My esteemed colleagues Jimbo, Hank and ABnorml have raised some excellent points about the local restaurant scene's challenges below. I think there's more going on than straight economics. I think there's also a zeitgeist issue afoot. Bear with me through a brief digression.

When I was fairly fresh out of cooking school I was reviewing restaurants in Baltimore, Md. I loved it, and here’s why: Baltimore is weird. It’s a city that celebrates its idiosyncrasy, from John Waters to the Museum of Menstruation. Some kook and/or culinary genius could get a wild hair and decide to open a restaurant. Maybe a taxidermy-theme restaurant or one that only serves crab fluff. People pursued their dreams, be they twisted or sublime. There was always something new, someone pushing some envelope. The culture embraced that.

After that, I moved to the San Francisco bay area. Totally different. Real estate was so expensive, for the most part, that in order to open a restaurant you needed a tried-and-true business model, an airtight game plan. So there were lots of sleek, cookie-cutter restaurants, but they had to be good to survive. The competition was too fierce, consumers too Type-A and entitled (hey, it was the dot.com boom) to endure mediocrity. It was also a form of cultural currency: have you been to the latest hot restaurant?

Now I live here (in New Tampa, to be exact). People are nice--they’re not jostling for position as much, not pushing their kids as maniacally, not as entitled. The culture doesn’t embrace the weird the way Baltimore does, nor is it as fickle and fixated on "The New" as folks in Silicon Valley. People seem loyal and constant and easygoing--qualities in consumers that don’t always yield good results in restaurants.

Customers seem to value familiarity in restaurants over innovation here. But maybe I’m all wet.