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Side dish
By CHRIS SHERMAN
© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 11, 2001
I'll have another . . .
Seat at the bar. Best and quickest table in many restaurants is a bar or counter that serves food as well as drink and offers inviting seating for not-so-lonely single diners. Sometimes there's a close-up view of the kitchen too. Sushi, raw bars and lunch counters came first; now you can eat at the bar in almost every new restaurant.
New in town
Cracker Barrel, the chain that put peach pancakes, sawmill gravy and barnfuls of knickknackery all over the interstate map, opens its 34th Florida location in St. Petersburg (I-275 and 54th Ave. N) on Monday. Don't forget, Sunday is Boiled Cabbage Day.
Changing recipes
Now that Outback has acquired St. Pete-born Bonefish, it's raising the bony flag over the former South Tampa location of Zazarac.
New chef at Ollie's (111 Second Ave. NE, St. Petersburg, (727) 895-2200) is Paul Mattison, who made the Summerhouse a Sarasota favorite.
He moved here to create Mattison's, an American Bistro, out of Ollie's, beloved for chicken salad sandwiches as big as prime rib.
Menu and prices are changing gradually. Crabcakes, big burgers and blackened salmon are familiar fare; fried capers, Gorgonzola, pine nuts and focaccia aren't.
Ollie's will close later this month and reopen before Thanksgiving as Mattison's with updated decor and menus.
Durango Steak Houses move uptown when they resurrect an Ulmerton Road landmark this fall as a high-end steakhouse. The former Pepe's, shuttered this summer, will reopen as Bascom's Chophouse by December, with high-grade beef, an upstairs banquet room and the grand old bar that made Pepe's famous.
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