She's a Florida legend, the dowager queen of all restaurants in the state, owned by the same prominent Tampa family for 98 years. In two more years, she'll turn a dignified 100, a proud, powerful lady, still dressed to the nines in priceless antique crystal and colorful Spanish tile.She seems to draw strength rather than disability from her long tenure on a full block of Ybor City, her lacy stone fretwork a familiar, reassuring constant for generations of diners, who have peopled her lavish dining rooms, loved her familial warmth, and enjoyed the Cuban and Spanish dishes for which she is famous.
She's weathered good times and bad. While she firmly stood her ground, the world went to war twice, endured depression, drought, hurricanes, underworld murders and bolita raids, land speculation and busts, nuclear standoffs, moon missions and the destruction of two space shuttles, the rise of a worldwide economy and the advent of dot coms.
Even during the 1960s and '70s, when the vibrant Latin neighborhood around her withered and Ybor City fell into blight, The Columbia still attracted hundreds of thousands each year to her ornate dining rooms and fancy bar. Once two new dining rooms are finished next summer, the restaurant will cover a staggering 47,000 square feet, with 12 dining rooms and seating for 1,800.
And though the menu has changed somewhat with culinary trends, its most popular dishes remain true to the originals. On my most recent visits there, I found a lovely, garlicky version of Cuban-style pork marinated in sour orange sauce, thick and rich Cuban coffee, terrific Spanish bean soup and the smoothest, creamiest flan. The food seems better now than it was a few years ago, maybe due to the new $2-million building that houses a state-of-the-art, 5,000-square-foot kitchen.
Or maybe it's the influence of new executive chef John Flaherty, who joined the company in October after a nationwide search. Formerly with Copeland's in New Orleans, he is a winner of an American Culinary Federation Presidential Award. He was hired because The Columbia wanted to preserve its ancestral recipes, but still endow its daily specials and banquets with innovative culinary style.
I am among the tens of thousands of staunch locals who join hordes of tourists to dine there regularly. And while the quality of the fare has remained reasonably good throughout many years, it has varied somewhat from year to year, depending on the chef and kitchen staff. What never varies is the crack service, crisply attired waiters who are unfailingly polite, efficient and friendly.
The Columbia's long reign as Tampa's premier Spanish restaurant started humbly. The year was 1905: Henry Ford was designing the Model T. Electric lighting was being installed for the first time. Tampa's population was less than 20,000.
Cuban immigrant Casimiro Hernandez Sr. opened a small corner café serving Cuban coffee and Cuban sandwiches. In 1919, he took over the restaurant next door and converted it to an additional dining room. In 1929, his son, Casimiro Jr., built the first air-conditioned dining room in Tampa, complete with an elevated dance floor.
In 1953, his daughter Adela and her husband, Cesar Gonzmart, took over the business, and in 1956, they added the Siboney Room, where top Latin performers contributed a lively flourish to the dining experience. The restaurant's entertainment tradition continues today with flamenco shows, the dancers bright in colorful costumes and the crowd mesmerized by the rhythmic stamping feet and the clicking castanets.
Beginning in 1959, the company opened restaurants in other cities, which now include St. Petersburg, Sarasota, St. Augustine, Clearwater and Celebration.
Fourth-generation owners Richard and Casey Gonzmart began working at the restaurant as teens, went elsewhere for higher education, and returned to Tampa to continue the family business. The fifth generation includes Lauren Gonzmart Laurato, a company vice-president, and her sister, Andrea Gonzmart, an assistant manager.
The restaurant was voted into the Fine Dining Hall of Fame by the Nation's Restaurant News; is a winner of Wine Spectator magazine's Award of Excellence for an outstanding collection of Spanish wines; it has been listed among Florida Trend magazine's Top 250 Restaurants every year since 1982.
My most recent foray was a pleasant rerun of the hundreds of other meals I have enjoyed there, though the restaurant's menu has been updated. Lunch one day in the familiar Palm Room started with a nearly perfect cup of Spanish bean soup (a la carte cup $3.50, bowl $4.50; with a lunch entrée, cup of soup or Caesar salad costs an additional $2.95). Its chicken and ham broth had real punch and was heavy with garbanzo beans, smoked ham, the Spanish sausage called chorizo and potatoes.
A huge, hot limb of crisp Cuban bread accompanied it, with cold, fresh butter in a dish — one of life's great joys. For an entrée, I went with chicken and yellow rice ($7.50), a generous helping of white meat chicken smothered in yellow rice, made with green pepper, Spanish onions, tomatoes, white wine and topped with green peas. The chicken was moist and tender, but the rice was a disappointingly pale imitation of the real thing; it needed more saffron flavor.
For dessert, I enjoyed the rich and creamy Spanish custard called flan ($3.95). It carried a caramel glaze that, paired with a thick cup of Cuban café con leche, is just about as good as it gets.
The waiter was typical of the servers who have smoothed nearly every visit I've ever made to The Columbia — friendly, but distantly so, careful, precise, a model of good manners and efficiency, even though it was 3 p.m., and there was still an unruly waiting line in the lobby, and he was juggling lots of tables.
Dinner one night was equally fine. We started with a sangria (glass $3.95, pitcher $12.95), the national drink of Spain made with sprightly red wine and fruit. It could have been more robust but was helped by tapas, a centuries-old Spanish tradition of small appetizers meant to stave off hunger until Spain's traditionally late dinner is finally served.
I got sangria made with domestic wine, which is inferior to a more expensive version made with Torres brandy; however, the better sangria is available only by the pitcher, costing $16.96 each; but if you're in a group, it's well worth the extra cost.
We tried Tapeo ($9.95), an assortment of different tapas, featuring crispy fried calamari, palm-size black bean cakes and Spanish Tetilla cheese baked in Rioja tomato sauce with toasted Cuban bread. The latter was our favorite because the tomato sauce was tangy and hot, and we liked dipping the bread and tossing it down with Sangria chasers.
As an entrée, I ordered several Cuban specialties called "La Completa Cubana" ($18.95). The hefty platter was loaded with roast pork, boliche (eye-round of beef stuffed with chorizo) and roasted picadillo fried in pastry, yucca, black beans and yellow rice. The roast pork was light and tender, and carried a delectable trace of its sour orange marinade, but the boliche took Best Dish honors because it was a wonder of flavors and so tender it fell apart under a fork.
The only disappointment was, again, a pale version of yellow rice.
We had reserved a table for the early flamenco show (with a cover charge of $6 per person) and were glad to be sitting close to the performers from The Columbia Restaurant Dance Troupe, led by Artistic Director Faustino Rios. Two 45-minute shows entail an athletic display of dance steps, stomped in time to the music on a solid wooden floor.
Though we were enthralled with the dancing and loath to disturb it, the waiter did manage to sneak dessert to us while the show continued. I tried one of the menu's newer offerings, a Godiva chocolate cake ($5.95), dark cake layered and topped with chocolate mousse, drizzled with caramel sauce and brightened with strawberries. Its frosting and texture were rich and gooey, but I preferred my companion's dessert, a piece of ordinary cheesecake with a wash of guava-flavor sauce ($4.95). Fruity, cheesy and so Tampa.
In fact, the whole restaurant seems a lovely distillation of true Tampa — its long history, its immigrants, its toil and tears, its energy, its persistence, its hope for the future, its subtropical panache and the Cuban-Spanish heritage that warms us all.
Contact food critic Sara Kennedy at sara.kennedy@weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 116.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2003.