10 years later, team behind Tampa’s Rooster & The Till takes another big swing
TAMPA — When Rooster & The Till opened on a sleepy stretch of North Florida Avenue in December 2013, everyone was watching.
The little white building on a thoroughfare better known for used car dealerships seemed like an unlikely destination for a restaurant serving ambitious farm-to-table fare. Ferrell Alvarez and Ty Rodriguez knew they were taking a gamble.
Would anyone travel to their tiny restaurant in Seminole Heights, then an up-and-coming enclave north of downtown Tampa, for charcuterie and small plates?
This past winter, the restaurant celebrated its 10th anniversary. The team that helped open it has grown from 11 to 130 as it prepares for one of its biggest risks yet: a pair of ambitious dining and entertainment concepts at Tampa’s splashy Water Street development.
It’s hard to talk about this area’s culinary landscape without referencing Alvarez and his team, whose contributions brought a new echelon of dining and national recognition to Tampa Bay. With Rooster, The Proper House Group — led by Alvarez, Rodriguez, Chon Nguyen and Myles Gallagher — helped usher in a particular kind of restaurant: farm-to-table concepts decked out with Edison bulbs, reclaimed wood and thoughtful dishes meant for sharing. Alvarez, the group’s executive chef, has been nominated for a James Beard award, and Rooster & The Till received the Michelin Guide’s Bib Gourmand recognition in 2022 and 2023.
The culinary group has gone on to open Nebraska Mini-Mart in Seminole Heights, and Gallito, Dang Dude, the since-shuttered Lunch Lady and Gordito’s at Sparkman Wharf. As Tampa Bay’s culinary scene has evolved to popularize food halls and fast-casual spin-offs, they’ve eschewed cookie-cutter concepts to chart their own course.
Rooster & the Till opened with 37 seats and a couple of induction burners. When Ash, a contemporary Italian restaurant, and Alter Ego, a cocktail lounge and entertainment venue, open this month at Water Street, they’ll have a combined footprint of 4,200 square feet, a resident DJ and music director, and seating for 164 people. As the final food and beverage concept to open during Water Street’s phase 1 plan, it’s arguably the most-anticipated debut at the development to date.
Will Water Street diners line up the way they did in Seminole Heights 10 years ago?
The odds are good.
The beginning
Ask Alvarez or Rodriguez how it started, and they’ll say Mise en Place.
The seminal fine-dining restaurant from Maryann Ferenc and Marty Blitz was the nexus of it all — a roughly seven-year stint for Rodriguez and Alvarez during which they would become not just partners in the restaurant business but friends for life.
The two met working at the Tampa restaurant in 2003 — Rodriguez was the general manager and Alvarez a sous chef, later working his way up to chef de cuisine under executive chef Blitz. At the time, the Tampa dining scene was attempting to shed its image as a franchise-laden testing ground for chain operations.
Rodriguez recalled a freedom to explore their culinary passions. Ferenc said there was a special bond between the group.
“Ferrell had an impact and a relationship in the kitchen with Marty that few have had, and did it in a really meaningful way,” she said. “But it was all of them being together that was kind of the magic.”
In 2009, Alvarez left for an executive chef position at Cafe Dufrain on Harbor Island and brought along Rodriguez. Inspired by the local food movement, they briefly published a magazine called Local Dirt, shoring up $20,000 in advertising dollars to create the first, and only, issue.
Magazine publishing wasn’t the endgame, but the ideas were emblematic of what they really wanted to do: run a restaurant that was chef-driven and sustainable. Something small, but mighty. In 2012, with help from a few friends, relatives and one investor, they scraped together roughly $60,000 and started looking for a place in Seminole Heights.
“The neighborhood was just getting this great culinary buzz,” recalled Suzanne Lara, who at the time helmed the kitchen at Seminole Heights restaurant Ella’s Americana Folk Art Cafe. She would later go on to work for Alvarez and his team.
Together with the Refinery — Greg Baker’s celebrated farm-to-table restaurant — and the Independent, the neighborhood was slowly solidifying itself as Tampa’s next culinary hub.
“It seemed like a place to try something that didn’t adhere to the mainstream,” Baker said. “It was this place that was conducive to trying something different and creative.”
For Alvarez, it felt risky.
“It was so far north, people thought we were damn near crazy,“ he said. “But it was the only thing we could really afford.”
Rooster & The Till opened to overnight success.
The restaurant sourced from small farms and local producers when they could, and Alvarez even traded in his sedan for a Nissan Xterra, which was big enough to bring in produce from a local hydroponic farm. A chalkboard displayed the daily house-cured charcuterie and a rotating lot of East and West Coast oysters.
Rooster’s selection of envelope-pushing shared plates — a trend with staying power — positioned it for great acclaim. The Parisian-style gnocchi with short ribs that appeared on the menu from the beginning remains a signature dish, and a chile-spiked cobia collar, which came on roughly a year later, is still among the restaurant’s best-sellers.
Alvarez recalls that first year vividly: eight months of work without a single day off, lines of diners out the door, rave reviews and national recognition.
The evolution
Five years after opening Rooster & the Till, the team began what would become a steady expansion, starting with the shuffleboard and burger spot Nebraska Mini Mart in 2018. The company was readying for additional growth when the onset of the pandemic in 2020 forced the team to press pause.
“It was a roller coaster ride,” Alvarez said. “I remember there were a couple of weeks where I was like, wow, we very well could lose everything that we just worked our entire lives to build.”
The team pivoted to takeout, retooled menus and began their foray into the fast-casual sector.
At the time, quick-service concepts were everywhere. First came their Mexican concept Gallito at Sparkman Wharf, the shipping container food park at the foot of what would become downtown Tampa’s multimillion-dollar Water Street development. The group saw something promising in both the Sparkman project and Strategic Property Partners, the real estate company fueling the massive project.
Since then, Proper House Group has opened other fast-casual concepts at Sparkman, including Dang Dude, an Asian-inspired dumplings and noodle spot, and the short-lived sandwich concept Lunch Lady, now a Latin empanadas and shaved ice restaurant called Gordito’s. The group also runs an offshoot of Gallito at Lakeland’s The Joinery food hall, and they are set to open two more quick-service spots at another location later this year.
The company has seen consistent growth in the years since the pandemic, finding success and profitability — even though that’s not the only goal.
“We want to be able to march to the beat of our own drummer,” Rodriguez said. “So I think that’s a heavy negotiation of ours, when we’re approached by people to open new concepts. By now it’s known that we do our own thing, and we’re not going to sell out.”
The group’s most notable contributions to the Tampa Bay dining scene go beyond what’s on the plate. Throughout the years, Proper House Group has garnered a reputation as an incubator for ambitious up-and-coming chefs, and a champion for a more equitable and sustainable kitchen culture.
“It can be punishing at times, but it’s not like that at Rooster,” Lara said. “It’s inspiring and it’s very comforting — you’re truly a human being and not just a cog in the machine. You’re allowed to grow, you’re allowed to make mistakes.”
Within the broader culinary community, the team collaborates with other chefs, including notable names from across the country. Lara recalled working shoulder-to-shoulder with chefs from acclaimed restaurants Boka in Chicago and Musang in Seattle.
Ben Pomales, who now leads the kitchen at St. Petersburg’s Bandit with his partner Adrianna Siller, worked at Rooster when he was fresh out of culinary school.
“As a young chef, you were side-by-side with the chef and you could really see the day-by-day changes,” he said. “(Alvarez) would kind of mentor me and give me advice — not just kitchen stuff, but also how to be an adult.”
There was a ladder you could climb, if you wanted to. Pomales and Lara both worked their way up, and Siller, who worked at Rooster as a young cook, went on to helm the Lakeland location of Gallito as sous chef.
The group’s success has paved the way for countless other chefs who have worked in their kitchens, said Lara.
“They inspired so many others to become entrepreneurs,” Lara said. “We’ve all watched them build and grow and flourish both personally and professionally — it was proof that the dream can be accomplished.”
The next step
After a decade of working to remain relevant in an always-shifting dining industry, the Proper House Group is ready to take another big swing.
But Tampa Bay’s culinary landscape looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago. The luxury condos and upscale vibes of Water Street feel worlds away from those early days in Seminole Heights, and landing a restaurant at the glitzy development signals a significant shift for the group. The team’s relationship with Strategic Property Partners helped spur the deal.
”They were looking for someone local — a smaller, craft-focused restaurant group to come into the Water Street area and offer something to complement the other restaurants,” Alvarez said.
Though the combined footprint of Ash and Alter Ego is much larger than Rooster & The Till, looking at the new spaces separately offers a glimpse into the original Proper House Group mindset.
Ash will feature seating for roughly 80 people inside and 30 outside — larger than their flagship restaurant, but not by much. Italian in concept, the menu will skew more progressive and modern, highlighting local, sustainable and seasonal ingredients wherever possible. There won’t be a tasting menu, but there will be small plates and a few large-format dishes meant for sharing.
Over at Alter Ego, the moody and monochromatic space is designed as a “music-forward” cocktail lounge with seating for 50 people and standing room for an additional 30. And while this is the group’s first nightlife and entertainment venue, Rodriguez was once the executive director at Gasparilla Music Festival, and was instrumental in the concept’s curation — which included hiring Justin Layman, better known as DJ Casper, as the spot’s music director.
All this growth has meant handing over the reins to new team members and relinquishing some control, an adjustment for a team that’s been so hands-on.
“It definitely feels good, but at times, it’s overwhelming,” Alvarez said. “Because it’s the four of us and our team — we don’t have 60 investors, we don’t have gobs of money. The way we started at Rooster and the way we did this are polar opposites. But the same type of passion fuels both.”
