Florida's oldest restaurant — Columbia opened in 1905 in Ybor City, founded by Cuban immigrant Casimiro Hernandez to serve Tampa's cigar-rolling Spanish and Cuban workers. James Beard America's Classics 2012. The 1905 Salad, the Spanish bean soup, the deviled crab croquettes, the flamenco dancers on weekends in the original Don Quixote dining room. Less polished than the modern Tampa Bay destinations, more about over a century of cultural-anchor status in Tampa's most historically Spanish-immigrant neighborhood. For Spanish-Cuban dining at the genuinely institutional level in one of America's oldest continuously-operating restaurants.