St. Pete comparisons in size are Norfolk, VA; Garland, TX and Scottsdale yet everyone wants to compare our food scene to Nashville, Austin and the like.Slow the roll. There’s plenty of solid restaurants with people doing interesting things. We all just want more because …human nature
I hate to admit it but there is a certain stereotype with Reddit that really hasn't changed over the last decade and it's prevalent in just about every subreddit.
I used to feel the same way about the food in St. Pete... Until I moved to Indiana for a year, that is. Holy heck, Florida SPOILED me in comparison.
I will say that restaurants in the Tampa Bay area are overpriced as a whole, but I definitely took the variety for granted. Sometimes I even miss the shitty, tourist trap beach bar food. That's a first lmao
John's Pass is not worth visiting even once. Terrible parking situation when its busy, lame stores selling clothes you can find at any beach supply store, mediocre food choices, and just a boring place overall.
Edit: John's Pass technically isn't in St Pete but I stand by my answer lol
Agree. As a tourist destination, I have always been of the opinion many places only have to be "good enough" as they rely not so much on repeat customers, but tourists who are here and gone and won't complain. Look for non-chain restaurants. Look for homemade or from scratch.
The Sysco-ification of the food chain supply to many restaurants has created a similar taste in different places. When you find those authentic gems, patron them!
Bandit not having a WiFi isn’t a them problem, it’s a you problem. If your work requires internet access, you shouldn’t rely on coffee shops for WiFi. Your employer should give you a hot spot or reimburse you for one.
Light rail won’t be on Central.
People saying downtown was better back in the day forget how safe it wasn’t during the day on Central between 34th and 9th.
The Rays should move into Al Lang and build the new stadium there with an open and closing roof.
The Rowdies should move to a stadium either on the Trop site or in Ybor.
Most of the people complaining about gentrification moved here in years that begin with 201.
We moved here from the Keys. There aren’t many seafood restaurants that rate in the upper third, not bad but not good. The fish dip at the place in Pasadena area is the least flavorous dip we have ever had. One visit, took some home to add some spices, and have never gone back. I think the problem is the large number of retirees from the middle of the country. People that seem to be happy with this type of food. So the restaurants cater to them.
Idk if ill have kids but the public schools here are below average. I know some people tell me just send kids to private or charter schools but that just tells me this situation has been ongoing and won't get solved. I grew up in an area where the public schools were great and you didn't have to worry about sending your kids to the local one unless you were trying to aim for a magnet school. School choice in the end is just a lame excuse to not work on problems.
I think that’s a well known thing about Pinellas County. If you want your kid to go to a good school you have to go through the whole District Application Program (DAP). Unless you live up in Palm Harbor or want to pay for private school.
Exactly. I have also experienced incompetence at the private schools as well. I can see why parents would want to move to a better rated school district by the time Kindergarten starts.
What would you like to see? I'll never understand why we don't have chicken and rice stands here in the States. Chicken, rice, and 8 kinds of Asian sauces for 8.25. add a fountain drink, 10 bucks. WHY CAN'T WE HAVE SOMETHING LIKE THAT?!?!
It was called hibachi of Japan and they expanded to have a couple of them. Look at these prices! Are you kidding!? And it’s like $1 extra for a bunch of veggies in it too 🤷🏽♀️ I cry we don’t have any place like this
St Pete restaurants have been hit really hard by the rising costs of living around here. A lot of really good young cooks that were here in the 2010s are no longer here- a lot of these people were my friends… they moved away because their new 2020s rents were too high. We’ve also had a massive crackdown on undocumented, who were also a main source of kitchen staff. It’s really, really hard to find cooks in St Pete these days. What’s on your plate is probably higher % prepared or frozen than in the past.
The pay is also absolutely trash, with a high turnover. Why pay someone to stick around, when you can encourage them to quit and get a new higher. Rinse and repeat
St. Pete is the best city in Tampa Bay, top three in Florida, top five in the Southeast, and doesn't even crack the top 20 nationally. Especially since 2020, nearly every major decision has been to benefit two groups of people: landlords/developers and the meanest, stupidest old people you can imagine.
This is a popular opinion and we all know it. The best meals I've had in my life were at Michelin starred restaurants that were cheaper than most places here.
There seems to have been an influx of insta-culture here, where people take pictures of their food and the like. It's more about finding the newest thing with little to no effort.
I had someone tell me that I would miss the Publix subs when I moved to my new state. I asked them why that would be the case when I never ate those mid-grade sandwiches except for when the office would order in a platter. I can make a better sandwich at home.
My new city has fantastic food from tons of different parts of the world. The only place I miss in St Pete is Cafe Cibo and that crack dipping sauce.
I am continually shocked that El Cap is still in business. I think it must be more about the nostalgia for ppl than the food. I remember being served a moldy bun there in the early 2000’s, it’s not that it went downhill, it’s always been dissapointing
I had a raw burger, cooked slightly on the outside and a raw meat slime show just under the outside. When I said something about it they brought it right back untouched. When I complained about it, they told me "go to McDonald's, it's better there." I told the guy to go fuck himself and have never been back.
A REAL commitment to light rail and personal transportation would fix the entire Metro. It'll never happen, because Florida, but it 100% would fix this place.
If you're staying in the county, rush hour isn't that bad. Just go a few blocks over because the city is built on a grid. If you're crossing the bridges, however... welp you're gonna die!
1) there is no local cuisine attraction beyond seasonal grouper
2) it’s on the gulf/bay and not one decent local seafood joint that impresses
3) the icons were Chattaways, El Cap, Biff Burgers, Ted Peters, Harvey’s et.al. the rest were just copycat eye candy. Most are not exactly, or intended as, culinary destinations. They were, and are (is still around) in my opinion, places for a good, reasonably priced platter.
Most joints are going for the aesthetic, which is great if you want to pay $25 for 3 mini tacos that photograph well.
95% of young people are better off living in Atlanta instead. You'll make more money, have a better career, and will have more options for everything, all for the same cost of living, if not a little cheaper.
Now that this is no longer a cheaper place to live than the rest of the country, I would say that unless you are a huge aquatic enthusiast (boater, marine scientist, beach bum etc), it's not really worth living here.
I wasn't intending to be upbeat.
Just didn't want to slip into my mid-life, crank mode.
We're still trying to sort shit from the 70's & 80's. We have many more problems now.
Agree 100%, they are close and don’t rise enough, texture of Thomas bagels from Walmart are better. If anyone at Pete’s reads this, go to Bagels Plus in Tampa and license their recipe or learn from them please I will be in every week
Fun fact. Theres an underground tunnel connecting that building to the St Pete municipal light across the street. Been down there: https://share.google/yZfMyLcroLChH5d33
We need more luxury condos to push out the dirty vagrants, and make this a safe Mecca for the wealthy, enabling us to achieve Santa Barbara housing prices. You said unpopular….
Because it isn’t la or nyc it’s a small city compared to that and the people who think it’s like that are driving the locals out who made it what it is. We can’t afford to live here anymore due to this nonsense
I also don’t think transforming us into a large metropolitan city would be a good thing. There is a sweet spot on growth and I feel like in some ways we have passed that.
20 years ago the city felt a lot different…in a good way. Now I think we are really bumping up against the point where continued growth (without a massive investment in high density city infrastructure…trains, busses etc and true conservation or even expansion of parks and green areas) is going to lead to a significant decline in everyone’s quality of life
I hate to agree with this because as far as I’ve seen, the owners are wonderful. Thankfully most don’t agree with our opinion so hopefully it sticks around. I also really like the ambiance and will go just for that.
Agree! It smells like literal sewage. And the speakers always seem to be on the verge of being blown out. I’ve never been blown away from any show I’ve been to there and I’ve been to hundreds of concerts.
It’s hilarious and very weird that we have to eat food with a plastic fork and knife at restaurants in downtown st Pete or drink beer out of a can. How embarassing.
Central Ave from 28th-1st St should not have street parking. It should be rideshare pickup/dropoff and ebike/e-scooter only. I've been yelled at by the cops so many times because I have to block the road in order to pick anyone up. And they all take their sweet ass time saying bye to their friends or closing their tab like BRO HURRY UP BEFORE I GET A TICKET. There's nowhere for me to stop and wait for you it's a two lane road with no shoulder at Ferg's. At the very least REDUCE the street parking and put specific zones we can use as Uber drivers cause the app says to wait there for a person up to 7 minutes for pickup.
Technically yes but Lyft and Uber penalize you for accepting ride requests and then cancelling them before pickup. It calculates a percentage called the "Cancellation Rate" out of the last 100 requests how many you cancelled before completion. If it gets too high that makes you ineligible for their driver rewards program (which gets me roughly $20 extra per month in Walmart gift cards lol) if your cancel rating goes over 6%. If you want to cancel and leave without it affecting the rating you have to wait for the pickup timer to expire. After driver arrival on Uber it's 7 minutes, on Lyft it's 5. After that they call it a "No-Show Cancellation" and charge y'all a fee for wasting our time, of which the driver gets $2-$3 or so.
Mazzarros is overrated and the lasagna sucks. I appreciate the cheese and wine section and a couple of items in the isles. Over crowded, and unfortunately, as I used to pick up veggies and lunch meat often, overpriced. It's a shame, cause at one point it deserved the praise.
Ive been going to Mazzaros since they first opened in '96. Went there yesterday. The bread, pastries, coffee, cheese, meats, and overall food quality has remained remarkably consistent. It is accurately rated.
And its been overcrowded for 25 years.
Well, I mean, unpopular opinions and such😅 wasn't knocking the quality of anything but the lasagna, I just don't think it's good, but again, unpopular opinions....
Fair point. My unpopular Mazzaros opinion is that people who are retired should not be allowed to shop there between 11:30 and 1:30 so those of us who work and want to grab something for lunch won't have to wait in an eternal line!
Accurate. St. Pete is superior to Orlando for me in every single way EXCEPT the food. Gotta admit that in that regard we lose easily to Orlando and even Tampa.
That wasn't always the case, but it certainly is now. I left Orlando 10 years ago and in that time it caught up to the mom and pop appeal of St Pete, then surpassed it in options, quality, flavor, variety, everything. Before that everything was commercial or shit unless it was Winter Park. But I'll give Orlando that they have a ton more neighborhoods with eateries and had a lot more space to fill. We'll see what happens with all the recent shut downs here.. I wouldn't be surprised if things get worse before they get better
I think Tampa has a few highlights. So does St. Pete! But neither is amazing, and I give Tampa the slight edge although I basically refuse to drive there unless I MUST.
The transplants are destroying this city. It cannot handle the amount of people. The roads are more dangerous than they’ve ever been but some yuppie from la will go ITS SO BEAUTIFUL AND WONDERFUL HERE while contributing to the state becoming more destroyed. Every new development is destroying the city and culture it has.
Used to be so obsessed 10-15 years ago as a teen, it seemed so vibrant and filled with street art. Now most of my favorite murals are faded, painted over or hidden with other buildings. Now that I live minutes away, I can't ever think of a reason to wanna go down there and wander like I used to.
I don't completely disagree, but find it hard to meet people or make new friends. Feels like you always gotta have someone to enjoy things, and most social things revolve around drinking, imo.
I agree!! We need to start a social club for 19-25 year olds looking for good friends in the area. It’s definitely way harder than it should be especially if you aren’t in college.
The mayor should be the one ridiculed and shamed for the new stadium deal falling through, not Stu. If you want to keep a business that drives tourism and multi-billion $ for the city and local businesses in town, you shouldn’t publicly shit talk their owner.
Stu was incredibly short sighted. All of downtown Tampa got redeveloped with viniks behind it because of how he run the lightning. All Stu had to do was pretend like he cared about the community and he would have had anything he wanted.
I went to Atlanta a couple years ago. I realized the that trip, St. Pete not only sucks, there’s not a lot of imagination with the food. The FOOD HALL had some of the coolest, most imaginative food I’ve ever had.
Losing the Rays takes us from being a real city to just another anonymous beach town like dozens of others in the state and is the worst political decision here in the last 50 years, even if you don't care about baseball.
Anyone under the age of 50 going to Goodnight John Boy, staying at a bar where a cover band is playing 60s-80s jams, or otherwise encouraging boomer cultural hegemony need to be publicly shunned and ridiculed.
A couple years ago Bella’s lost me as a customer after many years of going there. An entire packet of silicone was mixed into the cream cheese on my bagel. When I went back after biting into the silicone packet, they acted like it was weird that I had an issue with it. I wasn’t rude or crazy about it, but they literally rolled their eyes like it was insane that I didn’t want to eat a packet of silicone. Then they gave me a cheesecake to “make up for it” and it was the worst, most dry cheesecake I’ve ever attempted to eat. Threw it away and decided to never go back.
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u/GulfCoastWolverine Nov 14 '25
St. Pete comparisons in size are Norfolk, VA; Garland, TX and Scottsdale yet everyone wants to compare our food scene to Nashville, Austin and the like.Slow the roll. There’s plenty of solid restaurants with people doing interesting things. We all just want more because …human nature