26340 Silver Maple ParkwayOne more full day in Tampa. This will be the last of the blogs from my Florida trip so if you tuned out, you can tune back in now.
It has been almost a year since J and I last ate in a restaurant. Looking back over my blog posts, our stop at Reed City Brewing on March 22, 2020 was the last time I blogged about dining in somewhere. I was a few weeks behind on actually blogging because this stop was on the way home from a trip to Traverse City. I believe our last time in a restaurant was actually March 8, 2020.
My co-worker and I were pretty much on the same page on this trip. We didn’t want to be anywhere there were large groups and throngs on maskless people.
We did carry-out all week. We’d pick things up on our way to job sites and eat in the car or once we got to our workspaces. By the tend of the week, Co-Worker was getting tired of cold fries and asked if we could find a place that wouldn’t be packed to sit down and have a hot meal.
The hotel we were staying at was in Wesley Chapel…about 25 minutes north of Tampa. There were a lot of chain restaurants in the area and I assumed these would be our safest bet.
I picked a chain casual dining place just across the road from our hotel. I had never heard of it but some research showed it was operated by a familiar name.
Bubba’s 33 is Texas Roadhouses take on sports bar. The restaurant is meant to compete with the likes of Buffalo Wild Wings and Hooters. The spin-off restaurant was launched in 2013 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. There are a couple locations in Michigan…both in the Detroit area in Taylor and Macomb.
The Bubba’s 33 in Wesley Chapel is right next to a Texas Roadhouse. The address is Silver Maple Parkway but the business actually sits on Golden Maple Road…and the first time you see it, you’re driving on State Road 56. If you’re coming from I-75, you have to go past the building quite a ways to the next stop light then double back.
Bubba’s 33 looks really familiar when you walk in. It’s pretty easy to tell there’s a relationship here with Texas Roadhouse. The layout of the restaurant is the familiar. Bubba’s 33 looks like a sports bar chain which can be comforting and actually was comforting to someone who was slightly nervous about eating in a restaurant….in Florida…during COVID.
We still had a full day of work ahead of us so we both got Coke’s to drink. It was Super Bowl Sunday an Co-Worker really wanted to add to the amount of wings that were going to be eaten that day so he got six traditional Buffalo wings for us to share to start out. He hates the flats so I grabbed all three of those and left the drummies to him. The wings were big, juicy, crispy, and slightly hot from the medium Buffalo sauce he went with. They didn’t last long once they were brought out as an appetizer.
The menu is a pretty typical sports bar men. There are wings (obviously), pizzas, sandwiches, and burgers. There were actually a couple of burgers that sounded pretty good but I always come back to the one with a fried egg.
I ordered the Sunshine Burger. As the name implies, this burger has a fried egg and bacon on top of two “Bubba’s signature beef patties” and American cheese. The sandwich was really big. The burger patties are “smashed” but they’re still pretty thick and cooked a little further than I would to medium. They’re still really juicy and really crumbly. In an interview done with Forbes in 2019, the CEO says the thing that makes Bubba’s standout in a crowded sports bar chain landscape is the quality of their food. The burger and bread here were both pretty delicious.
The sandwich came with some battered fries. They were tasty and there was more than I could eat on the plate. I’m not always a fan of this type of fry but that never stops me from eating everything on my plate.
Bubba’s 33 is pretty much what I expected it to be. It’s a chain sports bar where you always know what you’re going to get….and that’s not always a bad thing. I had a lot of anxiety walking in to a restaurant to eat but groups were spaced out and mask wearing was being enforced (unlike some of the other places I was in that week). Once I settled in and started eating, everything seemed right.