The Wine Bar Café
3 out of 5 stars
6428 N. Florida Ave., Tampa. Small plates: $2-$24; desserts: $7; beer & wine: $4-$16. 813-244-3893, thewinebarcafe.com.
The decision to open any restaurant presents the owners with a broad spectrum of challenges and difficult decisions. If you’re inserting yourself into a niche arena, every branding choice made adds some weight on the scale balancing success vs. failure. Who is your audience? Where’s the sweet spot in the market for what you’re selling? What decor and serving pieces reinforce the image you want to leave with your diners to create buzz about your offerings? Does the name of your establishment raise expectations for particular answers to these questions.
When I hear “Wine Bar Café,” my first assumption is that serious attention is paid to the wine list and the stemware to showcase the contents of the cellar for optimal consumption. Wine usually also connotes a slightly more formal, rather than casual, environment. It’s possible the emphasis is in demystifying what is too often overly complicated. I wrote a series of more than 50 CL columns titled Drink More Wine with this intention. But if your cafe has beer, cheese, barbecue, whatever, in the name, I expect that element of the menu to be the highlight of the dining experience.
Here is where Tampa’s Wine Bar Café upends my expectation. The food from chef Kevin Boxx, which I’ll get to in a moment, is excellent across the board. The wine, however, seems like an afterthought. First off, the glasses are clunky with thick rims. At least their bowls are large enough to swirl and spotlight the aromas, but serious wine drinkers will be disappointed.
Presented on a plain white computer-printed sheet, the wine list is mostly lacking in important information. Details matter. There are missing producers, no vintages and little geography. For instance, “Peachy Canyon Zinfandel” doesn’t tell us enough to know which wine from the Paso Robles winery, whose retail bottlings range from $15 to $95, is going into our glasses.
Bordeau (sic), Vistacion (sic), Cabernay (sic) and Cloudine (sic) are spelled wrong and missing necessary accents, too.
Although our server is friendly and knowledgeable, not including more complete details is just inexcusable, particularly for a small, desktop-published selection. When the wine list says, “Marcella’s White Blend,” it tells us almost nothing. We don’t know the vintner, country, region, grapes or vintage. It’s essentially a worthless document. But if the list reads — Fess Parker Winery & Vineyard, Marcella’s White Wine, Santa Barbara County 2016 (53 percent viognier, 34 percent grenache blanc, 13 percent rousanne) — you know what’s up, before it goes down the hatch.
With so few wines (17 on my visit), you might also expect descriptive notes or ratings to help patrons. The eight wines we taste are unremarkable, almost without exception. The Seminole Heights hangout is obviously not trying to compete on the high end, yet many wines in the market are far more complex at these price points.
Ambience plays a part as well. Once you enter, then pass the bar and shelves of wine, the room opens into a brashly lit, sterile and uninviting setting. While shiny silver tables and chairs may be easy to clean, they resemble patio furniture and aren’t so comfortable as to encourage a lingering encounter.
The good news is that the Wine Bar Café small plates are superb enough to salvage my visit.
A fine place to start is with the Heights Cheese Tasting featuring a choice of five selections, plus accoutrements. Twelve cheeses are featured in four categories: cow, goat, sheep and blue. We settle on Reypenaer V.S.O.P. Gouda (Holland/cow), which is misspelled on the menu; Bonne Bouche (Vermont/goat); Humboldt Fog (California/goat); Manchego (Spain/sheep); and Cambozola Black Label (Germany/blue). We also decide to add tartufo salami from the charcuterie trio. The ripe cheeses are handsomely displayed on a slate plate with honeycomb, grapes, spiced pecans, water crackers and slices of whole-grain loaf with an open, airy crumb.
The triumphant Jazzy Veggie stuffs button mushrooms with a mound of spinach, artichoke hearts, fresh mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes and toasted pine nuts. Equally delectable is the wonderful bruschetta on superb multigrain bread; the ratatouille version with herbes de Provence and goat cheese — as well as the barbecue chicken take with apple-fennel slaw — are balanced and supremely pleasing. My tasters dissolve into silent joy.
Perhaps my favorite, though it’s hard to pick, is the shrimp and andouille sausage kebab with three colors of bell peppers and the surprisingly delicious Old Bay aioli.
House-made desserts are uniformly scrumptious. Classic carrot cake with traditional cream cheese icing substitutes currants for raisins before it's covered in coarsely chopped pecans and a decadent, intense caramel sauce, elevating the treat to the stratosphere. Chocolate mousse cake is out of the ordinary, too. Often these sweets are overly gooey and cloying, but this confection has the perfect balance of light cake with dense chocolate. What’s more, the flavors are clean and satisfying. The accompanying chocolate sauce and a few berries are added for good measure.
The most surprising and refreshingly original dessert is orange carpaccio. Carefully trimmed of their white pith, cross slices of Florida oranges are marinated in honey and cinnamon rum. The result bursts with fresh citrus and a hint of extra sweetness and spice. There’s a creamy scoop of vanilla ice cream to delightfully mix with the juice, along with a garnish of whole raspberries.
It’s got the entire table buzzing with joy, which is an agreeable denouement.
CL Food Critic Jon Palmer Claridge dines anonymously when reviewing. Check out the explanation of his rating system, or email him at food@creativeloafing.com.
This article appears in Feb 14-21, 2019.