Lance’s Birthday at Datz

 

Lance has decided that his favorite Tampa restaurant is Datz.  So after an afternoon at Cigar City Brewing and walk around Cypress Point Park, we finished his birthday celebration with dinner (it’s been an extended week of festivities since we both worked on his actual birthday). 

 

On weekdays, Datz has a Happy Hour 3 – 6pm with half price apps and drink deals.  Plus, you beat the crowd and don’t have to wait for a table if you can get there that early.  

 

 

They have $4 local Florida beers on tap – but unfortunately they didn’t seem to have many local beers besides Cigar City (and we had just come from their brewery).  Lance did have a beer and I had the Barbados cocktail – with Velvet Falernum, Krakken dark rum, and fresh lime juice.  My drink was actually so strong that I ended up watering it down a bit. 

Since we got there towards the end of the Happy Hour, we went ahead and ordered the Mac Bites and Datchos to make sure we got them half off. 

The Mac Bites are made with Benton’s Tennessee hickory smoked bacon and jalapeño mac n’ cheese fried in crispy balls of deliciousness.  They come with a spicy Sriracha aioli dipping sauce. 

The Datchos are made with Datz’s famous chips, topped with chili, cheese, jalapeños, sour cream, blue cheese drizzle, and scallions.  You can get it topped with pulled pork, chicken, or short ribs, but we held off on those for now.  We really should have stopped there and just had that for our meal. 

For my main meal, I ordered the Piggly Figgly flatbread – with caramelized onions, black mission figs, applewood smoked bacon, roasted apples, arugula, goat cheese, toasted almonds, and balsamic glaze.  I actually only ate a few bites before wrapping it up for leftovers for the next day. 

Lance had the Hungry Man 2.0 – which was a seriously huge plateful of food.  It had two southern fried pork chops topped with sausage gravy, bacon onion marmalade over a mound of garlic mascarpone mashed potatoes.  He also took most of his meal home for leftovers the next day. 

Our waitress was really sweet and gave us a free birthday cupcake – chocolate with salted caramel (which we also took home for later). 

Datz is located at 2616 S MacDill Ave, Tampa, FL 33629 and is open Monday – Thursday 7am – 10pm, Friday 7am – 11pm, Saturday 8:30am – 11pm, and Sunday 8:30am – 3pm.