The original Columbia Restaurant, located in Ybor City, carries a huge amount of history. A Spanish-Cuban immigrant started the Columbia Saloon in 1903, and two years later it became the Columbia Restaurant — and history was born. Columbia claims 120 years of operation, has grown to occupy an entire city block, and is billed as the largest Spanish restaurant in the world. It’s still run by descendants of the founder today. There’s even more detailed history available on their website if you want the full story.
My friend Annie and I had reservations at Columbia ahead of a comedy show in Ybor City. The comedy club has bar food, but with a restaurant like Columbia nearby, it didn’t make sense to skip it. We had reservations for a Saturday evening around 7pm, so the restaurant was extremely busy — but even with our reservation, we only waited about five or six minutes past 7 to be seated. According to our server, the restaurant can seat around 1,700 people across the building. Despite being packed, service was not a problem for us at all.
They started us off with authentic Cuban bread and butter — plain, but with a nice warm crust, exactly what you want from bread like that.
For appetizers, we split a large portion of their Original “1905” Salad, which is tossed and served tableside — it’s their signature dish. It includes Romano cheese, garlic dressing, ham, tomatoes, lettuce, and Swiss cheese, and it’s practically an entrée on its own. The other appetizer was their empanadas, conveniently served two to an order so we each had one — a nice light crust with an extremely flavorful filling, juices running out with every bite. I would have happily turned that into an entrée on its own.
Between the fresh bread and the salad, that took care of our appetizer needs pretty thoroughly.
For entrées, I had the Red Snapper “Adelita” — a boneless fillet, grilled, topped with hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, and spices, served with their signature yellow rice. The fish was cooked just enough without going over, and the toppings were extremely flavorful. An excellent dish.
For dessert, we tried the key lime pie and the white chocolate bread pudding. Annie and I have now been to three restaurants together, and she’s tried the key lime pie at all three — we’re sort of on a mission to test every key lime pie in the Tampa area. This one looked extremely traditional, served with a light raspberry sauce. The texture was perfect, the graham cracker crust was perfect — my only disappointment was that it didn’t have quite enough of that sour key lime juice punch that sets key lime apart for me. Almost perfect, but not quite. I actually preferred the white chocolate bread pudding, which was decadently rich but very good.
We finished with espressos to balance out the sweetness, and as expected, it was a proper Cuban espresso with a lot of bite. I only drink water otherwise, so I didn’t get to try any of their other drinks.
The menu itself is enormous — it takes a while just to decide what you want, and there seem to be so many good options that you’d have to come back several times before you felt like you’d made a real dent in it. Everything we had was excellent. I’d recommend it highly, with one caution: on a Friday or Saturday night, definitely get reservations ahead of time. Even with 1,700 seats, this place is popular enough to need them.
