OLIVIA

The Restaurant

OLIVIA opened in 2017 on West Swann Avenue in South Tampa, the second restaurant from chef-partner Chris Ponte (whose Cafe Ponte put Clearwater on the fine-dining map two decades ago). The dining room is a single deep space of about 130 covers — high ceilings, oak flooring, a chef's counter that runs along an open kitchen with a wood-fired hearth at its centre. The bar at the entrance holds eighteen seats and runs as a destination of its own.

The cooking is modern Italian with a clean handmade-pasta core. The fresh pasta programme — rolled and shaped in a glass-walled room visible from the dining room — produces ten to twelve preparations nightly: cacio e pepe with cracked black pepper from Sarawak, rigatoni with eight-hour Sunday gravy and pork shoulder, agnolotti dal plin in brown butter, a tagliolini al limone with Castelvetrano olives, a pappardelle with wild boar ragu that runs in the autumn months. Larger plates include a wood-roasted half chicken, a hanger steak with salsa verde, a whole branzino baked in salt crust, and a 16-ounce ribeye dry-aged in-house for forty-five days.

The wine programme is one of Tampa's most serious — over four hundred references with particular depth in Piedmont, Tuscany, and Friuli — and the sommelier team can produce a five-glass Italian tour by the glass that uses producers most American Italian rooms never reach for. The Michelin Guide added OLIVIA to its Florida recommended list in its first edition and has retained it on every subsequent cycle. For a serious Italian dinner in South Tampa, this is the address that the rest of the city's chefs send their visiting peers to.