First look at new pan-Asian restaurant Souzou in downtown St. Petersburg

ST. PETERSBURGOne of the six dramatic black-and-white charcoal canvases depicting fierce shogun warriors looks suspiciously like Frank Zappa. The artist, Scott Fisher of St. Petersburg design firm T2theS, was not available to confirm Wednesday afternoon, but Mike Harting and Patrick Marston spent a little time explicating many other non-Zappa elements of their Souzou, which debuts Monday at 435 Fifth Ave. N.The 182-seat pan-Asian restaurant is one more in a long list of ambitious new independent restaurants downtown, only with a twist: It has 100 parking spots."Beach Drive is such a commitment these days," Marston said during an exclusive walk-through for the Tampa Bay Times . "We wanted to do something that's more for locals."Marston is new to the restaurant business, having spent much of his career building medical complexes domestically and abroad. Longtime friend Harting, on the other hand, is an old hand, with years at Outback and then BellaBrava before launching 3 Daughters Brewing (which also unveiled something new this week: Canned Rod Bender Red Ale was released on Monday).As the service and kitchen staff prepared to serve 200 "friends and family" Wednesday evening, the partners toured the dining room: the rough-hewn tables are made of walnut slabs from Rhode Island, the bar is a gleaming piece of white crystalline granite into which holes have been bored to inset LED lights — the overall look a subtle palette of concrete, glass, stone and steel.The gleaming stainless steel kitchen features some unusual touches like a wok station and a couple of industrial rice steamers, stacks of wide porcelain noodle bowls and reusable wooden chopsticks awaiting the evening's service.The regular menu and sushi list will be short to start ("We're just going to get the engine to run first," said Harting), but the approach is interesting."I had a few thoughts with the menu of Souzou," Harting said. "I don't like how so many menus are broken into appetizers, entrees, etc." The Souzou menu has been reduced to three categories — sushi, hot and cold — to facilitate a sharing, mix-and-match strategy. A "less is more" approach extends to liquor, with a smaller curated list of liquor labels and beers with a rundown of 13 arrayed from low to high IBUs (international bittering units) for ease of exploration.With the doors about to open to the public, Harting and Marston's part of the project is nearly finished, the restaurant left in the hands of managing partner Julie Parrish (a longtime Outback colleague of Harting's), sushi chef Viet Vo (a sushi chef at the Sandpearl and Sushi Alive) and the 60 other people hired to staff Souzou.A word that means "imagination" and "creation" in Japanese, Souzou will push the geographic boundaries of downtown dining. But in a period when new restaurants are popping up in the Old Southeast, Grand Central, Historic Kenwood and elsewhere, it may be less "imaginative" than it is practical. Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley on Twitter.

First look at new pan-Asian restaurant Souzou in downtown St. Petersburg

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