Ferrell Alvarez has already had coffee today, but he is not finished yet. The wiry, very tattooed, 39-year-old chef bounds around the corner of the abandoned drive-thru convenience store he has only just turned into Tampa’s coolest new hangout, cup of iced brew in hand, and he is ready to answer all of my questions, and he is ready to tell me everything I have not asked, and I am listening.
The chef and co-owner ofTampa’s best restaurant has a great deal on his mind right now, and why shouldn’t he—Alvarez not only has a lot going on, he also happens to be a leading light in a fascinating, much misunderstood, quickly evolving city that has a great deal to share with the world, if it can ever collectively agree on the right words with which to do so. Alvarez loves Tampa. Flat out loves it.I'm so glad you're here, man, because it's enough of Tampa being the redheaded stepchild of Florida,he tells me, launching into a whole list of reasons why now is the time to be here, and why this city is going places, and also, would I like something to drink?
就像坦帕（Tampa）的许多其他人一样，与佛罗里达州许多其他地方的人们不同，阿尔瓦雷斯（Alvarez）昨天不只是昨天乘坐轻轻的聚会浪潮，他是坦帕（Tampa）遍布哥伦比亚移民的父亲和长岛意大利母亲在巴尔的摩，然后从一岁起就在这里长大。在几年后绕道前往辛辛那提（Cincinnati）完成学业之后，他回到了城镇，感觉很长一段时间了，慢慢地在当地的烹饪等级中工作，终于开设了自己的餐厅，Rooster & the Till。He did this with partner Ty Rodriguez, a Tampa Cuban, of which there are many and have been seemingly forever, back in 2013, just around Christmas time.
这个新项目称为Nebraska Mini-Martbecause that's what the convenience store was called, so why not, is something new and different for Tampa, just as Rooster was when it opened, and just as it remains today; there are bocce courts and there is shuffleboard, there are hangout corners, and there is lots of lush greenery on a generously-sized, nearly acre and a half property that has been converted into a sort of Austin-goes-to-the-tropics adult play space. The whole thing comes complete with an elevated menu of provisions—"fun stoner food," Alvarez tells me—of snacks, including spicy Malaysian chilichicken wings, tempura-battered oyster mushrooms with blooming onion sauce, sherry slushies androsé in cans。All good fun, but Alvarez is thinking more broadly this morning—he is excited by the trend toward improved mental health and accountability in restaurant kitchens, about the need for balance in our lives, and also, he is very interested in talking more about how it is long past time for his city to have its moment.
Credit: Skyler June Photography
Alvarez could be the mayor of Tampa, he ought to at least be on speaking tours, preaching the gospel of Tampa, Florida, established as a lonely outpost where the Hillsborough River meets Tampa Bay, back in 1824, but today it is just the two of us, riding down Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in his late model Cadillac, hurrying to what will end up being the first of two lunches. He had just come from his morning ritual of performance camp workouts and eating something healthy for breakfast, something without carbs, no doubt, and here we are, me in Tampa and desirous of mass quantities of the traditional local breakfast, which is toasted and buttered Cuban bread, served with a mug of gut punch-strengthcafé con lecheyou could eat with a spoon. Alvarez, already having proven himself to be the consummate host, is eager for me to be out there, seeing and eating all of it.
开车沿着地带,在四条车道of impatient and distracted traffic, Alvarez is pointing out highlights along a stretch of urban boulevard that presents much like you would expect in this kind of neighborhood, in this kind of town. Everything is low-slung commercial, the kind that seems to not have been significantly updated in a generation or more, the latest Sunbelt boom passing it all by in favor of further-flung suburbs, and yet, there is greatness within, once we slow down and look for it. In one of these unremarkable buildings, next to abotanicaand what was until recently a barbershop, there isPiccola Italia Bistro, where the chef hails from Abruzzo, the exterior hand-painted rather flamboyantly in the colors of the Italian flag, the sort of thing you might clock but not necessarily stop to see. "That place, they're great," says Alvarez, admitting that he and "roughly thirty other people" are probably instrumental in keeping the restaurant open.
A few more blocks west and next to the Burger King, he points out thePupuseria Centro Americana, a snug space for Salvadoran specialties, and then, a few blocks south on Habana Avenue, we are pulling into the lot at the very oldArco-Iris Café, nearly filled with other generously sized cars, piloted by a clientele that appears to have been coming here for a very long time. We sit in a far corner of the low-ceilinged, brightly lit room, which vibes something like a church basement, and we order from the mostly unimpressed server. Swiss cheese on pressed Cuban bread, strongcafé con lecheand a massive, $3batida, served in Styrofoam, tasting vaguely of papaya, but mostly of milk. All simple, all delicious. The talking stops for a moment, just to take it all in, when a couple of a certain age enters the room. Alvarez jumps from his chair to greet them.
“Señor, Señora,他说,非常礼貌,仿佛打断道箍ngers to ask a favor, except that this turns out to be his partner's mother and father, Cynthia and Jose, here for their lunch. We chat briefly and warmly, mostly about the duo's latest project, and how things are going, as they are still technically in soft open. There is some minor concern about the weather from theSra., as it is still hot out there for everyone, but Alvarez assures her that fall is on the way. "And that's Tampa," he says, smiling, as they give their goodbyes, heading over to their table. "Where to, next?"
The Birth of Something Good
您很有可能不会来坦帕（Tampa）寻找像Rooster＆Till这样的餐厅。即使您敦促您去那里，知道发生了什么的人也很有可能，您也不会听他们的话，然后，几年后，当您终于做正确的事并给餐厅时当您穿过空间的大门时，您全神贯注于一个晚上，目前在坦帕（Tampa）历史悠久的塞米诺尔高地（Seminole Heights）附近的一个外观破产的脱衣舞购物中心中占据了两个店面，当您坐下来时，您就订购了脆脆的海湾，墨西哥湾的Cobia Cobia Collar Collar Collar，像一些奇怪的美人鱼游行一样崛起，从一个咸，时髦，令人耳目一新nuoc cham, there is a very good chance you will be pretty well astounded, and a little sad over how long it took you to get here. And to think, this is a dish that happened pretty much by accident.
Credit: Skyler June Photography
“I was down at my seafood purveyor, where they were butchering whole Cobia," Alvarez recalls, "And I saw them throwing the collars into these giant bins, and I asked, where are these going?"
To Miami, it turns out, was where they were going, the closest place with people that had any inclination to do something with them.Give some to me, he told his guy, and now the Cobia collar is one of the most talked about dishes on the Rooster menu. This is a clown car of a dish, the unwieldy tails giving up, over time, a surprising amount of delicious flesh. Talk about Rooster around town, and people will ask you,did you go yet, and did you like the Cobia collar。One local proudly told me that his daughter, not even in the first grade yet, is known to the Rooster kitchen crew as The Girl That Can Put Away Two Orders of The Cobia By Herself.
There is a kind of theme to the menu at Rooster & the Till, a gentle nudge toward something different, with a subtle nod toward sustainable, or at least more responsible eating. On my first visit to the restaurant, the night before I meet Alvarez for the first time, they were also servinglamb neck, along with dumplings made from masa and anelotesalad featuringhuitlacoche，像我这样的美国农场孩子长大后就叫玉米粉，还有一种更放纵的鸡肉油炸的石斑鱼和喉咙，上面搭配炖的collard蛋黄酱。我认为，将这些通常被忽视的各种动物的部分忽略而升高，这似乎是对您正在吃它们的城市的敬意。阿尔瓦雷斯（Alvarez）和他的团队可能不会有意识地做饭，以吸引人们注意坦帕（Tampa），但肯定感觉到这就是正在发生的事情。
For five years now, Rooster & the Till has been serving the city, five years during which Tampa and the region have seen tremendous growth. Five years during which American food has been moving forward at rapid speed, almost like a car on which the brake lines have been cut. The whole thing seemed almost experimental in the beginning; with just a little money and no major investors, Alvarez and Rodriguez managed to get a 37-seat restaurant up and running, without a lot of expensive (or even necessary) kitchen equipment.
From the start, their passion for regional and local ingredients shone through, though now, Alvarez refuses to make a big deal about the provenance of the food he serves, allowing it speak for itself. They were doing house-made charcuterie, which was a big deal here in 2013, there was sous vide duck breast, there were all sorts of other ambitious little quirks. Everything about the restaurant invited Tampa diners to look forward, starting with the fact that they were asking people to come all the way out to the then slowly-reviving Seminole Heights historic district, which spent much of the late 20th century being avoided by the sort of people who can afford to go out to a coursed-out dinner with generous amounts of good wine.
“I intentionally wanted to go to Seminole Heights—I knew people would come expecting no pretentiousness, something different," he recalls. "A big part of it, though, was me being naïve, and there is something great about being naïve—if you know all the risks before hand, it would scare you into submission, right?" "There’s something advantageous there, that helps you take that leap."
Credit: Courtesy of Rooster and the Till
Naïve or no, the work that Alvarez and Rodriguez were doing was too good to be ignored, and word got around, and the people whose job it is to declare such things found the whole affair to be rather spectacular, and after working out the kinks and expanding into the shuttered art supply store next door and making the restaurant, dominated by a massive, comfortable bar that is always left open for walk-ins, it is five years later, and here we are.
Last year, Alvarez finally got the attention he deserved, snaring a nomination for the James Beard Foundation's annual awards, in the Best Chef South category. For 2018, Rooster & the Till has been dubbed the #1 restaurant in the Tampa Bay region, as decided by the area's Pulitzer Prize-finalist dining critic, Laura Reiley.
After attending culinary school in Cincinnati, Alvarez came back to Tampa in the late 1990's, eventually landing a gig with local lion Marty Blitz, chef-owner ofMise en Place, for years and still one of Tampa's best-loved restaurants. It was there that Alvarez, then Chef de Cuisine, hired and then became friends withEdouardo Jordan, another area native. (Jordan would later decamp for Seattle, was aF&WBest New Chef in 2016, and took home two James Beard Awards this year.) It was also at Mise en Place that Alvarez met his business partner Ty Rodriguez, but it wouldn't be until years later, when forces conspired to push them into something new and exciting, as forces outside our control can sometimes do, that Rooster & the Till would happen.
“Originally, I thought we'd open a sandwich shop, and just be a really good sandwich shop, and we'd make our own charcuterie," Alvarez tells me. But the people surrounding him seemed to know that bigger, or at least more daring, would definitely be better, and with a small infusion of cash—nothing major, the whole project was pulled off for well under $100,000—they were able to go all out, or as all out as you can go in a 37-seat restaurant, and in 2013, Rooster & The Till happened, with three induction burners, one circulator, and one oven.
“It was hard to get people to come all the way up to our neighborhood," he admits. "As many people as there were that were enthusiastic, there were also plenty that couldn't understand why we didn't have a larger sign out front, they'd complain that they couldn't find us. People would come in and give us these backhanded compliments, like, the outside looks pretty bad, but it's so nice in here," he laughs.
“When we got thenod from the James Beard Foundation, that was so good for us," Alvarez says, downplaying his own role in the moment, as you very quickly learn is his style, or at least the way he prefers to speak. Time and again he refers to just how important his people are to him, and how much he has come to learn that his people are investments, and that the rising tide lifting all boats should not just be something we talk about, because it is the absolute best way to run a restaurant.
“When I speak to other chefs, I have to really check myself, because we're such a tight crew, we're not like family, we are family—there's so little turnover, I almost feel guilty," he confesses, although he clearly is not, and why should he be, embarrassed by this.
Credit: Courtesy of Rooster and the Till
Receiving the nomination was not only validation for him, but for the team as well, clearly. On the night of my initial visit, I felt as if I were some place brand new, rather than at a restaurant already five years old. On a Monday night, at around 9 o'clock, the restaurant was essentially full. Tampa, it seems, is sold on Rooster & the Till, and on the week I visited, there was a tremendous buzz around the new project, as well. But what about the rest of us?
Slowly, word is getting out—Alvarez's inspired notion to host two rather impressive guest chef series at his restaurant has raised his profile considerably, and certainly within his peer group. The latest series has all been female chefs—he recently hosted Brittanny Anderson from Richmond, the next dinner will be with Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins from San Diego, followed by凯蒂按钮from Asheville. Alvarez serves as a one-man welcome wagon for his guests, booking their travel, ferrying them to and from their hotels, always leaving time to tour them through Tampa, showing off the city he loves.
A Little Bit of Love and Belief
There is much to love about Tampa right now, from sumptuous, tree-lined blocks of carefully restored homes in bayfront Hyde Park, to the shiny newHeights Public Market在城市北端的河道北端；在里面，您可以吃鸡肉Adobo，烧烤或拉面。您还可以喝一些镇上最好的咖啡。然而，与城市建立持久联系的最快方法仍然是最古老的方法之一，它是通过其经典的烹饪传统。我们在迈阿密谈论的那些古巴餐馆？至少根据古巴人的说法，与他们的坦帕（Tampa）相比，与他们的坦帕（Tampa）同行相比，Brash Young Upstarts以及坦帕（Tampa）的其他所有人。Arco-iris是西班牙彩虹，是一个很好的开始，但是一段时间后，我建议我们继续前进La Teresita, another restaurant everyone has been asking me about—specifically,have you been there yet.I have not, and today we are correcting the error.
我们设法在三重马蹄形的柜台上抓住了两个座位，我们订购了Mojo烤猪肉和ropa vieja,无论是在特殊的那一天,不到十个娃娃ars each. The main course alone gets its own platter, with back-up dishes of rice and beans, your choice, and all of it is very good and very straightforward, and the place is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it is one of those places that you could imagine living a lot of your life, if you lived in Tampa. Deep discussions, late night fights, early morning business meetings, break-ups, make-ups, meet-cutes—this is Waffle House, except with killer yuca fries.
Not all that long ago, getting Alvarez out and about in the middle of the day like this, to sit around and chat about life over plates of roast pork and rice, might have been out of the question. But these days, as he has told me before, he's learning a lot about balance.
This passion for living better, for keeping your eye on what's important, remains a recurring theme throughout our conversation, which was cut short on the first day because it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon, and he had to pick his up 14-year-old daughter, Eva, from school, as he does most days. The following morning, when we pick up where we left off, he asks about how the rest of my day was, and did I enjoy the things that I did, and he talks about having stayed home the night before, to cook for Eva, and his wife Nicole.
This time, Alvarez has asked his friend Joel Davis to join us; Davis, a warm, open-book kind of guy with an intriguing background in the parallel universe that is Christian music, is proprietor of Union, the aforementioned very good café inside the Heights Public Market. Davis, says Alvarez, "makes me a better man." After a memorable morning of too much coffee and a lot of very good conversation, I ask if they would like to join me for lunch at Columbia.
Think of Tampa, historic or no, and for a lot of people, Columbia is the first restaurant that will perhaps come to mind. Open for over a century, an anchor of the on-again, off-again Ybor City historic district, Tampa has a very nice history museum, but I'm telling you, Columbia is even better. Once again, we are young for the room, and we are certainly not dressed correctly, and still we are ushered into the light-filled conservatory, humming with lunch life, where a tuxedoed server appears eager to see to our every need.
像退休人员培训,每个人都选择了thrifty lunch combo specials—the restaurant's signature Spanish bean soup, and/or Cuban sandwiches, which in Tampa I am told are served with salami, paying tribute to the Italian immigrants that were equally essential to the life of Ybor, back in the day. We're all having that other signature dish, the magnificent 1905 salad, prepared with great flourish, and starring iceberg lettuce, julienned baked ham and Swiss, pimiento-studded green olives and a number of other deliciously retro things, plus a very involved dressing that includes enough Worcestershire sauce to put both Lea & Perrins' offspring through medical school.
我们是从繁忙的房间里发现的，杰夫·霍克（Jeff Houck）是前者的前食品编辑亚搏电竞Tampa Tribune,他立即过来;阿尔瓦雷斯介绍Houck as "One of the first people who believed in me," from back in the early days when he was at Mise en Place; Houck now works for the closest thing Tampa has to royalty, the Gonzmart family, which owns Columbia and a slew of other restaurants, both in and out of Tampa. After lots more conversation about the city, about restaurants, and about who used to sit at which table, Alvarez would like to get serious for a moment.
“Over the last few years, mental health and wellness are coming to the forefront," Alvarez says to our table, just an arm's length from where Joe Di Maggio and Marilyn Monroe famously tiffed. Now finished eating, he recalls the time at Indie Chefs Week, when one of the participants politely declined a drink, something he found terribly impressive.我们不必是陈词滥调，他回忆起意识到这一刻。我们不必让自己疲惫不堪。Alvarez tells me he that and Rodriguez have worked hard to create a working environment that removes many of the stressors that so notoriously make kitchen life a difficult one.
“Everyone works five days a week, while the cooks work four, with enough overtime to get them up to a full week," he says. "We keep a consistent schedule—it's always the same. They know they can ask for time off, as long as they're respectful with how much they ask for. In the old days, if you asked, you'd be shamed."
学分：由访问坦帕湾提供
Empowerment is a big deal with him. Empowerment, he says, coupled with accountability, is everything, going on to admit that while sometimes he might be "too nice," he is also "beyond picky and OCD," but on balance, "tough but fair." Whatever combination he's got going, it's working, as he alluded to earlier, telling me proudly about his low turnover rate. His Chef de Cuisine, Brian Lampe, has been with him for 13 years now, he tells me, and Lampe is not the only team member that's been around for a long time, either. Not that everybody's perfect, of course.
“One of my young cooks got arrested in Orlando for an expired tag, he was driving a car full of girls and smoking weed," Alvarez tells us, trying his best not to give into the massive dessert now sitting on the table, a white chocolate bread pudding made with giant hunks of Cuban bread, drowned in sauce and covered in chocolate shavings.
“So he called me up, crying, saying,Chef, I feel so bad that I let you down, you know I don't have a dad," Alvarez recalls. "I slid him $2,000, and he pays me $50 every paycheck, and he is so loyal. I didn’t have a father figure, growing up, and mom worked third shift, and I know what it's like."
“With a little bit of love and belief," he says, spoken like a man who has lived every bit of this himself, "It’s incredible what can happen."
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费雷尔·阿尔瓦雷斯（Ferrell Alvarez）只是想知道您是否听说过有关坦帕的好消息
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