Riding off the momentum of its one-year anniversary, The Warehouse Arts District’s Eat Art Love has tirelessly proven itself as a must-visit spot for breakfast and lunch in St. Petersburg.
Tucked in between large warehouses and private art studios at 589 22nd St. S, the intimate, daytime restaurant is run by a small team of dedicated employees and can seat about 30 people.
Helmed by longtime industry professionals Chef Mario Brugnoli in the back of house and Jess Williams in the front of house, Eat Art Love delivers a myriad of hospitality experiences. Whether someone is on their lunch break, grabbing a quick bite for breakfast, or dining with their entire family—Eat Art Love’s small, yet mighty menu is designed for all walks of life.
With newly-expanded hours and the recent addition of a coffee program courtesy of local pop-up Sage’s Playground, Eat Art Love has quickly evolved out of the confines of traditional weekend brunch service. And since the small restaurant shares a parking lot with its adjacent businesses, diners won’t struggle to find street parking or better yet—have to pay—just to eat lunch with friends.
Both Eat Art Love ownership and the handful of employees proudly boast the restaurant’s perfect 5.0 on Google reviews, and for a good reason. Chef Brugnoli’s fine dining background and penchant for detail shines through Eat Art Love’s daytime menu. He offers straightforward, yet perfectly-executed breakfast classics alongside more bright, creative and visually-stunning dishes—like his seasonal salad, which changes every few months. His current, Thai-inspired rendition features roasted broccoli covered in a pineapple sweet and sour dressing, chilies, mint, shallots and lime for $12.
Eat Art Love offers slightly different menus on weekdays and weekends, with Wednesday-Friday focusing on handhelds and sandwiches while Saturday and Sunday feature more complex items—like Brugnoli’s seasonal salad, pancake and baked toast. These weekend selections are a bit more higher end, take longer to prep and serve, and are more technique-driven.
But there are also a few select dishes offered daily, which Brugnoli and his regular customers have deemed Eat Art Love staples. One is his poached egg dip with perfectly-seasoned creamed potato (think a mashed potato-sauce hybrid), chives and toasted sourdough that gets a healthy swipe of garlic butter ($14).
Another staple is the Eat Art Love Classic, which is an extremely safe, plan B if you’re not sure what to order. While it can feel a bit pricey at $17, the classic plate comes with caramelized onions, snappy kielbasa, ultra-crispy hashbrowns that almost resemble a casserole or savory cake, and Brugnoli’s prized scrambled eggs—soft and custardy, finished with small knobs of cream cheese, just like his father used to prepare for him when he was a child.
The most expensive item on the menu is Eat Art Love $20 confit duck leg, another weekday-weekend staple. It’s an indulgent, savory meal that still maintains a certain lightness. While most cheesy grits can feel laden with cheddar or gouda, Brugnoli opted to use feta to highlight notes of creaminess with a slight tang.
“I really had to find different ways to put out technique-driven dishes while still fitting within the breakfast theme—there’s little aspects of the menu that are definitely inspired by my fine dining background, like the baked toast and duck confit,” Brugnoli tells Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “I’ve always been the type of person that has focused on details.”
Rounding out the daily staples are Eat Art Love best-selling chicken sandwich ($14) with hot honey, mayo and a pickled cabbage slaw on a Sullivan Street Bakery focaccia roll (which fans of Tampa’s Supernatural Food & Wine will immediately recognize), a housemade sausage sandwich with pickled red onions, carmelized onions and Weber’s mustard ($12), and Brugnoli’s “Grandpa Larry’s” benedict ($15). This dish, reminiscent of a homestyle Italian pasta, features a family recipe of meat ragu that’s ladled over two poached eggs, garlic toast and finished with grated parmesan and basil.
“Going into opening this place, I thought to myself, ‘Well I’m a chef, I just have to cook good food.’ And then I quickly understood that there’s way more to worry about as a chef-owner than just the food tasting good. Marketing myself, promoting the restaurant and posting on social media were all things I had to learn how to do,” he explains. “What goes on the plate matters. The margins matter. You can’t just cook food that you like to eat, you have to cook what’s going to keep the customer happy every single time.”
Brugnoli is a perfectionist. His food is delicate, intentionally seasoned and garnished, and executed to the best of his ability—each and every time.
While “greasy spoon,” hangover-cure breakfast classics elsewhere can induce a certain “itis,” Brugnoli and Sous Chef Matt Rembas deliver something lighter for the palate.
They both taste every single dish before it hits the pass, painstakingly adjust seasonings, and cook everything to order.
While many restaurants—even small ones—often utilize steam tables for quick service, at Eat Art Love, you’ll never see sauces or sides held to temperature in a rectangular metal six-pan.
Vegetables and fruit—sourced from local farms as often as possible—tend to receive a special treatment from the Eat Art Love kitchen, often showcased in its seasonal salads and sweeter options. Another rotating item that recently got a wintertime update is Brugnoli’s pancake, which is only available on weekends. The current pancake ($13), that’s almost reminiscent of a Japanese-style jiggly pancake, features matcha whipped cream, strawberry jam and strawberry streusel, seamlessly combining the flavors of fresh Florida strawberries with a nostalgic hint of a strawberry candy. This quarter’s specialty toast ($13) with poached mandarins, lemon ricotta and wildflower honey on sesame sourdough offers a balance between sweet and acidic, paying homage to the Sunshine State’s citrus season.
Co-owners and silent partners Jose and Natalie Martinez approached Brugnoli about Eat Art Love in 2023, coincidentally a few weeks after he resigned from Sarasota’s Meliora as its sous chef, looking for a break from the overwhelming grind of the fine dining world. Two months before the restaurant opened, Brugnoli appeared on Food Network’s “Chopped” to help promote the new breakfast spot.
Brugnoli, who is an operating partner and chef-owner, cut his teeth as a line cook at The Sundial’s now-closed Farmtable Cucina before heading across the bridge to be a part of Rocca’s debut brigade in 2019. After mastering the ins-and-outs of Rocca a few years before it gained a prestigious Michelin star (Tampa’s first, nonetheless), he headed to Jeffery Jew’s Asian-Nowegian concept Lingr to try his hand at an unfamiliar cuisine.
When it was time to open Eat Art Love in January 2024, Brugnoli had the challenge of tackling another unfamiliar fare—breakfast.
“This was pretty much the first time that I ever had to cook eggs during service. I hyper-focused on everything when it came to creating the menu, and it’s been a challenge to actually slow down and try to dedicate myself to a cuisine that I’ve never really had to cook professionally,” Brugnoli says. “It’s easy to elevate a dish by adding expensive ingredients, but there’s ways to make things better without overcomplicating the classics. I serve some of the best eggs in town, and small details like that makes folks come back.”
Brugnoli not only cooks with razor-sharp preciseness, but also cooks from a deeply personal place. His menu may seem like typical breakfast and lunch fare at first glance, but there are sprinkles of familial recipes and inter-generational techniques amongst the dozen or so items. In addition to cooking, Brugnoli will often deliver dishes to a table, greet regular customers, cash them out and gather feedback from the dining room. And if his one year-old son Roman happens to be visiting the restaurant, Brugnoli will always take him to regular customers to say hello.
Brugnoli is intentional about building trust with regulars who are going to explore the menu multiple times—they may start with a simple breakfast sandwich, but in a month, they may venture to the confit duck legs over feta grits. The Eat Art Love menu is a group of dishes worth coming back to, time and time again.
Diners usually need to book dinner reservations at a fancy, dimly-lit restaurant with handcrafted plates to receive this type of customized, attentive service—but at Eat Art Love, your first meal of the day can leave a lasting impression. Eat Art Love combines the inherent charm of a small restaurant with the culinary prowess of a large-scale eatery.
Tampa Bay’s breakfast options more-or-less lean towards the well-loved “greasy spoons” or trendy and expensive brunch restaurants. But locally-owned and chef-driven concepts like Eat Art Love are changing the expectations of what daytime service can be.
Only a year into its existence, both Brugnoli and the rest of the Eat Art Love team have continuously adapted and evolved to thrive in St. Pete’s competitive restaurant scene. But with an arsenal of regular customers and an unique culinary vision, Eat Art Love is hopefully on its way to becoming a proper institution in The ‘Burg. “I spend a lot of time thinking about the sustainability of this restaurant…my goal is for this to be a staple in St. Pete,” Brugnoli tells CL. “I want it to be around for decades, for my son especially.”
While Brugnoli’s job is to constantly manage the restaurant’s food cost and profit, there’s another type of sustainability that he’s been able to maintain at Eat Art Love. After so many years of closing restaurants and getting home well past midnight, his daytime shifts have been a welcome shift of pace.
“Never in my life have I had a job where I come back after my one or two days off actually feeling refreshed. This is truly the first time I’ve ever had work-life balance as a chef, and it’s more important than ever because I have a son now,” Brugnoli explains. “I come into this kitchen actually excited to cook. The combination of being an owner and only working during the day has me feeling really refreshed each week. When you work dinner service for so long, it feels like it takes up your entire day, every day.”
“I’m able to keep my anxiety levels low and just really be able to focus on the quality of food and service,” he adds.
Looking towards the future, Brugnoli has dreams of knocking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room to expand seating into the restaurant’s neighboring unit. But before that day comes around, he expects a gradual growth in menu items and perhaps a shift towards more complex lunch plates.
Head to @eatartlove_stpete on Instagram or the restaurant’s Facebook page for its latest menu items, events, and other news. It’s open in the Warehouse Arts District from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Reservations are strongly encouraged on Saturdays and Sundays (and can be made on eatartlovestpete.com), but service during the week is walk-in only and folks can seat themselves. Give Eat Art Love a call at 727-289-1713 for any questions about reservations and accommodations.[location-1]UPDATED 03/11/1:30 p.m. Updated with a link to reservations.
