As time ticks on, businesses come and go — restaurants shutter their doors and memories of your go-to comfort food can start to fade.
When it comes to Tampa, maybe you wish you could have another taste of mouthwatering biscuits and gravy from The Refinery or the tart satisfaction of key lime pie from Ella’s Americana Folk Art Café.
So, it can be a little bittersweet if you perhaps didn’t savor your last bite as much as you’d like.
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But now, one former Tampa chef is working to preserve the city’s iconic food so it doesn’t get lost in a moment in time — and forever satisfies our cravings.
His name is Eric Hipol. And on the side of his own work in North Carolina, you can find him on a Tampa subreddit as the “RouxedChef” posting about his side passion: the Recipe Preservation Project.
It’s where he passes along recipes from beloved Tampa restaurants that have often closed. He includes the ingredients, how to make it and even chef notes. He also condenses them to be serving sizes more doable for a family — instead of a crowded restaurant.
Recipe of banana cake from the Fly Bar. It’s also made with peanut butter ice cream & brûléed marshmallow fluff
“When a restaurant closes, what’s usually lost isn’t just the menu: it’s the instincts, the shortcuts, the ‘you’ll know when it’s right’ moments that never get written down. Those things live in cooks’ and chefs’ memories until they have no more use for it,” Hipol wrote in a description about the project. “This project isn’t about perfect replication or nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s about documenting how food was actually made: the ratios, the habits, the judgment calls, and the quiet rules that kept a dish on the menu for years.”
It’s a type of nostalgia that stems from his own experience in the Tampa culinary scene. He first moved to the city in 2008 from Massachusetts. He then would commute to Orlando to culinary school in 2009.
During his studies, he got his start in places like a small cafe at The Peabody Hotel and Ella’s Americana Folk Art Café. He said he’d commute after class in the morning and juggle different schedules.
He moved out of Florida in 2022, and mentioned he misses a lot of places in the area. However, Ella’s has a special place in his heart since the team took him in, even though he’d just started school and didn’t know much.
It was through all these experiences that made him realize how the creativity of Tampa food is “unmatched,” yet there’s also something comforting about the dishes.
“The feeling of looking at a menu thinking, ‘Huh? What? How does that make sense?’ Ordering it and realizing it’s upscale comfort food with a twist — was entertaining and accessible,” Hipol said.
“This is pretty much kind of a love letter to Tampa dining. I think it just helped me shape who I am as a chef today. And that’s the exciting part.”
Eric Hipol
Hipol added that it helped him get out of a mindset thinking that every component on a dish had to be intricate or mind-blowing.
“I realized when dining in Tampa, have one thing on the plate be the stand-out, and everything else elevates it,” he said. “Too many crazy components on a dish turns the plate into a disorganized mess and — if everything is a stand-out — then all the flavors become flat and nothing becomes memorable.”
When it comes to recipe preservation, Hipol said it all started last September when he saw a Creative Loafing article on Reddit about restaurants closing. The comment section was filled with people wishing they at least had the recipes to make the food themselves.
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That’s when he realized he could do something to help.
“I’m a recipe hoarder. I always have been since I started my career back in 2009, and I just had them on my phone. I didn’t realize that I had been sent them, the recipe cards to this restaurant, so I just put out there, ‘Hey, if anybody’s interested, I can give you these bulk recipe cards, and next thing I know, my inbox was flooded, and then it just suddenly became bigger,” Hipol told “Florida Matters Live & Local host Matthew Peddie.
He then realized he could turn it into a fun hobby and make the recipes accessible to people. He started the project about a week or so later, he said.
Eric Hipol started the Recipe Preservation Project.
“Food is very personal for people — it’s not just the style of cooking or anything like that, but it’s just people having these emotions when they are there and discovering things and these memories of meeting certain people there and having grown up with it in which that just becomes important,” he said.
Hipol said the response from former restaurant owners, chefs and patrons has been mixed as some people are understandably protective of their recipes.
“But I’m a big believer that if you’re holding onto these recipes, if you’re gatekeeping it, you’re not able to expand on it,” Hipol said. “Nobody’s able to want to grow these recipes, make it their own — maybe even create something new from it. Get inspired by it.”
In terms of how he’s sourced coveted recipes over the years, he said you can find him hanging out behind restaurants with a cold six-pack waiting for the chef or owner to come out.
“And just say, ;’Hey, I would love to be able to recreate some dishes that are from here. Would you be willing?’ And sure enough, you’re just cracking cans in the back and just enjoying yourself and seeing how the sausage is made, so to speak,” he said.
Overall, Hipol described his project as a “love letter to Tampa dining” — the very city that shaped him as a chef.
“It’s kind of really sad whenever I was looking through some of those areas and just seeing that a lot’s changed, and a lot of these restaurants have been turned over a couple times,” Hipol said. “I just wanted to put it out there that we can keep the memories of these places alive.”
You can listen to the full interview in the media player above. This story was compiled from an interview by Matthew Peddie for “Florida Matters Live & Local.” You can listen to the full episode here.
Dining and Cooking