Authentic Spanish cuisine is the closest thing to heaven -- except for Scandinavian cuisine  or Moroccan cuisine.
Tampa's Columbia restaurant, still special after 100 years
Larry Olmsted, Special for USA TODAY 8:09 a.m. EDT July 17, 2014
The scene: The Columbia is the oldest restaurant in Florida and the oldest Spanish eatery in the United States. It's also one of the largest, seating about 1,600 patrons in a dozen different dining rooms. When the self-proclaimed "Gem of Spanish Restaurants" opened in 1905, Ybor City was experiencing the tobacco equivalent of the Gold Rush. While known as a largely Cuban Tampa neighborhood, the town was actually founded by a Spaniard, Vicente Ybor, who hired large numbers of Cuban workers and built the area into the world's cigar-making epicenter, home to more than 200 factories in the early 20th century. At one point Ybor City produced an estimated 500-700 million hand-rolled cigars annually, a staggering figure, but starting with the Great Depression, cigar-making here died, and today there is just one factory left. But the Columbia is more popular than ever, and perhaps the colorful neighborhood's most enduring symbol.

The Columbia occupies a full block, and that's still not enough – on the adjacent block is a museum devoted to the restaurant, which does double duty as an event space, since the Columbia is very popular for weddings, wakes, birthday parties, corporate outings and every other imaginable celebration. There is also a large gift shop in the complex, selling everything from T-shirts to sangria pitchers to cigars – they often have a hand-roller in the restaurant. The twelve dining rooms are widely varied in size and each completely unique in décor. The two oldest areas are large open dining rooms flanking either side of the original bar, built when Theodore Roosevelt was president, and these feature well-worn original Spanish tile floors, high ceilings and walls covered in period photos and endless newspaper and magazine articles about the place.

It has since been expanded many times, including the first air-conditioned dining room in Tampa (1935). One room has red velvet-covered walls, crossed swords as ornaments, and a conquistador feel, while another evokes a traditional Spanish inner courtyard with a bubbling fountain and terraced balconies all around. One celebrates Moorish architecture; another, with seating for 200, hosts live entertainment each weekend, including flamenco dancing. All throughout, every picture, piece of art, or bric-a-brac has a story.

Despite its size, the way it is broken up into so many spaces allows the Columbia to retain an amazingly intimate feel, aided by the friendly, personal service from veteran tuxedo-clad wait staff. It is a dark, cool respite from the Florida sun, an atmospheric place that is equally welcoming to a cadre of longtime regulars, often multi-generational, and tourists, who flock here in droves. Remarkably, after nearly 110 years, it remains owned by the founding family, operated by the great-grandchildren of founder Casimiro Hernandez – with yet another generation waiting in the wings. The Columbia is very locally popular and has spawned six other Florida locations, including two in Tampa, a café at the Tampa Bay History Center along the city's popular Riverwalk and a full-service location in the Tampa airport. There are additional spots in Clearwater Beach, St. Augustine and Celebration.

Reason to visit: Tableside salad, tableside sangria or mojitos, Cuban sandwich, tapas, house special entrees, flan.

The food: The original Columbia is so charming it would be fun to visit even if the food was not good, but fortunately, that is not the case. It is however, an odd mix of Spanish and Cuban, related but different cuisines, plus an Italian influence, thanks to its setting in multicultural Ybor City. This fusion is evident immediately upon opening the large menu, which begins with cocktails and adult beverages. The first page is all mojitos and daiquiris, decidedly not Spanish, along with a random Mexican margarita and an offbeat martini take on classic Cuban coffee. Beer comes from Spain, as do many wines (there are several glass-walled cellars, one all Spanish, including collector wines), and even the bottled water, Penaclara brand, is imported from Spain's Rioja region. But the real Spanish flair comes in the form of several sangria options, some made at your table, as are pitchers of mojitos – tableside flourishes are a recurring theme here and integral to many things you can order. Even the standard café con leche is poured and mixed with milk in front of you.

The menu is vast, with soups, tapas, sandwiches and entrees, but a few famed signatures stand out, starting with the "Columbia Original 1905 Salad," which, of course, is tossed tableside. The ingredients are fairly non-descript -- mundane iceberg lettuce, julienned deli ham and Swiss cheese, with supermarket tomatoes, olives and grated Romano cheese -- but it comes together thanks to the house-special and highly addictive garlic dressing, which brings people back. "A lot of our regulars tell me they tried to replicate it at home and it didn't work," said our server. "I think it's because all oil is different and we import our olive oil special from a particular estate in Spain and that makes it unique." Whatever it is, it's very good.

All meals are accompanied by a slab of warm Cuban bread served wrapped in paper. Other top sellers include the empanada appetizer, which is very good, two large pieces with fresh meat filling and flaky, rich clearly homemade crust. Roast Pork a la Cubana, which is citrus-marinated, slow-cooked, then sliced and cooked again in gravy until falling apart, is also very tasty. The Cuban sandwich is a signature here, and very large, a full loaf of bread, also available as a half with soup or 1905 salad, a top choice. The sandwich, while very enjoyable, was a bit different from the Cubans I've had in the Caribbean, New York and South Florida, breadier, not quite as flattened, and with genoa salami in addition to the traditional trio of ham, roasted pork and Swiss cheese. The menu attributed the sandwich to Ybor City's mix of ethnic cultures, including the Sicilians who contributed the salami.

One of the most interesting dishes, and another house signature, is the Salteado, an Asian-inspired stir fry in a hot iron skillet credited to the influence of Chinese who lived in 19th-century Cuba. This is a sauté of onions, green peppers, garlic and mushrooms, made Spanish by use of olive oil for cooking and the addition of potatoes, chorizo and a splash of red wine, done with a choice of chicken, beef or shrimp, and served with yellow rice. This was an old school take on fusion cuisine, before there was such a thing, and it is surprisingly delicious, one of my favorites at Columbia.

The menu is big enough where you could visit several times without ever coming close to repeating, or just once with a group and have no problem satisfying everyone's tastes. You could make lunch of a half sandwich meal, a big dinner of entrees and apps, or simply share from the slate of nearly two dozen tapas, most of which are traditional Spanish offerings including albondigas (Spanish meatballs), piquillo peppers, croquettes and a thick sliced omelet, tortilla Espanola. The desserts are also well worth a look and range from Floridian specialty key lime pie to churros with a trio of dipping sauces, guava, chocolate and caramel, but the two signatures are the white chocolate bread pudding and the old-fashioned flan, which is excellent. Whatever you choose, the food will probably satisfy and the charming setting and excellent service certainly will.

Pilgrimage-worthy?: No, but along with world-famous Bern's Steakhouse this is one of the two must-try restaurants for Tampa visitors, and the airport location serves among the best such food you will find on the fly.

Rating: Yum! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)

Price: $$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)

Details: Original, 2117 East 7th Avenue, Tampa; 813-248-4961, columbiarestaurant.com/ybor.asp

MORE: Read previous columns

Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an e-mail at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.

Been here several times - it certainly is a place worth going to and returning to.

Savor S.C.-style barbecue at Bessinger's
Larry Olmsted, Special for USA TODAY 8:04 a.m. EDT June 26, 2014

The scene: Since the Bessinger family began serving Southern barbecue in 1939, their namesake eatery has expanded into its own strip mall of sorts, a roadside complex that includes both the main restaurant and a sandwich shop doubling as a high-volume to-go operation. These are connected with homey faux-Old West meets red barn architecture. The main restaurant is a popular fixed-price, all-you-can-eat operation, featuring a long buffet with a changing daily slate of barbecue meats and Southern staples, and the line is often long enough that servers take drink orders from patrons as they wait to get to the food. After making it through the buffet, diners seat themselves in one of two main high-ceilinged dining rooms packed with elbow-to-elbow tables covered in green plastic tablecloths.

The sandwich shop next door, which offers a full array of barbecue meats, sandwiches and sides, along with burgers, is a more traditional order-at-the-counter operation. After paying you get a buzzer and help yourself to a comfortable and spacious wooden booth. Compared to the crowded, loud, electric atmosphere next door, the sandwich shop is a bit of an oasis. Both are located along busy Savannah Highway in the commercial center of Charleston, just west of the historic old city, and convenient to Charleston itself as well as on the way to Kiawah and James islands, Hilton Head and Savannah.

Founder Thomas Bessinger learned to cook whole-hog barbecue at age 13 from his father, "Big Joe" Bessinger, and today his sons still run the place, which was voted the Number One BBQ restaurant in the barbecue-mad state by readers of Living in South Carolina magazine. It has won hosts of other awards, and its mustard-flavored barbecue sauce was rated the best of its kind by television food personality Andrew Zimmern, who listed it among his top five condiments and stocks it in his home fridge. Many celebrities visiting Charleston make it a point to eat at Bessinger's, especially politicians (Sen. Dole and Gov. Romney) and musicians (LL Cool J, Charlie Daniels, Hank Williams Jr. and Randy Travis).

Reason to visit: Pulled pork, fried catfish and the mustard-based barbecue sauce.

The food: For pure barbecue fans, the sandwich shop is the better bet, while the larger buffet restaurant serves up a much broader array of Southern classics, soups and some interesting salads along with a bit of barbecue.

In general I almost always find buffets disappointing, with the emphasis on quantity over quality, but Bessinger's does an excellent job and the food across the board was both surprisingly well-prepared and very fresh-tasting. For example, the salad greens were crisp, the shredded cabbage in the cole slaw was fresh and crunchy, and the unexpected crab salad was rich and laden with chunks of tasty crabmeat. The non-barbecue staples on the buffet include an excellent rendition of fried catfish, a dish that is easy to get wrong, and a better-than-average fried chicken that could have been a bit crunchier, but was tender, juicy and very well-seasoned. The catfish was the surprise highlight, light and buttery fish encapsulated in delicious breading.

The smoked meat dishes on the buffet rotate, but for a barbecue-centric eatery there was surprisingly little barbecue, although it was anchored by excellent pulled pork. Big, roughly ripped chunks of pork were juicy and meaty and tossed lightly in the signature mustard-based sauce, a far cry from the finely diced, vinegary chopped pork common in many parts of the Carolinas. Mustard-infused barbecue sauce is a distinctive regional specialty of central South Carolina and this is an excellent example of the genre, which I consider the most underrated of all barbecue condiments – it goes especially well with pork, and if you haven't tried it you should. The other featured item was barbecue hash, a thin chili-like saucy concoction served over white or dirty rice. The meat was a bit too finely ground to really satisfy a barbecue craving, but the dish was flavorful and aggressively spiced with a bit of heat.

For a more straightforward barbecue experience the adjacent sandwich shop offers a full menu of platters, trays and sandwiches including sliced beef, chicken, the same excellent pulled pork and very good St. Louis-cut pork ribs. These are well-coated in dry rub then smoked and served as-is, or with either a tomato-based hickory sauce or the signature mustard sauce. The ribs were meaty and very well-seasoned, but they were a bit on the dry side and would benefit from a little less time in the smoker. Still, they really hit the spot and beg for the mustard sauce, which goes magnificently with the crusty exterior.

Everything here is served with a big slab of moist and tasty corn bread and choice of sides, and like the buffet next door, they did a great job with the sides and small details – even the fried okra, not normally a favorite of mine, was wonderful. Adding to the nostalgic charm is the friendliness of the staff on both sides, and the assortment of nearly forgotten regional soft drink specialties such as Cheerwine, Sun Drop and grape and orange Nehi.

Pilgrimage-worthy?: No, but it's a must if you are in the area – or have never had South Carolina mustard-based barbecue sauce.

Rating: Yum! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)

Price: $$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)

Details: 1602 Savannah Highway, Charleston; 843-556-1354; bessingersbbq.com

MORE: Read previous columns

Larry Olmsted has been writing about food and travel for more than 15 years. An avid eater and cook, he has attended cooking classes in Italy, judged a barbecue contest and once dined with Julia Child. Follow him on Twitter, @TravelFoodGuy, and if there's a unique American eatery you think he should visit, send him an e-mail at travel@usatoday.com. Some of the venues reviewed by this column provided complimentary services.