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32 | FLORIDA HOMES MAGAZINE Q: W hat are some of your favorite places in Tampa? A: I like Charley's Steak house; it's an old school place in Tampa, close to where I live. I live in South Tampa in Beach Park. We really like it there. I like Ciros, it's an old speak easy bar along South Howard Avenue, that you need a password to get in. You have to call ever y day to get the new password. ey have great cocktails there. Bern's Steak house is great and there are a lot of new places opening up that are really good. Q: Downtown St. Petersburg has an eclectic mix which creates a vibrant energ y. Do you think Tampa will become more synergized? Absolutely. By the water, you've got affluent retirees and professionals and if you go up Central Avenue, you've got younger people and it's different —edgier. If you go to the Warehouse District out west where a lot of the cra breweries are, there's a younger crowd too. In Tampa, there's maybe not a pronounced mix but, they have the same thing. Seminole Heights is a popular spot where a lot of new places are opening up – cra breweries, restaurants. ere's a lot going on in Tampa. Q: Miami has become a massive international city becoming the Gateway to South America. It has a different flair than when you were a child, would you agree? I see Tampa a lile bit like the Miami I grew up in. It's really widespread, it's diverse, and you can live in the suburbs or downtown. When I grew up in Miami, nobody lived downtown. It was completely decrepit and so was the beach. I like this area because you also have St. Pete Beach. I can be in St. Pete Beach is less than 30 minutes from my house in South Tampa. Sarasota and Clear water are not too far away either. Q: You mentioned you got married recently. Did you meet your wife here? Yes, she is a Tampa native. We went to ailand for our wedding. We traveled through ailand, Burma, Miramar, Cambodia and Vietnam, but the best of the bunch was ailand. It's breathtak ingly beautiful. e people were really nice, super welcoming and the food was great. e north part of the countr y – Shanghai — is the second most visited region. We went there to do the destination wedding and had a wedding planner who we never met before who did ever ything. It was great! I took my two brothers and my business partner and my wife took her two best friends, so we had a ver y small group of seven people. We rode elephants, took a cook ing class and all k inds of cool stuff. We wanted to do something different. My wife is a social worker. She's ver y entrepreneurial and I've goen involved in her nonprofit. It's a good balance. She works for Grace Point, a large behavioral nonprofit. We've done several projects together. Actually that's how I met her – it was at a grand opening for one of the projects we did. It's been nice to 32 | FLORIDA HOMES MAGAZINE

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