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Restaurant review: Mortar & Pestle in Seminole Heights should focus on mom-and-pop pharmacy vibe

 
Mortar & Pestle opened in Seminole Heights in Tampa in August. [MONICA HERNDON   |   Times]
Mortar & Pestle opened in Seminole Heights in Tampa in August. [MONICA HERNDON | Times]
Published Sept. 25, 2017

By Laura Reiley

Times Food Critic

TAMPA

Sometimes, the more time you have with a project, the more complicated it gets. I started hearing about Mortar & Pestle in Seminole Heights about 18 months ago. It was the vision of Ujwal Patel, a pharmacist;

Ujwal's wife, Jessica Patel, also a pharmacist; and Ujwal's cousin, Badal Patel, an internist. They wanted to bring back America's historic mom-and-pop drugstores, the kind where you'd hang out, have a BLT while swinging your legs at the lunch counter, kibbitz with your community and, oh yeah, get your antibiotics prescription filled. This was, Ujwal says, the antithesis of the modern-day CVS or Walgreens, which he says are fairly lousy environments for patients and pharmacists alike.

Huh, a cool idea. There is Goolrick's Pharmacy in Fredericksburg, Va., Little Drug Co. in New Smyrna Beach and the Pickwick in Greenville, S.C., but most of the old-time pharmacy/soda fountains have ditched the pharmacy part. Maybe it's because it's two different professions, two different skill sets, to run a pharmacy and to run a restaurant, or maybe it's because people don't want to buy a Fleet enema in the same place they're enjoying a root beer float, but pharmacies with lunch counters have gone the way of the dodo.

If any place in Tampa could bring it back, it would be Seminole Heights.

And then time started passing.

Ujwal says they were initially thinking small, but they found two buildings side-by-side and decided to use one for the pharmacy and the other for the cafe (properties with two different owners, which complicated things). The architectural phase dragged on for six months; the demolition guys knocked out a gas line; the city added its own holdups with permitting and such.

Delay after delay, and it opened Aug. 11. I've visited a couple of times, once midmorning for an early lunch and coffee, and once for dinner. The restaurant space, not connected to the pharmacy, reads like a hipster coffee roaster — high volume ceilings, white walls, dangling Edison bulbs, great natural light and seating that looks like old-fashioned school chairs — because it is. They are roasting and selling on-site, either a pound of beans to take home or as a coffee drink made on a gorgeous-looking copper-fronted machine. They offer Chemex, French press and pour-overs, cold brew and Instagram-worthy latte art.

In the dining room there's no connection to the pharmacy next door — you don't know it's there unless you do — but there are subtle nods, like apothecary jars. The dominant wall decor is a huge chalkboard of craft beers, quite a good list, all draft and split between regional options and nationally known names, in the full range of styles and not leaning overly heavy on the IPAs. Most are offered in 5-ounce, 12-ounce and some in 16-ounce pours, some in cool pharmacy beakers.

You're with me now? Pharmacy over there, coffee roasting and craft beer over here. But then add in cheese and charcuterie, raw bar items, craft sodas, veggie burgers, sous-vide grass-fed burgers and (here's where my head started spinning) vegetable-forward molecular gastronomy for dinner, foams and spherification and such.

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This is the work of Brett "BJ" Wright, who has spent time at Mermaid Tavern and Rooster & the Till. It's seriously the last thing someone stool-spinning at a lunch counter would expect, but there's solid work being done: roasted tri-colored carrot lengths strewn with fig and bits of romanesco with a little miso-umami veggie broth poured over and lime crema ($12); or a house-made burrata (its exterior a little tough) with tiny leaves of cress, wedges of ripe tomato, spherified pearls of cucumber juice and a gleam of blackberry balsamic ($10); or even fat stalks of perfectly cooked asparagus interwoven with what looked like sauteed brown enoki mushrooms, given a swirl of portobello mushroom "demi glace" and a delicate cheese tuile, plus a foam I couldn't quite identify ($12).

I also really enjoyed a simple pair of poached cobia fillets set against lovely Red Island sea peas with a broth they call "fish tea" and a little preserved lemon foam ($23). But a deconstructed short rib agnolotti ($18) was a visual mess, very heavy and one-note tasting.

While dinner entrees cluster just above $20, which seems in line with Seminole Heights peers, I worry that lunch prices are high for the neighborhood. That sous-vide burger is $15, and a swordfish on black lentils is $19. Steep for this 'hood, and definitely not in the vein of old-timey pharmacy lunch counters.

Service thus far is young and enthusiastic, with decent menu knowledge. My biggest hope for this ambitious newcomer is that it's not trying to do too much. There are a lot of places in Seminole Heights right now to get charcuterie and kombucha — not so much mom-and-pop drugstore fare.

Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley. She dines anonymously and unannounced; the Times pays all expenses.