- December 13, 2025
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There are few things, if any, Tampa businessman, philanthropist and hospitality entrepreneur Blake Casper — some call him a reluctant Tampa celebrity — does half speed.
He loves to ski. And when he does, he flies to Chile in the Florida summer for the South American winter. Or he goes to his beloved Aspen, where he heads straight for the black diamond runs. “There are no blues for him,” his sister and business partner Allison Casper Adams says, referring to more medium skiing slopes. A Feb. 21, 2020 photo on Blake Casper’s Instagram account shows a grinning Blake in Aspen in front of a sign that, next to a photo of a skull and bones, says “This is your decision point: Backcountry risks include death.”
The piano is similar to skiing in its all-inness for Casper. He learned to play as a kid, then gave it up. He went back to it about five or six years ago. T. Corey Neil, CEO and president of Bank of Tampa and fellow board member with Casper at Tampa General Hospital, has gone skiing with Casper and, without divulging a location, chuckles and confirms Casper is quite adventurous on the slopes. Neil also has seen Casper randomly walk up to a piano in a bar — again, in an undisclosed location — and “just play songs off the top of his head,” from classical music to pop.
There are actually few topics and adventure opportunities that don’t interest Casper. He’s climbed mountains. He dotes on his daughters and their hobbies — music and horses, to name two. He travels often.
And while his name, for years, was known mostly around Tampa Bay for being the “McDonald’s guy,” Casper’s business interests spread far and wide, and his ability to spot trends and market shifts, say several who know him well, is likewise on point. (He and his family sold their holdings in McDonald’s, some 60 locations built over six decades, three years ago.)
“He’s knowledgeable on a lot of things that aren’t business related,” Neil says. “He has various topics he can go really deep on.”
Wilton Morley, founder of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, a South Tampa pub, and business partner with Casper in the new, reimagined Mad Dogs, says his friend is a throwback to the Great Gatsby-Roaring Twenties era. “He really would hate me saying this about him, but he’s the definition of an intellectual," Morley says. “He loves politics. He’s fascinated by architecture and he’s interested in art. He has really eclectic ideas about a lot of things.”
“He’s reticent to talk about himself,” Morley adds, “but he’s good looking and single and people in this town are really interested in what he’s up to.”
Casper, of course, is more than skis, piano keys and British breakfast teas.
A Tampa native, Casper, 52, is also the CEO of Caspers Co., a conglomerate with five brands, including:
Oxford Commons is growing, too. The Oxford Exchange opened a swanky podcast studio in April. And brands that have joined the family since 2023 include Predalina, an elevated Mediterranean in Tampa’s Water Street area; Casa Cami, a modern Mexican rooftop restaurant atop The Current Hotel; and Mad Dogs & Englishmen, the reimagined British gastropub. Those additions come with growing the unit’s employee base 150%, from 100 to 250, including six executive chefs and more than 16 sous chefs and kitchen leaders.
All told, Caspers Co. is a 1,000-employee enterprise that, says Casper, does some $100 million a year in revenue.
Asked what the company's strategy is with its multiple entities, Casper says there’s “no grand plan,” settling on opportunistic. “We do things we think Tampa will support and that will be good for Tampa,” he says, “and things we could successfully execute on.”
The original business execution for Caspers Co. wrapped around McDonald’s.
Caspers Co. was founded by Blake’s grandfather Fritz Casper, who sold suits to McDonald’s impresario Ray Kroc in the 1950s in Chicago. The pair became friends and in spring 1958, Fritz Casper opened the first McDonald’s in Florida, on South Dale Mabry.
The Casper family grew its McDonald’s empire over the next 64 years. Fritz’s son Joe Casper took over the business in 1970 and grew the organization from five to 44 locations, according to Franchise Times. Blake and Allison Casper Adams — their father Joe died in 2005 of cancer — later grew the portfolio to 60 McDonald’s in Tampa and Jacksonville, in conjunction with Allison’s husband, Robby Adams.
The Caspers operated one of the largest franchises in the McDonald's system when the family sold the operation back to the corporation for an undisclosed sum Oct. 1, 2022. Not only was it large, its restaurants, according to Franchise Times, had some of highest average sales, guest counts and cash flows in its unit.
Casper was captivated by the McDonald’s Way — he remembers his time fondly at the chain’s famed Hamburger University. While he never met Kroc, he heard lots of his stories about him from his grandfather and quotes him often.
Casper's first job was as a teenager at the Carrollwood McDonald’s, where he cleaned bathrooms and worked the counter. In ownership, Casper first focused on the Tallahassee market, where he grew that portfolio from 12 to 27 stores, doubling sales.
While the current iteration of Caspers Co. has brands far different from McDonald’s, Casper says there are similarities in operating models. Things like treating people — employees and customers — right, having integrity and sticking to solid processes and procedures.
On the employee side, Caspers Co. has long provided a supersized benefits package, something of an anomaly in the hospitality sector. That includes providing medical, dental, vision, life insurance and supplemental plans such as ID theft, legal and caregiving services to salaried, executive and full-time employees working at least 30 hours a week. There’s also a 401 (k) and company-paid EAP.
Doing core things like that, Casper says, stems from the many times in his career he’s learned “consistency and persistence is more important than grand plans.”
That’s also a take on one of Casper’s favorite Kroc quotes, from his 1977 autobiography, “Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s.” The quote: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
With possibly his most noted project outside McDonald’s, the Oxford Exchange, just outside downtown Tampa, Casper went all-in on an unproven concept during a recession, against a chorus of doubters.
Today Oxford Exchange is a core Tampa destination, styled on a British-embassy-in-Cairo vibe.
Oxford Exchange bills itself as a restaurant, bookstore, lifestyle gift store, coworking space, design studio and event venue. Travel publication Frommer’s adds some pizazz to the description, saying “Oxford Exchange is an urban oasis of, well, everything good in life. It also has a look straight out of an interior design magazine: brick-walled, chandeliered, with art-filled dining rooms and a sunlit conservatory with rambling vines and retractable glass roof.”
Casper, going back 15 years to when he first sketched out Oxford Exchange, says the risk was twofold: Most people didn’t understand the concept Casper, a graduate of the London School of Economics and admitted Anglophile, envisioned, and beyond that, in 2010 not too many people were buying and investing in commercial projects.
“It was a very depressing time for real estate,” Casper says. “There was really nothing going on in Tampa, but we wanted to develop something different. And nothing like this had ever been done before in town.”
Caspers Co. President Rudy Garcia, who has worked for the Caspers family for 40 years — enhances that theme: Casper, he says, “saw something Tampa really needed and deserved before Tampa even knew it needed or deserved it.”
Casper paraphrases Kroc when considering Oxford’s big-time success. “If you believe in it and you give it your all,” Casper says, “you can pretty much make anything a success.”
One more all-in: Morley, Casper’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen buddy, says Casper throws “very extravagant Christmas parties” for members of The Stovall House. Last year’s party was a Studio 54 theme. “He’s like an Arab in Dubai putting on parties,” he says. “He doesn’t really mingle at his parties. He likes to walk around a bit and stick to himself. But nobody throws a party like that in this town.”
“He doesn’t do it to show off,” Morley adds, “but he does it to keep things interesting for the members.”
While Kroc’s mantra to follow what you believe passionately as a road to success is a north star for Casper, he’s also had some setbacks using that approach.
A big one: running for elected office. Casper ran for Tampa City Council in 2023 on a pro-police platform and was soundly defeated by incumbent Bill Carlson for the District 4 seat; Carlson won with 59% of the vote, according to Florida Politics. Casper ran, he says, as a voice against “defund the police” chatter. “I thought that would be a real disaster,” he says.
A Republican who has donated money in multiple political campaigns, Casper says he doesn’t regret running for office, and, like any would-be politician, says “never say never” when asked if he will do it again. He also says he was surprised “about all that’s involved in it.”
Another setback, which Casper, sitting and chatting in the Oxford Exchange on a recent Thursday morning, connects to the unsuccessful city council run, was an attempt at turning the prominent and historic Alex. Brown & Sons building in downtown Baltimore into a high-end restaurant. The project was hurting before the pandemic, he says, and Covid essentially killed it. “I fell in love with the building,” Casper says. “That’s part of my problem, is I will fall in love with buildings and other things like that. But it wasn’t in a good location. I knew it wasn’t the best location, but I thought we could overcome it and it turned out we could not.”
In considering the location in context with the well-known decline of some big cities like Baltimore, Casper brings it back to Tampa and his run for office. “In Baltimore I saw what happens when a community vacates a city politically,” says Casper. “That could happen here if we don’t stay involved and engaged.”
