The Columbia Restaurant: Celebrating a Century of History, Culture, and Cuisine

The Columbia started as a cafe in Ybor City where cigar workers came in for coffee and a meal. More than a century later it’s still there on Seventh Avenue, it’s grown into a group of restaurants across Florida, and the same family still owns it. Very few businesses anywhere can say all three of those things, and almost none of them are restaurants, where most places close within a few years of opening.

Andrew Huse wrote its history.

The University Press of Florida published The Columbia Restaurant: Celebrating a Century of History, Culture, and Cuisine in November 2009, as part of its Florida History and Culture series.

What is The Columbia Restaurant book about?

The family and the city together. Huse follows the Columbia from its founder, Casimiro Hernandez Sr., to fourth-generation owner Richard Gonzmart.

He covers the hard stretches as well as the good ones. Liquor was hidden during Prohibition, and the restaurant had to deal with the gangsters who ran much of Tampa’s underworld. The Great Depression came next, and decades later urban renewal emptied out the neighborhood around it. The family kept the doors open through all of it. It’s a big book. It has a family tree, a map, hundreds of photographs and 77 recipes. About 225 of the photographs are in color and 156 in black and white.

How long has the Columbia been in the same family?

Since the beginning. Casimiro Hernandez Sr. founded it, and every generation since has run it. The business traces back to a saloon opened in 1903, and the family dates the Columbia Restaurant itself to 1905.

It’s billed as the oldest restaurant in Florida in continuous operation. Besides the Ybor City flagship, the family runs Columbia restaurants in Sarasota, St. Augustine, Sand Key and Celebration, plus cafes at the Tampa Bay History Center and Tampa International Airport.

Who was Andrew Huse?

Huse was a librarian and archivist in Special Collections at the University of South Florida, where he ran an oral history project on the Columbia. Those recorded interviews with family members and longtime staff became the backbone of this book, his first. His conversations with Richard Gonzmart in late 2006 and early 2007 run through it, and USF still keeps the Columbia oral history collection. He later wrote From Saloons to Steak Houses, a history of Tampa dining, and co-wrote a history of the Cuban sandwich. He died in 2025.

He was born in Illinois, grew up in Clearwater, studied history and English at USF and later earned master’s degrees in library science and history. The historian Gary Mormino was his mentor.

Why does The Columbia Restaurant belong on this shelf?

It’s the model for a Tampa Bay family business history.

A trained historian did the research. Recorded interviews with the people who were there supplied the story, and the family’s photographs and recipes made it a book people want on the coffee table. A family business with a century behind it couldn’t ask for a better template.

It also shows the value of an outside writer. A family member writing the history would have had to decide how much to say about Prohibition and the gangsters. A historian with a university press behind him could tell it straight. The family let him, and that’s part of why readers trust the book.

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