Email
Print
The Tampa Underbelly Tour
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: October 2, 2007
Related Links
TAMPA - TAMPA - It was at the precise moment when the spoon passed my lips that I fully understood, maybe for the first time, the true meaning of trust.
Perched upon that spoon: an almost spongy, not quite rubbery yet still pretty chewy chunk of honeycomb pig intestine that sat soaking in a shallow, rich, brown broth from a dish known as menudo, The recipe for the Mexican tripe stew usually includes bits of intestine and sometimes features veal knuckle or bits of heart.
I had never eaten anything like this before, but that was sort of the point. Now I had to trust that it had been cooked right, that the new acquaintances who suggested we eat at this restaurant were noble in their intentions. It doesn't matter where you eat, really. Every bite is a contract of trust.
You realize that after years of watching Travel Channel guys such as Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern traipse around the globe eating native food in exotic places. See Anthony suck a seal's eyeball like a Concord grape while sitting in an Alaskan Eskimo's living room! Watch Andrew gnaw his way through a grainy piece of camel!
Lacking the kind of travel budget that an international TV series provides, I've nonetheless yearned to break free from the yoke of chain restaurants. Most everything I consume, I've consumed too many times before. That fast-food sign that brags about "billions served"? A good percentage of those were served to me. I have no interest in stunt eating to get out of my rut, but I like to think I'm open-minded and curious enough to break through a few cultural barriers.
Wait a second. That camel Zimmern ate? He found it in New York City in a small restaurant in Queens. He didn't have to go to sub-Saharan Africa to try it. Maybe I could do the same. If America is a melting pot, Florida — and Tampa especially — is the Big Fondue. Just about every kind of food can be found here, too.
Then I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from Greg Baker and his wife, Michelle, who operate Cooks and Co. private chef service in Tampa.
"If you ever need a local tour guide to the bowels of Tampa food, feel free to give us a call," Michelle wrote. "Greg knows every back- road diner, hole-in-the-wall dive, best-damn-food pass-the-Pepto don't-breathe-just-eat joint in Tampa. His culinary instructors would be so proud."
My very own culinary Sherpas. Cool.
We picked a weekend. The plan was to visit as many restaurants as possible in one afternoon. They asked if their friend Larry Cotton could tag along, Cotton works as a production technician at WFLA, Channel 8, and does "Larry's Good Eats" video reviews for the "Daytime" morning show. The more the merrier, I said.
Which explains why I would be considering a spoonful of pig intestine with people I barely knew.
But first, back to the beginning.
Getting Started
Because none of us knew each other, the original plan was to meet at noon on a Saturday at a central location. We settled on the Hillsborough Avenue Starbucks. But then that didn't seem right.
"Greg has requested (strike that) demanded we meet at The Hub," Michelle e-mailed a few days before we were to meet. "He stated it was his 'one condition.'"
The Hub is a funky bar in downtown Tampa. I don't want to call it a dive, but it's the perfect place to have a drink if you're on the way to the bus station, just getting out of jail or have a few extra dollars in your pocket from selling your plasma. Then at around 11 on Friday and Saturday night, it turns into one of the hippest party bars in Tampa with, as Michelle said, "a who's who crowd frolicking in drinks potent enough to make Kenny Rogers drunk after one sip."
I love bars like that. Greg was right. Starting a food journey at a chain coffee shop would have been heresy.
"I feel like I should be calling you guys by code names ..." Michelle e-mailed. "Roger that, Big Beaver. We're meetin' down by the Big Muddy."
Fine by me, I replied, "Although I have one demand: That I not be referred to as 'Big Beaver.'"
I showed up at The Hub at noon and through the secondhand smoke and witness-relocation dimness of the lights saw three people at the bar.
We introduced ourselves as Michelle pulled out the itinerary. Of the six places she had planned for us to visit, I'd been to only one. Those were good odds.
Stop No. 1: Martha's Place
We were looking for exotic, but you can't just jump into the deep end of the pool. To get into first gear, we needed a little home cooking at Martha's Place on Nebraska Avenue in Seminole Heights. There are 50 seats in the eatery, but you'd never know it. The dining room, with the makeshift tip jar on the counter and menu scrawled on a dry-erase board on a wall above the kitchen, was intimate and cozy. It's the way all neighborhood restaurants should be.
"The catfish and scrambled eggs are awesome," Michelle said. "So are the biscuits and gravy."
Within a few minutes, a giant plate of biscuits drowning in white gravy appeared at the table.
"These are serious biscuits," Cotton said.
"Band name," I replied.
Greg said he makes a similar gravy at home. "Brown the sausage, leave the grease behind," he said. "Make the roux out of that grease."
Michelle went into investigative mode. It was like something from an episode of "Biscuit CSI."
"There's almost like a soda-water background," she said. "There's a tang to it."
A few minutes later, the plate of eggs, fried catfish and grits landed.
I'd eaten all three before, of course, but never together. It was like a texture summit between food superpowers. Something about the fluffiness of the eggs, the crunchiness of the fish and the creaminess of the grits made it taste simultaneously foreign and familiar.
"One of the secrets to making great fried food is having just the right amount of … detritus, for lack of a better word, in your fryer oil," Greg explained.
We stopped to talk to owner Della Walsingham as we walked to the counter to pay our bill. She told us she's selling Martha's Place in a few weeks after owning it for 27 years.
"I've got cancer for the third time," she said.
The new owner, she says, plans to change nothing about the restaurant. The menu, the staff, everything will remain.
"We love these people," she says. "They love the help. We have a lot of family here."
Stop No. 2: La Cabana Antioquena
Making our way a little farther northwest to Armenia Avenue, the Bakers take me to a Colombian restaurant that's famous for pollo a la brasa — rotisserie charcoal-roasted chicken.
Walking into La Cabana Antioquena, we found a courtyardlike dining room with one porchlike section covered by barrel-tiled clay shingles.
Michelle ordered again, but this time, I looked at the menu.
"Hen soup? We've got to have that," I said. "And this on the back. Under desserts. Brevas con queso … figs with cheese."
To that, Michelle added a plate of the chicken and an order of chicharrones, or pork rinds.
"They are to die for," she said.
I had been expecting pork rinds with the poofy consistency of Cheez Doodles. Instead, these were meaty pieces of fried fat.
Initial thoughts: They were to die for. They were greasy, smoky and perfectly chewy. If there is a hog heaven, this must be the kind of pork they serve.
Subsequent thought: I should have premedicated with Lipitor.
After that, we were hit by a flavor tsunami as wave after wave of new tastes poured over us. First the smokiness of the chicken. Then the hearty yucca, potato and poultry flavor of the hen soup. Then the creamy figs and cheese.
"This tastes like deconstructed flan," I said.
It was sweet and smooth and fresh all rolled into one.
Stop No. 3: Taqueria Mi Mexico
"Oh, I've been here before," I said as we pulled into Taqueria Mi Mexico, which was a little farther south on Armenia. In a small, concrete-block building with a sky blue roof, the restaurant makes amazing burritos. It also makes, you guessed it, menudo.
Greg was classically trained and graduated from Western Culinary Institute in 1987. He's studied the food and wine of Italy by traveling through its regions but prefers eating poor-man's food. The more unusual, the better he likes it.
Menudo certainly qualifies.
He orders a big bowl to share. Along with it, a plate of carnitas, a roasted pork platter with rice, refried beans, radishes, avocados and diced onion, with cilantro and soft tortillas.
The first spoonful of tripe rises to my mouth. "Try not to think about it," the voice in my head says.
And, yes, at first it tastes gross. It tastes like I'm eating a warm head cold. And then it doesn't. The rich broth, mixed with a squirt of lime and diced onion, transforms it into something … interesting. Not good. Not bad. Just different. And today, different is the gold standard.
Greg giggles a little. I finish my bowl in a heroic gesture. Larry takes one bite and dives for the carnitas and hot sauce.
In the moment — and from that spoon — we find a handle for our adventure: The Tampa Underbelly Tour.
Stop No. 4: West Indies Cuisine
At the corner of Floribraska and Florida avenues, a tiny section of the pink building on the northeast corner is home to West Indies Cuisine.
"Yo, take a picture of me" A young guy seated at one of the tables in the small dining room stood up when he saw my video camera.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Lucky," he said with a huge smile and a laugh.
"How are you doing today?" I asked.
"Been well. How 'bout you? Yeah, yeah, yeah."
I asked what he was eating. His plate was full of chicken and collard greens.
We walked up to order and immediately hit a language barrier. The two women behind the buffet-style counter serving food didn't speak English. On the menu board were words such as kabrit (goat), kalaloo (a Caribbean gumbo with West African roots) and ke buf (oxtail). But we didn't know that at the time. Lucky acted as our interpreter in ordering a sample plate that eventually was filled with chicken, beef, corn flour, wheat rice and a mixture of green beans and sweet potato.
"Oh, that's awesome, the green bean thing," Michelle said.
"This tastes like polenta," Greg said after dipping a spoon into the corn flour.
We had no idea beyond a few basic descriptions from Lucky what we were eating. But it all tasted amazing.
Did anything else really matter?
Stop No. 5: Big John's Alabama BBQ
You've got to go to Big John's, people told me for years. It's the best barbecue in the area, they said.
Now I was finally here.
With a smokestack that rises above the burnt-orange building, you smell Big John's on 40th Street in Tampa before you see it.
Once inside, we found a line of about two dozen people waiting for to-go orders and just about every table taken in the dining room. Pretty soon, we would know why.
Digging into a Styrofoam takeout container, we each sampled the honey-sweet baked beans, the smoky ribs and pork, the creamy potato salad and bites of the smoked sausage.
"The sausage is out of control," I said.
I considered weeping for joy, then pulled back.
'It's like a cross between a kielbasa and a smoked sausage," Michelle said after taking a bite. 'The skin, there's a snap as soon as you bite into it."
At this point, my brain went into an adrenaline narcosis that marathoners get as they run past the 20-mile mark. It was safe to say I had "eater's high." And we still had one more stop.
Stop No. 6: Walgreen's
Pepto, Gas-X. Altoids. Floss.
Enough said.
Stop No. 7: Cephas Hot Shop
By this point, we had plowed through a serious amount of food. We started this thing at noon, and it was going on 7 p.m. We'd need a marsupial pouch if we ate one more plate. Greg and Michelle suggested we drive to Ybor City for some Jamaican jerk chicken at Cephas Hot Shop.
We parked in front and walked around back to the courtyard to take a seat on lawn furniture. Under a leafy canopy, we waited until the owner, Cephas Gilbert, came out to greet us.
A wiry man with a thick Jamaican accent, Cephas is a portrait of joy and energy. We want to order some chicken, we said. Instead, Cephas launched into a long soliloquy about the healthful virtues of drinking aloe. After about the 15th minute, it all became a vowel movement of words such as "lose weight" and "mucus" and "large intestine" and "feces elimination." We were a long way from "Welcome to Applebee's. My name is Heather."
A couple at a nearby table dined on chicken. It looked delicious.
"Come with me," Cephas said.
We walked back to the front of the building. That's where his aloe beverage stand is. A sign on the outside reads: "Aloe for health."
Cephas got behind the counter, took a 2-foot-long aloe branch, sliced its skin with a knife and used a spoon to scoop out the plant's goopy innards. It sat coiled in the bottom of a blender canister like a translucent snake.
He then put the container on the blender for about three minutes until it reached a deep froth.
"You will get used to this after the first few times you have it," he said.
Bad sign No. 1.
A customer walked up to the window. Oh, an aloe buyer, I thought. Must be good.
Nope. Cephas handed him chicken instead.
Wait a second, I thought. That's not fair. He didn't get the aloe sales pitch.
Bad sign No. 2.
Once blended, four Styrofoam cups of frothy liquid were poured.
"Knock it back all at once," he said. "Pinch the cup and throw it down."
We looked at each other hesitantly, then simultaneously tilted our heads back.
What happened then became a blur. A medicinal flavor filled my mouth. Happy memories of catfish and sausage and brevas con queso flew out of my mind like exorcised demons. Where the flavor of delicious chicken should be In their place was a taste I can only describe as Florence Nightingale.
Michelle gagged. Greg followed. Larry said he didn't mind, but he didn't look too pleased. Obscenities were uttered.
"Now for the second cup," Cephas said.
Michelle begged off. I went for a second helping, only to breathe in half of it this time. A frothy, white, viscous stream ran down both sides of my chin and onto my chest. I looked like I had swallowed a sneaker, and the white shoe laces were dangling out of my mouth.
Clearly, we would not be having the chicken.
"We'll save that for next time, Cephas," I said.
End Of The Road
Back at The Hub, we sat at the bar in silence.
Clearly, something inside us had changed. And to think: we'd spent less than $100 for four of us to dent our culinary fender in one afternoon. Greg and Michelle reached for the therapy that only nicotine can provide. I attempted to remove the aloe taste with Pabst Blue Ribbon. Thankfully, it worked.
We sat for a little while before shaking hands and bidding adieu. We promised to do it again real soon.
A few weeks passed. Finally, I got the nerve to ask Michelle whether she would do it all over if she could.
"Yes," she e-mailed. "I like exploring places people would have commonly dismissed. Even Cephas' has become a fond memory."
Then she hit the nail on the head.
"I can have Greg make braised beef short ribs with truffle turnip mash and roasted bone marrow any day of the week," she wrote. "I can't get authentic chicharrones, carnitas or figs and cheese and hen soup."
Exactly.
Which is why, you know, we need to do it again. Real soon.
The Tampa Underbelly Tour shall ride again.
Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324 and jhouck@tampatrib.com.
TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online ©2009 Media General Communications Holdings, LLC. A Media General company. | Member Agreement | Privacy Statement | Work With Us
