Ybor City When the Cigar Smoke Hasn't Cleared

Ybor City When the Cigar Smoke Hasn't Cleared

Ybor City sits northeast of downtown Tampa, and it was built in the 1880s by cigar manufacturers who recruited Cuban, Italian, and Spanish workers and created a neighborhood so culturally dense that it earned its own language — a Spanish-Italian-English mix called "Tampeno" that you can still hear in the coffee shops if you arrive early enough and listen carefully.

La Segunda Central Bakery on 15th Street has been baking Cuban bread since 1915 — long, crusty loaves pressed with a palmetto leaf that gives the crust its signature split — and the smell that pours from the building at four in the morning is the neighborhood's alarm clock. By seven, the bread is stacked and the cafe con leche is flowing, and the counter is occupied by regulars who treat the bakery as a living room with better pastries.

Seventh Avenue is the main artery — brick-paved, lined with ironwork balconies, and populated by cigar shops, galleries, and restaurants that occupy the same buildings the cigar workers built. The Columbia Restaurant at 2117 East 7th Avenue has been serving Spanish-Cuban cuisine since 1905, making it the oldest restaurant in Florida, and the 1905 Salad — tossed tableside with a garlic dressing that should be classified as a weapon — is the dish the city claims as its own.

Insider tip: Visit the J.C. Newman Cigar Company on 16th Street — the last cigar factory still operating in Ybor City — and watch hand-rollers make cigars with a speed and precision that makes the craft look effortless. The factory store sells what they make, and the experience of buying a cigar from the place that made it, in the neighborhood that invented the industry, is the kind of authentic that can't be replicated.