and-hummus sandwich; folks zipping in early morning for pastry or late afternoon for some wholesome dinner takeout.
It's not perfect: The habanero jelly on the PB&J is too blisteringly hot. In fact, many of the dishes pack at least moderate heat, so it's good to ask for a taste if you're spice-averse.
The order-at-one-counter-and-pay-at-another setup is awkward. Because the pastries are often in cases near savory foods, crusts sometimes pick up odd flavors. And plates and so forth would be nice for those eating on premises.
But what Guidicessi's new restaurant does best is nurture with imaginative and robust flavors. And isn't that what every Kitchen aspires to do?
Contact Laura Reiley at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com. Her blog, The Mouth of Tampa Bay, can be found at www.blogs.tampabay.com/dining.