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Simply Huggles
- Thread starter MerHearted
- Start date
figmentmom
Well-Known Member
ogryn said:
Heh heh...portrait of your average upstate-New Yorker after one too many months of winter...:hammer: :lol:
(Og!! :wave: )
speck76
Well-Known Member
For Mad...as I know you love this place as much as I do
for the non-Floridians, there is a location in Celebration that is good, but if you ever are in Tampa, head to Ybor City and eat here.
Dishing it out for a century
Starting in 1905 (or was it 1903?), Tampa's Columbia restaurant, Florida's oldest, has been run by the same family. for a century (or more)
Scott Joseph | Sentinel Restaurant Critic
Posted November 13, 2005
It all comes down to timing.
Kitty Hawk and the Columbia restaurant -- pioneers come in all styles.
A century ago, the United States was entering a new era. Theodore Roosevelt was the president; Henry Ford was organizing the Ford Motor Co.; and Wilbur and Orville Wright were sending us skyward.
Ragtime music was becoming the rage, but a popular song of the day was "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean," a patriotic tune that refers to "the home of the brave and the free" and offers "three cheers for the red, white and blue."
The song was a favorite of Casimiro Hernandez Sr. and made him feel proud of his adopted country. So when he opened a small cafe on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 21st Street in Tampa's Ybor City, he named it Columbia, Gem of Spanish Cafes.
For ages, the Columbia's logo has sported a banner proclaiming "since 1905," and the "1905 salad" has been a staple of the menu for decades. And in April the Florida House and Senate passed joint resolutions congratulating the Gonzmart family, whose members have owned and operated the business since the beginning, on the occasion of their 100th anniversary. But it seems that isn't exactly true.
"We may have to change the name of our salad," says Richard Gonzmart, one of the fourth generation of owners.
When a newspaper challenged Gonzmart to verify the date's authenticity, he asked a family friend, a historian at a state university, to research the origins. The investigation revealed a reference to the Columbia restaurant in the Tampa Tribune dated Dec. 17, 1903, the same day the Wright brothers were making history at Kitty Hawk.
But what's a couple of years? So without knowing the exact inaugural day, Columbia will have a party to commemorate the occasion on Dec. 8.
But there is no disputing that Columbia is Florida's oldest restaurant -- Joe's Stone Crabs in Miami Beach opened in 1913 -- and although it is not the oldest restaurant in the United States, a claim that is made by Boston's Union Oyster House, established in 1826, it is among the oldest restaurants with the same familial thread as owners.
At home in Ybor City
For Columbia it was Casimiro Hernandez Sr. who started the operation in, well, when the 20th century was new. Hernandez was a Cuban immigrant who settled in Ybor City, an enclave of immigrants established in 1886 as a center for cigar making.
Four generations later, Hernandez's great-grandsons Richard and Casey Gonzmart serve as the company's president and chairman respectively, overseeing an operation that has grown from a small corner cafe with 40 to 45 seats into a sprawling complex of 16 dining and banquet rooms that can serve about 1,600.
The Ybor City restaurant is so large, says Casey Gonzmart, "You can actually order a drink on 21st Street and have the waiter go to 22nd Street to pick it up." It boasted the first air-conditioned dining room in Tampa when the Don Quixote room -- complete with an elevated floor for dancing -- was added in 1935. Two years later the Patio room, which is actually indoors under a retractable skylight, joined the complex. With a wraparound balcony and a centerpiece fountain, it was designed to resemble the courtyards of fine Andalusian homes.
Nearly 20 years later, a 300-seat showroom, the Siboney Room, was added.
With each addition and renovation, care was taken to use authentic Spanish touches. There is extensive use of tile, including painted tiles that create murals, the type that are common in Madrid. And although each of the rooms that come together in a warren of connected chambers has its own distinct decor, all have the same theme: Spain.
The addition of the Siboney showroom was the undertaking of Richard and Casey's father, Cesar Gonzmart, a classical musician who wanted a place to showcase the day's top Latin talent.
Gonzmart was married to Adela Hernandez, only child of second-generation owner Casimiro Hernandez Jr. Cesar was a concert violinist and Adela a pianist. Because he found his birth name, Gonzalez-Martinez, too unwieldy for concert-hall marquees, Cesar combined the two names into Gonzmart.
"It used to be a ritual to go there when they had a band and Cesar was playing the violin," says Leno Rodriguez, who has been a regular at the Columbia for well over 60 years. "It was a ritual every Saturday night for 20 to 30 years."
Before their touring days were over, Cesar and Adela were performing in Orlando and while there, the couple's second son, Richard, was conceived.
Actually, his full name is Ricardo Orlando Hernandez Gonzalez-Gonzmart, the Orlando commemorating the city of conception.
"I'm grateful they weren't touring in Lake Okeechobee," says Gonzmart, 52, from his office in Ybor City. When he isn't at work in Tampa, Gonzmart is usually off running somewhere -- literally. He ran five marathons and two half-marathons during the past year to raise money and awareness for cancer research. He sponsors the annual Richard's Run for Life road race in Tampa, which took place this month.
A time of change
He and his brother, Casey, 57 -- Cesar Casimiro Gonzalez on the birth certificate because his father had not yet changed his name -- began working in the restaurant when they were very young. Richard says he started when he was 12.
"I did all kinds of stuff," he says. "I used to go around and clean up and empty the garbage in the bars."
That was in the 1960s when Ybor City was going through some tough times. The cigar industry collapsed in the '50s and '60s, says Richard, and many of the ancillary businesses and residents moved away.
"It was quite shocking," says Casey. He guesses that more than 90 percent of the businesses in Ybor moved out or had to reinvent themselves. The Columbia survived and found that even those who moved out of the area returned to dine there and have their celebrations.
Personal traditions
Bob Clark is a regular of the restaurant to the extreme. He has been a patron for more than 50 years and has had a standing reservation for lunch every Friday for the last five. Clark, who owns Tampa Steel Erecting Co., usually hosts business and municipal meetings with 13 or more participants.
"The mayor comes once a quarter, the president of the University of South Florida comes once a quarter, the president of Tampa University comes a couple of times a year," says Clark. And, he says, "Sometimes I go there for dinner."
Rodriguez is part of a social organization called the Crew of Santiago, which was started by Cesar Gonzmart and has been meeting at the restaurant every Tuesday for 34 years. He says the group has between 75 and 100 diners each week.
Indeed some of the customers have been dining at Columbia longer than the current generation has been working there.
Richard, who says he is more hands-on than his brother, joined the restaurant full time in '74.
"Richard enjoys multitasking" says Casey. "What I've always enjoyed in the past is working with our staff."
Like his grandfather, Casimiro Jr., Richard Gonzmart says he enjoys cooking -- he started when he was 6 or 7, he says -- and likes to create new dishes for the menu occasionally.
If that brings up a question of authenticity in a restaurant that bills itself as Spanish, Gonzmart explains that really isn't an issue.
"A lot of the dishes at the Columbia were created at the Columbia and you won't find [them] in Spain." Then again, he says, "The way we do gazpacho is more authentic than they do it in Spain," with the chopped vegetables added to the chilled tomato broth at the table. Other items, such as boliche and ropa vieja are more commonly found on Cuban menus.
Women join in
All along the way, the Gonzmarts' mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were not involved in the business. "Never have your wife work in the business with you," Richard Gonzmart says his grandfather told him, "because it will create problems." Richard's wife, Melanie, does not get involved in the actual operation but assists with decorating the restaurants, especially with overseeing the framing and placement of the numerous articles and reviews done on the restaurant through the years.
But the Columbia is finally getting some input from the Gonzmart women. Richard's daughters, Andrea, 26, and Lauren, 28, are now working with their father. Lauren, who handles the shops at the Columbia restaurants, sees the day when a woman will head the company.
"It's almost bound to happen," she says. "Luckily a lot of the Latin machismo has died down."
So far, none of Casey's six children has joined the business.
And business is the key word. Richard Gonzmart says the family has hired an outside mediator whose specialty is working with family businesses and helping them keep work separated from home.
"Probably 10 years ago we had to change the culture of our business," says Richard Gonzmart. "We couldn't operate our business as a family business anymore." Decisions have to be made for the bottom line without concern for emotional issues.
Recently the family redeveloped old dining rooms and added new ones, taking over the original kitchen space. A 5,000-square-foot state-of-the-art kitchen was added in 2001.
And across the street is a museum, opened last year as part of the observance, that displays photos and artifacts from the restaurant and its owners. Cesar's violin is there.
Columbia employs about 1,000 people, says Richard Gonzmart, 200 in Ybor City and the rest at the locations in St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Clearwater Beach, Celebration, West Palm Beach and Sarasota.
The Sarasota Columbia was the second, opened in 1959 on St. Armands Circle, and today claims to be that city's oldest restaurant.
Lauren says there was never any pressure to join the restaurant, and during her first year at Florida State University she considered a number of career paths that did not include dishes, cooking and the long hours of a restaurateur. But, "it kind of just always brought me back to the Columbia," she says.
Other Columbia restaurants opened through the years and some of them closed, including a short-lived one in Daytona Beach that never seemed to capture the aura of the Ybor City original. "Our successes have far outdistanced our failures," says Casey. And there will certainly be other tries.
Family members will have plenty of time to decide what year they will celebrate the next milestone. In the meantime, whenever Richard overhears a diner request the 1905 salad but without the tomatoes, he leans in and says, "Oh, you want the 1903 salad."
Brothers Casey (left) and Richard Gonzmart are the 4th generation of the family to run the Ybor City restaurant. Richard's daughters, Andrea and Lauren (right), are the family's first women to be involved in the business, which includes 7 restaurants. Lauren expects a woman will one day run things. 'Luckily a lot of the Latin machismo has died down.'
Scott Joseph can be reached at sjoseph@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5514.
for the non-Floridians, there is a location in Celebration that is good, but if you ever are in Tampa, head to Ybor City and eat here.
Dishing it out for a century
Starting in 1905 (or was it 1903?), Tampa's Columbia restaurant, Florida's oldest, has been run by the same family. for a century (or more)
Scott Joseph | Sentinel Restaurant Critic
Posted November 13, 2005
It all comes down to timing.
Kitty Hawk and the Columbia restaurant -- pioneers come in all styles.
A century ago, the United States was entering a new era. Theodore Roosevelt was the president; Henry Ford was organizing the Ford Motor Co.; and Wilbur and Orville Wright were sending us skyward.
Ragtime music was becoming the rage, but a popular song of the day was "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean," a patriotic tune that refers to "the home of the brave and the free" and offers "three cheers for the red, white and blue."
The song was a favorite of Casimiro Hernandez Sr. and made him feel proud of his adopted country. So when he opened a small cafe on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 21st Street in Tampa's Ybor City, he named it Columbia, Gem of Spanish Cafes.
For ages, the Columbia's logo has sported a banner proclaiming "since 1905," and the "1905 salad" has been a staple of the menu for decades. And in April the Florida House and Senate passed joint resolutions congratulating the Gonzmart family, whose members have owned and operated the business since the beginning, on the occasion of their 100th anniversary. But it seems that isn't exactly true.
"We may have to change the name of our salad," says Richard Gonzmart, one of the fourth generation of owners.
When a newspaper challenged Gonzmart to verify the date's authenticity, he asked a family friend, a historian at a state university, to research the origins. The investigation revealed a reference to the Columbia restaurant in the Tampa Tribune dated Dec. 17, 1903, the same day the Wright brothers were making history at Kitty Hawk.
But what's a couple of years? So without knowing the exact inaugural day, Columbia will have a party to commemorate the occasion on Dec. 8.
But there is no disputing that Columbia is Florida's oldest restaurant -- Joe's Stone Crabs in Miami Beach opened in 1913 -- and although it is not the oldest restaurant in the United States, a claim that is made by Boston's Union Oyster House, established in 1826, it is among the oldest restaurants with the same familial thread as owners.
At home in Ybor City
For Columbia it was Casimiro Hernandez Sr. who started the operation in, well, when the 20th century was new. Hernandez was a Cuban immigrant who settled in Ybor City, an enclave of immigrants established in 1886 as a center for cigar making.
Four generations later, Hernandez's great-grandsons Richard and Casey Gonzmart serve as the company's president and chairman respectively, overseeing an operation that has grown from a small corner cafe with 40 to 45 seats into a sprawling complex of 16 dining and banquet rooms that can serve about 1,600.
The Ybor City restaurant is so large, says Casey Gonzmart, "You can actually order a drink on 21st Street and have the waiter go to 22nd Street to pick it up." It boasted the first air-conditioned dining room in Tampa when the Don Quixote room -- complete with an elevated floor for dancing -- was added in 1935. Two years later the Patio room, which is actually indoors under a retractable skylight, joined the complex. With a wraparound balcony and a centerpiece fountain, it was designed to resemble the courtyards of fine Andalusian homes.
Nearly 20 years later, a 300-seat showroom, the Siboney Room, was added.
With each addition and renovation, care was taken to use authentic Spanish touches. There is extensive use of tile, including painted tiles that create murals, the type that are common in Madrid. And although each of the rooms that come together in a warren of connected chambers has its own distinct decor, all have the same theme: Spain.
The addition of the Siboney showroom was the undertaking of Richard and Casey's father, Cesar Gonzmart, a classical musician who wanted a place to showcase the day's top Latin talent.
Gonzmart was married to Adela Hernandez, only child of second-generation owner Casimiro Hernandez Jr. Cesar was a concert violinist and Adela a pianist. Because he found his birth name, Gonzalez-Martinez, too unwieldy for concert-hall marquees, Cesar combined the two names into Gonzmart.
"It used to be a ritual to go there when they had a band and Cesar was playing the violin," says Leno Rodriguez, who has been a regular at the Columbia for well over 60 years. "It was a ritual every Saturday night for 20 to 30 years."
Before their touring days were over, Cesar and Adela were performing in Orlando and while there, the couple's second son, Richard, was conceived.
Actually, his full name is Ricardo Orlando Hernandez Gonzalez-Gonzmart, the Orlando commemorating the city of conception.
"I'm grateful they weren't touring in Lake Okeechobee," says Gonzmart, 52, from his office in Ybor City. When he isn't at work in Tampa, Gonzmart is usually off running somewhere -- literally. He ran five marathons and two half-marathons during the past year to raise money and awareness for cancer research. He sponsors the annual Richard's Run for Life road race in Tampa, which took place this month.
A time of change
He and his brother, Casey, 57 -- Cesar Casimiro Gonzalez on the birth certificate because his father had not yet changed his name -- began working in the restaurant when they were very young. Richard says he started when he was 12.
"I did all kinds of stuff," he says. "I used to go around and clean up and empty the garbage in the bars."
That was in the 1960s when Ybor City was going through some tough times. The cigar industry collapsed in the '50s and '60s, says Richard, and many of the ancillary businesses and residents moved away.
"It was quite shocking," says Casey. He guesses that more than 90 percent of the businesses in Ybor moved out or had to reinvent themselves. The Columbia survived and found that even those who moved out of the area returned to dine there and have their celebrations.
Personal traditions
Bob Clark is a regular of the restaurant to the extreme. He has been a patron for more than 50 years and has had a standing reservation for lunch every Friday for the last five. Clark, who owns Tampa Steel Erecting Co., usually hosts business and municipal meetings with 13 or more participants.
"The mayor comes once a quarter, the president of the University of South Florida comes once a quarter, the president of Tampa University comes a couple of times a year," says Clark. And, he says, "Sometimes I go there for dinner."
Rodriguez is part of a social organization called the Crew of Santiago, which was started by Cesar Gonzmart and has been meeting at the restaurant every Tuesday for 34 years. He says the group has between 75 and 100 diners each week.
Indeed some of the customers have been dining at Columbia longer than the current generation has been working there.
Richard, who says he is more hands-on than his brother, joined the restaurant full time in '74.
"Richard enjoys multitasking" says Casey. "What I've always enjoyed in the past is working with our staff."
Like his grandfather, Casimiro Jr., Richard Gonzmart says he enjoys cooking -- he started when he was 6 or 7, he says -- and likes to create new dishes for the menu occasionally.
If that brings up a question of authenticity in a restaurant that bills itself as Spanish, Gonzmart explains that really isn't an issue.
"A lot of the dishes at the Columbia were created at the Columbia and you won't find [them] in Spain." Then again, he says, "The way we do gazpacho is more authentic than they do it in Spain," with the chopped vegetables added to the chilled tomato broth at the table. Other items, such as boliche and ropa vieja are more commonly found on Cuban menus.
Women join in
All along the way, the Gonzmarts' mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were not involved in the business. "Never have your wife work in the business with you," Richard Gonzmart says his grandfather told him, "because it will create problems." Richard's wife, Melanie, does not get involved in the actual operation but assists with decorating the restaurants, especially with overseeing the framing and placement of the numerous articles and reviews done on the restaurant through the years.
But the Columbia is finally getting some input from the Gonzmart women. Richard's daughters, Andrea, 26, and Lauren, 28, are now working with their father. Lauren, who handles the shops at the Columbia restaurants, sees the day when a woman will head the company.
"It's almost bound to happen," she says. "Luckily a lot of the Latin machismo has died down."
So far, none of Casey's six children has joined the business.
And business is the key word. Richard Gonzmart says the family has hired an outside mediator whose specialty is working with family businesses and helping them keep work separated from home.
"Probably 10 years ago we had to change the culture of our business," says Richard Gonzmart. "We couldn't operate our business as a family business anymore." Decisions have to be made for the bottom line without concern for emotional issues.
Recently the family redeveloped old dining rooms and added new ones, taking over the original kitchen space. A 5,000-square-foot state-of-the-art kitchen was added in 2001.
And across the street is a museum, opened last year as part of the observance, that displays photos and artifacts from the restaurant and its owners. Cesar's violin is there.
Columbia employs about 1,000 people, says Richard Gonzmart, 200 in Ybor City and the rest at the locations in St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Clearwater Beach, Celebration, West Palm Beach and Sarasota.
The Sarasota Columbia was the second, opened in 1959 on St. Armands Circle, and today claims to be that city's oldest restaurant.
Lauren says there was never any pressure to join the restaurant, and during her first year at Florida State University she considered a number of career paths that did not include dishes, cooking and the long hours of a restaurateur. But, "it kind of just always brought me back to the Columbia," she says.
Other Columbia restaurants opened through the years and some of them closed, including a short-lived one in Daytona Beach that never seemed to capture the aura of the Ybor City original. "Our successes have far outdistanced our failures," says Casey. And there will certainly be other tries.
Family members will have plenty of time to decide what year they will celebrate the next milestone. In the meantime, whenever Richard overhears a diner request the 1905 salad but without the tomatoes, he leans in and says, "Oh, you want the 1903 salad."
Brothers Casey (left) and Richard Gonzmart are the 4th generation of the family to run the Ybor City restaurant. Richard's daughters, Andrea and Lauren (right), are the family's first women to be involved in the business, which includes 7 restaurants. Lauren expects a woman will one day run things. 'Luckily a lot of the Latin machismo has died down.'
Scott Joseph can be reached at sjoseph@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5514.
Fantasmic!329
Active Member
School tomorrow 
*huggles*
*huggles*
Safari Giraffe
New Member
barnum42 said:Wow - much huggling gone on since Friday afternoon. Too much to catch up on - anyone care to fill me in if I missed anything?
*Huggles*
Hi Joe. How was your weekend? :wave:
Safari Giraffe
New Member
speck76 said:
Sounds like a great place.
Safari Giraffe
New Member
BTW.....Good evening HUGGLES to everyone.
tigsmom
Well-Known Member
darthdarrel
New Member
Now you have gone and made me hungry!tigsmom said:
Safari Giraffe
New Member
tigsmom said:
The menu made me hungry.:slurp:
WDWScottieBoy
Well-Known Member
Feeling really tired right now *huggles*