Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well, good afternoon, we're here with Michael Stewart,
Michael, thank you very much for being with us.
Michael is the owner of 717 South, which is a very heralded spot here in Tampa.
This place really has an excellent reputation.
The food, the atmosphere, your location is impeccable.
So tell us a little something, Michael, about how you started this place,
and how you just pulled it all together the way you did.
I think you just got everything, actually. I mean, everything you said is correct.
You know, we started, uh, nine years ago, and it came from a need for dining segment
that we thought were popular at the time; which was more of an Asian/Pacific Rim,
and then I took it Italian style.
Through the years, our menu just kept evolving, my executive chefs here,
his background's his grandparents are Korean, and the other side's Italian,
so it kind of worked perfect.
But we kind of changed, we kept changing our menu to more steaks and seafood.
That's done very well for us.
Interesting. Interesting. How about the location?
How did you get this prime real estate that you're in?
I've been lucky, I guess. You know, we gave bids against a lot of people,
and they ended up liking our restaurant group at the time,
at the time we had a couple restaurants, and we did like South Tampa,
I don't know, but first I walked down the street,
and this was a location that my mom and dad used to come to.
Actually, the old building was called The Chatterbox.
I think everybody in Tampa went to The Chatterbox, me included.
So, it has a lot of history to it. And the fact that The Chatterbox was here
when my generation was in high school, me coming up,
and that kind of had a little bit to do with it, as well.
Who designed this place? Because, clearly, you put a lot of thought into
making just the way the shape of the room, and the colors that you use.
You obviously have some great talent in terms of aesthetics.
We did. We originally designed someone to help, but to be honest with you,
a lot of this design is the need, the functionality of the restaurant.
We have some dividers up that you'll see around here, and that wasn't
something that we thought of as a design, but we consulted people in the restaurant,
at the bar, they kind of needed to contain itself, rather than kind of go
in the dining room, so, we'd have a lot of people in the bar, entertaining,
so we kind of needed to have a sound barrier, so we did the same kind of throughout
the restaurant, and interestingly enough, booked almost every night,
really wasn't designed in the beginning.
Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is coming to town, heard about this bar,
it was the night before Superbowl, he'd made reservations about three weeks before.
I took the call, I'm like "yes, Allison, how many people in the party?
Of course we're booked, but we're going to do whatever it takes
to get Jerry Jones in the restaurant."
And I thought, at the time, building a private room would be really needed.
Then we started designing it, and building it, and building it, and we had it all done,
two days before. They called to confirm their reservation, and, ah, they asked me,
"Are you going to take care of Jerry?"
And I said, "Absolutely. he's in a private room, in the back".
You know what they said? "Oh no. He wants to sit in the front.
Around everybody else." But it's kind of a funny story, and because it adds,
best thing that ever happened to me. 'Cause, we have that private room for
pharmaceutical parties almost every night.
Business meetings, birthdays, graduations.
So we used that rec room like pretty much every day after that.
Very interesting. Yeah.
Well, Michael, thank you very much.
Absolutely.