Mise en Place

The Restaurant

Mise en Place reopened in late 2025 inside a renovated ground-floor space at 1229 East 8th Avenue on Ybor City's Casa Gomez block, the historic cigar-factory district two miles east of downtown Tampa, after closing its long-running 442 West Kennedy Boulevard location across from the University of Tampa with a final Halloween service in October 2025. The restaurant - opened originally in 1986 by chef-owner Marty Blitz and partner-owner Maryann Ferenc on Kennedy Boulevard, then run continuously at that address for nearly four decades - is widely treated as the senior pioneer of contemporary fine dining in Tampa Bay and is regularly credited with introducing the city to seasonal, ingredient-driven modern American cooking long before the rest of the regional dining scene caught up. The new Ybor City room is roughly a third the size of the prior location - the new kitchen, Blitz has told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, is dramatically more efficient than the old one - and seats approximately seventy across an intimate single dining room with restored brick walls from the original Casa Gomez cigar factory, polished oak floors, a small central marble bar, and a half-open pass kitchen that gives the room visual access to the line.

The kitchen project is the Mise en Place canon refined into the new space: a market-driven modern American menu with classical French technique as its structural backbone. The menu changes weekly with the Florida Gulf Coast growing seasons and the daily catch from Tampa Bay and Apalachicola, and the kitchen's wood-fired and induction-driven cooking has been the regional standard against which every other Tampa fine-dining room has measured itself for thirty-nine years. Signature plates have included a duck breast with cherry-gastrique and root vegetable purée, a Gulf grouper with citrus beurre blanc, a hand-cut tagliatelle with house-made bolognese in the cooler months, a Florida pompano with caper-and-brown-butter, the dry-aged ribeye with bone marrow and red wine reduction, and a foie gras preparation that has been on the menu since the 1990s. The pastry programme - a Mise en Place signature for decades under pastry chef Maria Diaz Pinilla - supplies a small but ambitious seasonal-dessert progression that has won the kitchen multiple Florida Trend best-dessert awards.

The wine programme - long among the most considered in Florida outside of Miami - has been rebuilt for the new room around a tightly edited two-hundred-and-fifty reference list with deliberate depth in California (Sonoma and Napa pinot noir and cabernet verticals), a serious Burgundy and Rhone section, a careful Champagne progression, and the kind of small-production Italian and Spanish bottles that Maryann Ferenc has personally selected across forty visits to European producers. The room's reopening - covered nationally in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, Tampa Bay Times and Edible Tampa Bay - confirmed Mise en Place's transition into a smaller, more deliberate operation without diminishing the kitchen's status. For a Tampa dinner that needs to register as nationally serious and Tampa-historically consequential simultaneously, the Ybor City Mise en Place is now the city's first call.