Home Sweet St. Pete Home

We are back into the swing of things, and thinking whether we could have extended that Roatan vacation by a few days, weeks or months, but realize that for now St. Petersburg is our home.
We can dream and imagine, that sometime in the future, as our AARP cards get more and more use, that owning and running a restaurant somewhere in the Caribbean or Central America could be a possibility, while still maintaining ties to the U.S. It is actually not only something we envision, but what a fair amount of people, that we have come across during our travels these past years, have done. David and Dana, who created Hamanasi Dive Resort in Dangriga (where we spent a long weekend last April), are a prime example, having built their resort in a yet undiscovered area on the mainland of Belize. The couple from Michigan who run a restaurant, bar and small B&B on Ambergris Caye or Bob and Rhonda's "Hole in the Wall" on Roatan, all seem to have gotten their priorities right. Imagine waking up to pristine turquoise waters, coral reefs, palm trees swaying, sun shining...ahh..this actually sounds a lot like St. Petersburg, except for the traffic, so we are halfway there.
As we settle back in, making our desserts, sauces and bread during the day and taking care of our dinner guests at night, we continue to check out the Tampa Bay Area's hundreds of restaurants, returning to our favorites and eschewing those where our experiences either in quality, value or service have left a lot to be desired. Looking at a restaurant's entire product from the point of few of a restauranteur and chef might seem like a conflict of interest, but our insight is not meant to be a negative, nor do we expect to supplant the area's professional food reviewers critiques. We want to share our personal opinions and tastes, intertwined with both back and front of the house knowledge, that some weekly paper's critics sorely lack, and more importantly, before expressing an interest or dislike in a restaurant's cuisine we will have been a frequent visitor to that establishment and able to measure whether a one time mishap in service, atmosphere or food flavor and execution, was just that. We know nobody is perfect, not even the country's top chefs and restaurants, even those with their own TV shows, cookbooks and restaurants, will often admit their failures, mistakes and downfalls.
Time to get on track and during the coming months display our hopefully verbose talents, starting with some of our favorite restaurants, all vearing away from the bland, cookie cutter, ubiquitous foods delivered on plastic plates with paper smiles, leaning towards ethnic, eclectic and well executed foods with lots of flavor and value to match. We all live in a hectic and oft too serious world, so if we can have even one person slow down for a millisecond, read our blog, smile a little, enjoy a new restaurant, and recommend one to us to try, then we will have accomplished our job, so tomorrow the sharing of culinary experiences both recent and distant, local and international will commence.