The Epicurean Hotel exists because of a single, defensible premise: that there is a category of traveler for whom the food and wine program at their hotel matters enough to be the primary reason for booking. The 137-room property on South Howard Avenue in SoHo opened in 2013 as a partnership with the Bern’s Steak House organization, which operates the ground-floor restaurant Elevage and the cooking school, The Pass, that occupies the lower level. Whether this premise produces a hotel worth staying in is a more complicated question than the concept implies.
The concept works better in theory than in every dimension of practice, but the dimensions where it works are the ones that matter most if food is genuinely your organizing principle for a Tampa Bay visit. The restaurant is excellent. The bar program at Chocolate Pi is specific and well-executed. The cooking classes at The Pass are among the most interesting private experiences available in Tampa Bay for guests with a culinary interest. These three elements justify the booking and the price point, which is above the neighborhood average for a hotel of comparable room quality.
The Room
The rooms at the Epicurean are comfortable and unremarkable. This is not a criticism. The design is contemporary and clean, with sufficient space for a two-night stay, good blackout curtains, and a bathroom that does its job without requiring commentary. The South Howard Avenue location means the rooms facing the avenue have a view of the SoHo commercial corridor, which is a street scene rather than a skyline, and the rooms facing the hotel’s interior courtyard pool are quieter if you are a light sleeper.
The bed is the room’s best element, which is true of many hotel rooms and is worth noting here specifically because it produces a quality of sleep that guests at this property frequently mention: a properly weighted mattress, linens that hold their thread count past the first washing, the particular acoustic situation of a room in a building on a corner that somehow attenuates the noise of a busy restaurant street by eleven at night.
Room service operates from Elevage until late evening, which is either irrelevant or essential depending on whether you are the kind of person who eats at midnight in a hotel room. The menu is an abbreviated version of the restaurant’s, and the execution is consistent with what the dining room delivers.
Elevage and Chocolate Pi
The restaurant program is the reason this hotel operates at the price point it does, and it earns that argument. Elevage, the ground-floor restaurant led by executive chef Chad Johnson, serves New American cooking in a room that has been thoughtfully designed for the long dining occasion: a wine cellar visible from the dining room, a bar program that takes vermouth and aperitif culture seriously, a kitchen that makes its own charcuterie and whose bread service is better than most restaurants charge for separately.
Chocolate Pi, the ground-floor patisserie and bar, is a specific and necessary institution on South Howard Avenue. The morning pastries are made by a pastry team that has been at this address long enough to have developed a repertoire: the croissant is correctly laminated, the pain au chocolat is made with chocolate that has an opinion about itself, the breakfast tart changes with the season and is almost always the correct order. In the afternoon and evening, the bar program at Chocolate Pi offers cocktails in a format that the hotel’s other food and beverage outlets do not: smaller, more intimate, designed for a drink rather than a meal. The espresso at the bar is the best argument for starting or ending a SoHo visit here.
The Pass: Cooking School
The Pass is a kitchen classroom and private dining space in the hotel’s lower level, and it is the element of the Epicurean concept that is most specific to this address. The 16-seat counter space overlooks a working professional kitchen, and the format — guests seated at the counter, chef working and explaining in front of them, dinner served at the counter following the demonstration — is the hotel’s strongest experiential offering.
Classes and private dinners at The Pass book months in advance for weekends. For a guest who is visiting Tampa Bay with a culinary interest and is planning far enough ahead to secure a booking, The Pass represents something that most hotel stays in any price range cannot offer: a genuinely unusual evening that is specific to the property and not replicable elsewhere in the market.
The Location
South Howard Avenue in SoHo is one of Tampa’s more walkable commercial corridors: restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and retail within a few blocks in either direction. The hotel’s immediate block has enough density that a stay here with a car unused for the full visit is entirely possible. Bayshore Boulevard is seven minutes on foot, which provides the early morning walk that a business traveler who exercises will use without requiring a hotel gym.
The drawback of the SoHo location is the parking situation, which is the drawback of every SoHo location: the hotel’s garage is adequate but valet-oriented on evenings when the neighborhood traffic increases, and guests who prefer self-parking will find the street spots to be unreliable. This is a SoHo problem rather than a hotel problem, but it is relevant to the experience.
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Room and Amenities | 3.5/5 |
| Service | 4/5 |
| Location | 4/5 |
| Dining | 5/5 |
| Value | 3/5 |
| Overall | 3.9/5 |
Epicurean Hotel, 1207 S Howard Ave, Tampa, FL 33606. Standard rooms from $229/night. The Pass private dining: reservations required well in advance via the hotel’s event team; weekday availability is substantially better than weekends.