Doctor Tampa

Ferdie Pacheco has done it again. In Ybor City Chronicles (UPF, 1994) he brought to life the immigrant utopian that was Tampa's Ybor City in his childhood. In The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook (UPF, 1995), he and coauthor Adela Hernandez Gonzmart created something more than a cookbook, highlighting the recipes, history, and personalities behind of one of America's most famous Spanish restaurants. Now, in Pacheco's Art of Ybor City, the Renaissance man and bon vivant best known as Muhammad Ali's "Fight Doctor" - a man who has also worn the hats of family physician, Emmy Award-winning boxing commentator, historian, playwright, screenplay writer, and author of five books - here offers 33 of the paintings that have established his reputation as an artist. In these full-color reproductions we see the Ybor City of the 1930s and '40s (and earlier) that inspired Pacheco from the beginning. With the same flare and storyteller's gift evident in Ybor City Chronicles and The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook, he narrates the unpredictable course of his development as an artist and tells the story behind each printing in this collection. In the bright muralist-style colors that have become his stock-in-trade, Pacheco renders a storehouse of memories too vivid ever to grow dull. So long as he has hold of us, there is no Ybor City more real than this one - with its cigar factories, palm trees, bolita gangsters, trolley cars, clubs and diners and cafes, and the Spaniards, Cubans, Sicilians, and oddball personalities who walk its redbricked streets.

Out of secrets and dreams and romance, Adela Hernandez Gonzmart and Ferdie Pacheco re-create their passion for the Columbia in this narrated cookbook inspired by the nation's largest Spanish restaurant and Florida's oldest. Adela's affair with food is a family legacy that began more than 90 years ago, when her beloved grandfather Casimiro emigrated from Cuba to Tampa, then a little town on Florida's west coast. There, amid scrub palmettos and rattlesnakes, an enclave of Cubans, Spaniards, and Italians worked in the growing cigar industry in a neighborhood known as Ybor City. This book is both a history of the elegant family restaurant, which now boasts six locations in Florida, and a cookbook of 178 recipes that make them famous. It is also the biography of Adela, the heart of the Columbia, with commentary by Ferdie Pacheco, television's "fight doctor", Ybor City's famous raconteur, and Adela's neighbor as they grew up together in Ybor City.