One World Cafe, Peoria, Ill.

Of all the major cities I’ve been through, Peoria might be the one that I’ve been through the most, yet visited the least. The reasons are twofold. Interstate 74, one of the main roads used to get anywhere east of the Quad-Cities that isn’t Chicago, goes right through Peoria and over the Illinois River. Since a lot of my trips have led to east of the Q-C, that’s meant a lot of trips over the river.

The second, as you might have guessed, involves the love of my life. Because the airport in the Q-C never flies on the days we need it to, Amy often flies into Peoria when she comes to visit, which has led me to drive to the airport on three separate occasions, each time worrying that I’d oversleep and be late. Of course, this has never happened, I’m just paranoid on these kinds of things. However, the one constant is that up until this past weekend, I’d never stopped in Peoria.

Well, with Amy making her final trip into the Peoria airport, now was the time to get it done, and we couldn’t have picked a much better place to make our first real visit to Peoria than One World Cafe, located just outside the campus of Bradley University. What sets One World apart is that it literally tries to live up to its name, becoming a melting pot of restaurant styles, and it manages to pull it off. Instead of just focusing on one specific style of cuisine like most places do, One World offers entrees inspired by places across the world, putting their own spin on each one.

That’s a desperately tricky move to pull off, because attempting to specialize in everything can often lead to doing nothing particularly well. Instead, One World goes the opposite direction and manages to get its multitude of styles correct. Personally, I think it’s because of their commitment to fresh ingredients and a small, intimate atmosphere. One World’s founders started out by running a simple one-room coffee place, and they haven’t forgotten those early roots, keeping the place small and paying close attention to quality in the ingredients they use.

What that means is that you can combine several different styles, similar to Chino Bandido’s combination of Chinese and Mexican. One World doesn’t go quite that crazy, but it does offer choices from seemingly every continent on its menu. From its appetizers alone, you can find a choice from India (Samosa), the Mediterranean (hummus), Mexico (salsa and nachos) and America (spinach artichoke dip). What’s more, all of these are made with the best ingredients, often using high-brow options. The hummus, which Amy and I both sampled, is exceptional, using a family recipe of pureed chickpeas, lemon, garlic, salt, tahini, olive oil and paprika. There might be a few secrets in there, but the only thing I know for sure is that whatever is in there, it’s really, really good.

The worldliness continues with the entree, regardless of whether it’s breakfast or lunch. At breakfast, scrambles dominate the menu, as does the Bungle sandwich, a bagel with an egg souffle and either vegetables or meat between it. You can also opt for one of One World’s six specialty coffees, served either hot or cold and with or without caffeine.

While all of that sounds tempting, the fact was that it wasn’t breakfast, and besides, there was something else that caught my eye. Any time you get a chance to try an entree called “Bacon and Mushroom Chicken”, you pretty much have to take advantage of the opportunity, and that’s exactly what I did. Of course, this being One World, this was no ordinary bacon and chicken creation. This sandwich is topped with ranch and served on a tomato-basil focaccia bun, making for a high-brow taste with high expectations.

There was no disappointment here. The mushrooms are sauteed perfectly, the Swiss melts well on the chicken and the ranch dressing pulls it all together. Then there’s the bun, which does what a good bun should by actually imparting flavor and improving the quality of what it holds. The tastes of tomato and basil really take this sandwich to another level over the garden variety chicken bacon ranch that many restaurants have done a thousand times. Throw in some mashed redskin potatoes, and you have quite a meal here.

Amy chose to go for another One World signature, the tomato melt, featuring diced tomatoes mixed with spices to create something good. The main star on her dish was actually her pureed hummus, but the melt was a pretty solid backup. All in all, a strong food day.

Turned out, it was too strong, because our meals were so good that we missed out on One World’s huge desserts. All of their desserts cost $6, and looking at them through the display case as we walked out, these things look legitimate. The Reese’s peanut butter pie in particular looked heavenly and huge, and I had to promise the guy behind the counter that next time, I’d grab a slice.

That’s not a promise I would mind keeping whatsoever. Variety and a lot of choices might not always work well in the restaurant industry, but One World has found a way to perfectly blend the cuisines of several cultures into one menu that’s sure to please anyone who walks through the cafe’s doors, no matter what part of the world they’re from.

Recap

Time to go: Breakfast or lunch. Either one is good, as One World specializes in both. Do attempt to avoid the college crowd.

Wait during my visit: None. Coming in at 11:30 meant that Amy and I successfully avoided the lunch rushers and the college crowd, making us able to grab a quick table.

Location: One World is at 1245 West Main Street in Peoria, Ill.

Parking: Not good, but it can be done. There’s a small city-owned lot a little bit past One World, which is incredibly helpful. Without that, it would all be street parking, which suits nobody.

Cost: Most entrees are about $10-15. You should be fine with that, unless you throw dessert or a drink on the order.

Seating arrangement: Tables and chairs.

Website: One World Cafe

Specialty items: One cuisine across the globe.

Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza, Tampa, Fla.

One of the first rules of running a restaurant is to stick to what you’re good at doing. Very few places can successfully pull off more than one kind of cuisine, and when they can, it’s usually ridiculously priced. When you add too much variety, what happens is you can dilute the quality of your menu, taking away from the things you do really well. Not everyone has to go the route of Louis’ Lunch or Five Guys and keep a bare-bones menu, but both places’ successful business models are built on identifying what they do well and sticking with it.

That’s what you’ll find at Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza, a Florida-based restaurant that actually started with an idea of a Brooklyn native. Anthony Bruno grew up eating pizza in Brooklyn, and after watching his father run a successful restaurant in Fort Lauderdale (which remains open today, Runway 84), he decided that he could also make a restaurant succeed. He decided that his specialty would be pizza, as he wanted to share the taste he grew up on with Floridians.

To that end came Anthony’s simplistic menu. You’re not going to find a slew of toppings available or pasta options at Anthony’s. Instead, your main choices are either pizza, sandwiches or chicken wings. Bruno’s father might have been able to pull off an expanded menu at Runway 84, but Bruno himself decided that the best course of action would be to emphasize quality.

As a result, all of Anthony’s restaurants are owned by the company rather than franchised, and Bruno constantly stresses the importance of consistency with Anthony’s pizzas. Hey, if I had the quality product that he had up for sale, I’d be concerned about being consistent myself.

This product is definitely worth having high standards, because Anthony’s pizzas are pretty unlike most other places. Coal-burning pizza tends to be found mostly in the Northeast, in the form of either New Haven, Conn.,’s style of apizza or in New York’s famous coal-burning ovens, going back to the Brooklyn connection that started all of this. While many pizza places use either an electric or a wood-burning oven to cook their pizzas, Anthony’s gets its coal-ovens up to 800 degrees to make your pizza.

This has two effects on it. First, it drastically cuts down on your waiting time. As anyone who has gone out for pizza knows, one of the most difficult parts is the wait for the pizza to be done after you order, which can be as much as 45 minutes in some locations. At Anthony’s, the waiting is not nearly as long. New York pizza is much thinner than Chicago’s deep dish, which cuts down on the time between those two. Plus, the 800-degree oven means that in just about five minutes, your pizza will be fully cooked. This does not mean you’ll have it four minutes after you order, but you won’t be spending a half-hour waiting either.

The wait is negated, however, by Anthony’s outstanding chicken wings. This is one of the few things that Anthony’s does besides pizza, and they do it very well. These wings are not breaded, they’re roasted in the coal ovens and cooked with caramelized onions. The wings are seasoned to perfection and are just delicious. The onions add an extra dimension of flavor, and of course, Amy chose to just take my word for it given her dislike of onions in many forms. But these things were great, sweet and soft.

On the pizza front, Anthony’s pizza is all about the char. Like Bob and Timmy’s, the bottom of your pizza is going to get burned by the charcoal. It’s just the way it is when you cook dough in that style, and there’s nothing wrong with it at all, because the smoky flavoring it adds is subtle, not overwhelming. It’s the pizza itself that shines, as Anthony’s focuses on both authentic Italian-style pizzas and a small number of specialty pies that put their own spin on the classic comfort food.

The specialty pies include creations such as the roasted cauliflower, topped with mozzarella and romano cheese and bread crumbs, and the Broccoli Rabe and Italian Sausage pizza. Oddly, some of Anthony’s toppings are only available on the specialty pies. For instance, you can order the Arugula Pie, but arugula is not one of the toppings Anthony’s has on its list. Perhaps they simply don’t see the point, because you can add whatever you want to a specialty pie from the toppings they do have.

That was what Amy and I opted for, getting the white pizza with mushrooms added to it. Anthony’s white pizza includes ricotta along with the mozzarella and romano, which is more often associated with lasagna than pizza but adds an interesting taste and texture to it. Plus, more cheese on something is almost never a bad thing.

That was the case here. The three cheeses work in perfect harmony together with both each other and the charred dough. The pizza is on the greasy side (after all, this is a place based on the New York style), but the taste is worth it and the grease can always be wiped off.    The mushrooms are cooked to perfection, and this pizza has all the parts that make pizza great. Of course, that’s because I’m partial to mushrooms, but that’s the beauty of pizza, you can try about six million combinations on the dough.

Amy’s friends Matt and Poly opted for a meatball pizza with ricotta and mushrooms, and this was also an excellent pizza. I’ve never been a huge fan of meat on pizza (and Amy, of course, won’t touch it at all), but this actually worked very well. You have five elements in this pie with the tomato sauce, ricotta, mushrooms, cheese and meatballs, and the combination is pretty awesome. Neither the sauce nor the cheese is overwhelming, nor does the coal mark interfere with the taste.

However, Anthony’s doesn’t stop at pizza. Being from New York, cheesecake is also something they do well, and as one would expect with a New York influence, this cheesecake is smooth and creamy. With a hint of citrus, a graham cracker crust and a dusting of cinnamon, this was outstanding. As good as I am at making cheesecakes, I couldn’t match this quality.

Quality over quantity is a big thing for many restaurants, and that’s been Anthony’s recipe for success. Even with several locations open now in the U.S., they haven’t forgotten where they came from, and that’s what makes them worth the visit.

Recap

Time to go: Lunch or dinner. This is more upscale, so I recommend a dinner plan.

Wait during my visit: None, the restaurant had plenty of spots open.

Location: Anthony’s is throughout Florida and the Northeast. Ours was at 1901 South Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa, Fla.

Parking: There’s plenty here.

Cost: These pies are not cheap. A large specialty pie can cost $20 before adding toppings. The taste is worth the price.

Seating arrangement: Tables and chairs.

Website: Anthony’s

Specialty items: Coal-fired pizza

The Colonnade, Tampa, Fla.

The best restaurants tend to have three things they can count as positives. As you might have guessed, the first, most important and non-negotiable one is taste, because if it doesn’t taste good, nothing else matters.

Along with taste are style and location. Style can range from elegant to budget to creative to colorful to simple, but every good restaurant has a niche of some kind. Location, the final factor of the restaurant trinity, is the one optional factor, because some restaurants simply don’t have location going for them, yet they still taste wonderful enough that people still repeatedly find their way to the building.

But location has never been a problem for the Colonnade, located right on the bay in Tampa. From your table, you have a perfect view of Tampa Bay, as you are literally right across the street from the water. The restaurant is actually on Bayshore Boulevard, which hugs Tampa Bay and allows residents of Tampa to walk along the bay. It’s a pretty beautiful sight, and a lovely scene for which to enjoy a meal. They advertise their window seats, and it’s easy to see why.

I’m pretty sure location also played a role in naming the restaurant. A colonnade is an architectural term, and it means a long row of joined columns, similar to St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican or Illinois’ Memorial Stadium. On Bayshore Boulevard, there is a long row of joined columns (albeit small ones) that adds greatly to the atmosphere of the bay. It doesn’t say on the website where the name comes from, but I’m betting it has something to do with those columns.

Even if you don’t get a table by the window, you’re still going to have a great experience here. The Colonnade’s location allows you to see the bay no matter where you are in the restaurant, and as you might have guessed from a restaurant that’s located that close to a major body of water, you’re here for one main reason: seafood.

As has been established, Tampa is one of the best places to go for great seafood, and the Colonnade certainly doesn’t disappoint. Their philosophy is to prepare all food on-site in the restaurant, which means it is all fresh and prepared that day. Fresher is almost always better by a wide margin, and this was the case from beginning to end.

First, you start off with a basket of corn muffins, which might not be seafood, but all great places have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually bread. The muffins are moist and flavorful, exactly what a restaurant’s bread should be. They give you eight to a basket, which means a lot of food, and we’re only getting started. As you’ve probably guessed, not a place to come for a light meal.

Up next, at Amy’s request, was the chance to try some gator bites. On my previous visit to Tampa with Amy, we both got to enjoy the greatness that is gator at Skipper’s, where the gator tastes like a high-quality pork. At the Colonnade, the gator bites are just as awesome. These pieces of gator are a lot like popcorn chicken, breaded and fried before being brought to you with a honey mustard dipping sauce.

My rule on breading is simple. It should either be thin and crunchy, or it should be tasty and flavorful, adding something different to the established taste of what you’re already eating. This falls in the latter category. The breading doesn’t change the taste of the gator meat too much, but it’s enough of a difference that it adds to the taste rather than merely getting in the way of the meat. The gator still provides that pork-like taste and texture, and the bites are just as delicious. Alligator might be one of my favorite creatures to eat.

I don’t have nearly as strong a history with the fish that I ordered for my main meal, but I had no choice on this one. Grouper is to Tampa seafood what oysters are to New Orleans or what deep-dish pizza is to Chicago. It’s considered to be Florida’s prime rib of the sea, and the Colonnade’s fried grouper sandwich has been voted the best in Tampa Bay. Yeah, that’s something that I have to find out for myself.

It was good, hot and juicy inside and cooked to perfection. The fish is light and flavorful, not cooked too long or too short. With vegetables and tartar sauce, it’s a wonderful sandwich. I probably would not have had it fried were I to get it again, but the batter was not a drawback here. Grouper is traditionally a fried fish, and it did work well after getting breaded and dropped in the fryer. All in all, this was absolutely worth finding out for myself.

But Amy’s special sandwich relegated the grouper to second place on our table. She opted for a scallop sandwich with bacon, which does not show up on the Colonnade’s normal menu, but was served as a special. Those scallops were what made this sandwich. Juicy and cooked to perfection, the scallops are simply amazing. With bacon and toppings added, this thing is a winner from start to finish. Once again, I love having her around to discover things with me, and she discovered an awesome find. By the end, despite my enjoyment of the grouper, I found myself wishing I’d opted for the scallops. It’s a wonder that the Colonnade doesn’t have it on its main menu, it’s that good.

Taste, style and location can make a restaurant become an icon in its chosen locality. Without taste, you don’t have a restaurant, but when you add location to it, you’re well on your way to entrenching yourself in the city as one of the places to go if you want a taste of your city. For nearly 80 years, the Colonnade has been giving its patrons a taste of Tampa as well as a view of Tampa. It’s a combination that should continue for years to come.

Recap

Time to go: I recommend lunch, as you can see the bay better and things have the potential to get crowded at night.

Wait during my visit: None. It wasn’t packed on a Tuesday lunch. I imagine it can get really busy.

Location: The Colonnade is at 3401 Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa, Fla.

Parking: Their lot is usually enough to handle crowds. You shouldn’t have much of an issue.

Cost: It can be pricey to eat good seafood. Plan on about $15 a person, but you do get a lot of food. This can be cheaper if fish are in season.

Seating arrangement: Tables and chairs.

Website: Colonnade

Specialty items: Seafood