A collective wail resounded throughout South Tampa when Gordon Davis decided to close Le Bordeaux a few years ago, as if the culinary heart had been ripped out of SoHo. I still get e-mails about Le Bordeaux whenever I review a French restaurant. It was beloved. Davis transformed the place into St. Bart's, with a Franco-Caribbean theme. But it never developed the rabid fan-base of Le Bordeaux, and last year Davis sold the space to nightclub entrepreneur Philip Glassman.
What's changed? Well, not much — yet. St. Bart's chef, Anthony Bruno, is still cooking, and the menu is largely the same, with just a few changes to indicate that Bruno has been given freer rein in the kitchen. The place is still beautiful, with the same Mediterranean décor of rich earth tones and natural materials, as well as the best outdoor dining area in SoHo — in the courtyard around the "pool." St. Bart's has good bones, and Glassman isn't messing with them.
His plans are more expansive. He's turning the "house" — a building behind the restaurant proper that was used for office space — into a private, members-only club that will cater to SoHo denizens who want something a little more exclusive than the upscale meat market at Sidebern's down the street. It won't be cheap, possibly over $5,000 just to buy in, but the trappings will be fun. Electronic thumbprint keypad entry? Personal lockers to store wine and cigars? Slavish service? Yep, that and more.
For a few more months, though, you'll have to drink and eat with South Tampa's hoi polloi in the public dining room and bar, soaking up the "island" cuisine with the rest of us. St. Bart's menu started out as a French-influenced Caribbean mélange, but has gradually morphed into an anything-goes menu that rivals the Cheescake Factory's — in length, at least.
It's seven pages of largely satisfying food — except a lobster cassoulet ($28.95) that owes more to the baked seafood casseroles of New England than the fancy pork-and-beans of France. Under a slightly overcooked pink and pale tail — improved by a shower of drawn butter — sits a bland muck of rice and breadcrumbs and chanterelle mushrooms. Even with buttery run-off from the lobster, it's not worth eating.
Normally, I praise chefs for a subtle touch with sauces, but that subtlety is taken to an extreme here at St. Bart's. Tender roasted pork (flashily dubbed Blood Orange Mojo Suckling Pig, $17.95) needs more than a thimbleful of the garlicky citrus mojo drizzled off to the side to give it some passionate flava'. It's nicely cooked, but bland.
Mustard and horseradish work perfectly with a salmon filet ($22.95) covered in crisp crumb, although we have to ask for a ramekin of the stuff to supplement the meager teaspoon puddled at the side of the fish. Cedar-plank roasting has come and gone in fine dining circles — it's become a staple of chain dining — but in this dish, St. Bart's shows how good it can be to throw fashion to the wind.
Some of the small plates suffer the same dearth of saucy goodness. A tower of crab and avocado ($9.95) has the barest hint of vinegar and cilantro that could have punched up the fresh, but too-subtle sweet and fatty ingredients.
A special of roasted snapper ($25.95), likely some of the last fresh Gulf snapper of the season, suffers from rubbery skin that covers the entire filet. Fatty fish skin is a good thing, but only when rendered crisp through contact with a blazing hot pan. It's also barely room temp and accompanied by a cylinder of cold scalloped potatoes.
That's an exception in an otherwise well-cooked meal. Among our appetizers, soft-shell crab ($8.95) is given a crunchy crust of crisp cashews, and a simple pepper pot soup ($8.95) lets off the lush aromas of saffron and sweet tomato. Shortribs ($8.95) fall off the bone with but a glance, the meat glazed in just enough gingery barbecue sauce.
Considering the size of the dining room — it's tucked into a narrow interior room adjacent to an enclosed patio — it's obvious that much of St. Bart's allure is concentrated in the other 75 percent of the establishment. Even early in the evening, there are more bartenders behind the bar than there are waiters working the dining room. A huge selection of rum is on hand, including several aged varieties that easily equal the best scotch and cognac you can find.
There has always been music at St. Bart's, but under Glassman's hand that music has been expanded to six nights a week. On one Thursday — which has long been reggae night — we walked out of a half-empty dining room to see the bar and courtyard packed with people. The place was jumping. It's considerably more vibrant and lively than it used to be, especially for the usually sleepy days of early June.
In the end, that's the future of Glassman's St. Bart's. It's also the first sign of real change at the place. He's injected this charming piece of old South Tampa with new life, transforming it from Le Bordeaux's less successful successor into his own place, fresh and let loose from the shackles of 20 years of dining history. It's really a nightclub now, so it doesn't have to compete on the same level anymore.
That probably means that St. Bart's acceptable seafood-based cuisine won't get much better, but that's all right. It's good enough to act as a supplement to the excitement next door, and to cater to the private membership, once that gets rolling. Mostly, I suspect, people will be having too good a time to pay much attention.
Brian Ries is a former restaurant general manager with an advanced diploma from the Court of Master Sommeliers. Planet food critics dine anonymously, and the paper pays for the meals. Restaurants chosen for review are not related to advertising.
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.