Tampa’s The Floridian selling its assets as owner plans retirement

The Floridian, a popular Tampa eatery best known for its Cuban sandwiches, is selling its assets and the lease to its space as its longtime owner prepares to retire.

In an email Friday, owner Harold Seltzer writes that “I’m selling the leasehold improvements, all FF&E and small wares, and assigning my lease which is less than half of current market rents in the area.

“It’s an incredible deal!”

Seltzer, The Floridian’s owner, says the business itself is not for sale and that he owns all the intellectual property. But if the eventual buyer wants to operate as The Floridian, he is willing to license the name.

According to marketing materials from Axxos Commercial Real Estate, the shop has placed all of its furniture, fixtures and equipment for sale at the 1,500-square-foot space at 4534 W. Kennedy Blvd. The deal includes an assignment of the lease, which has eight years remaining on it.

The sale price is listed as “subject to offer.”

The listing shows that the restaurant has sit-down dining, counter seating and a full kitchen.

The kitchen includes an 8-foot hood and Ansul System (fire suppression); six-burner stove and oven; two fryers; a three-door glass cooler and several under-counter coolers; a freezer; and an in-floor grease trap inside the back of the restaurant.

There are also pots, pans, small wares, tables, chairs, bar stools and shelving for sale.

As for the lease, the current rent is $2,937 per month —$23.50 per square foot — for three more years. It will then increase to $3,250 — $26 per square foot — for the next five.

The firm says market rent on Kennedy Boulevard or nearby Dale Mabry, both heavily travelled commercial districts near the heart of the city’s business community, is $45 to $55 per square foot.

“Please keep in mind this is a total turnkey operation,” Axxos writes in the listing. “You will have an opportunity to open within days or a few weeks once you bring in your own concept.”

The sale of The Floridian’s assets, when it happens, will bring to an end the long, storied career of local restaurateur who traces his roots to a butcher shop in Montreal.

Seltzer is the former owner of the Harold Seltzer Steakhouse chain, which closed its final location about two years ago. His LinkedIn profile shows that he’s owned the sandwich shop since 2009. 

Company website

According to a 2023 profile in the Business Observer, his grandfather Sam ran the NDG Meat Market in Montreal for years until Sam’s sons took over and operated it for 60 years.

Harold Seltzer began working at the shop as an 8-year-old and stayed through his teens.

The shop in those days supplied burger patties to the A&W restaurant chain. One of his jobs was to work the patty machine starting at 6 a.m. People, he says, would stop what they were doing to watch “this little tiny kid working with an apron” on the machine, he told the Observer.

Seltzer, who would work at the shop during the summers, eventually put himself through undergraduate and law school but “had no intention of going into that business. Ever.”

In 1995, Seltzer was in his 30s and a partner at a Montreal law firm “doing extremely well.” But he had young children, and there were serious political issues in the country that year as voters were deciding whether Quebec would separate from Canada.

“I wanted to grow a business. And my family, we were very concerned about the political situation, and we kind of wanted to get out of the country because if Quebec separated from the rest of Canada it would have been a major mess,” he told the Observer in 2023.

“I thought it was a great time to move in pursuit of a business opportunity,” Seltzer added. “Which is what I did.”

Seltzer, who chose Florida because his in-laws at the time had a condo in Sarasota, opened his first Sam Seltzer’s Steakhouse in 1995 in Tampa. It was on Dale Mabry Highway, just south of Hillsborough Avenue and less than a mile from the stadium.

Over the next seven years he opened six more Sam Seltzer’s before selling the business in 2004.

According to reports, at its peak the chain had 13 locations, mostly along the Gulf Coast, but filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and shut down for good in May 2010.

A couple of months after the closure, Seltzer reached out to some of the property owners who’d leased to Sam Seltzer’s, seeing if he could take a look. He ended up buying the St. Petersburg and Port Richey restaurants, the last two that opened while he was in charge.

“They closed in May,” he told the Observer in the 2023 interview. “I purchased the contents of those two restaurants in July. I refurbished them and I hired back over 150 people that had lost their jobs in the middle of recession. And I changed the name from Sam’s to Harold’s.”

He also took out a full-page ad in the then-St. Petersburg Times “to send the message that the original founder was back.”

In 2023, he closed a Clearwater location and then sold off the two remaining Harold Seltzer Steakhouse restaurants.

At the time, he said in the interview, that he was spending a lot of time on the road going from restaurant to restaurant, traveling up to 100 miles on Fridays when he worked at The Floridian.

“I’m very hands-on, and if there's a plumbing blockage or an air conditioner that breaks down or whatever, I get called seven days a week,” he said at the time. “I don't have a district manager and director of operations as I did back in the day. So it's really consuming.”

As for what’s next for Seltzer, simple. “I’m planning to fully retire,” he writes in the email.