Restaurant BT
4 stars
2507 S. MacDill Ave., Tampa, 813-258-1916, restaurantbt.com
Restaurant BT owner/chef BT Nguyen has had a hell of a year. Last April, the restaurant in Tampa’s Hyde Park Village — which she owns with former husband Norman Batley — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to find relief from a backlog of unpaid rent. The 200-seat Hyde Park space was big, beautiful and damn expensive at more than $14,000 a month, and the slack economy played havoc with the restaurant’s income.
Jumping ahead almost a year, we find Nguyen’s restaurant in a new, downsized location on South MacDill. The reborn Restaurant BT has a more casual look and more intimate vibe than the old spot, but the food is the same fine French-Vietnamese cuisine that made Nguyen so popular in the first place.
Nguyen has made some changes to the menu, but most of the favorites are still there: fresh rolls and bo tai chanh, duck pancakes and foie gras, pumpkin soup and shaken beef, among many others. In fact, the menu seems surprisingly large for such a small place, until you dig deeper and realize how she uses the same main ingredients in a variety of strikingly different ways, like duck in that pancake, on a salad, and as a seared breast entree.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2011.