five courses

Farm fresh: A St. Pete city farm uses technology to grow its local bounty

Ever seen a farm with high-tech software or LED lighting? If not, pay a visit to Brick Street Farms. 

Cold fusion: St. Pete's Made Coffee brewery is about to make coffee even cooler

When the espresso machine at work kept malfunctioning, Mike Rideout needed a solution. 

Rideout, a Mandarin Hide floor manager at the time, knew about cold-brew coffee, which was just starting to hit the mainstream about two years ago. Always experimenting with coffee cocktails at the venerable downtown St. Pete cocktail bar, he invested in equipment to begin experimenting with the concentrated coffee at home.

Then one thing led to another.

For the love of growlers: A Florida-driven growler bar is now a thing in Odessa

Almost half of Christian and Jill Brugal’s customers have never heard of a growler. But no matter. The husband-and-wife team behind Brū — a weeks-old Odessa bar focused on loading those colored-glass jugs with the state’s finest craft beer, kombucha and nitro coffee — aim to change that. 

Yeah, I haven’t posted in... a year (regularly updating this thing is like trying to keep a diary as a teenager). But I can’t get over this coffee mug I found online earlier today.

If you’ve ever been on a shopping trip with me — or we’ve walked into a Bob Evan’s together during the holiday season to pick up last-minute takeout after dark (the restaurant has hefty-looking, campfire-worthy speckled cups on display near its Christmas tree this year) — you know how much I love looking at mugs.

Any drinkware, really.

Mulch love: The Reading Room set to spread the garden gospel in west St. Pete 

In west St. Petersburg, in a building that once housed a Christian Scientist Reading Room, a new restaurant plans to spread the garden gospel. 

Remember CL’s 25th anniversary cover for our 2015 Best of the Bay issue? This year’s winners get revealed tonight at the Mahaffey Theater. 

Five Courses is a semi-regular column written by Creative Loafing Tampa’s Food & Drink Editor (that’s me). I’ve borrowed the name for what will become my nifty trove of articles — and other related foodstuffs — that document the happenings of Tampa Bay’s culinary scene.