By: Helen Freund
Times Food and Dining Critic
It’s a sweltering, mid-July day in Ybor City, and Drew Newman is visibly excited — elated, even.
The great-grandson of J.C. Newman Cigar Co. founder Julius Caesar Newman is showing us around his latest project: an ambitious renovation of the 116-year-old Sanchez y Haya building.
We tread through dirt, tuck beneath scaffolding and plastic sheeting, and climb up unfinished stairs and past exposed concrete beams. We are all sweating profusely, but it’s hard to not get caught up in the excitement: Newman’s enthusiasm is contagious.
In just a few months, the roughly $20 million project will wrap, and Newman will debut what has been a years-long, painstakingly laborious endeavor. Nate Siegel, a co-owner of the Tampa restaurant Willa’s and proprietor of St. Petersburg seafood spot Cheeky’s, is consulting on the project. Together, the duo took the Tampa Bay Times on an exclusive tour of the two-story building, currently an active construction site but the future home of a classic American restaurant, a swanky cigar lounge and a boutique hotel.
Here’s everything to know about what’s in store.
The history
Across the street, inside the historic brick El Reloj building, is the J.C. Newman Cigar Co.’s cigar-making factory and museum — the last traditional cigar factory in the country. Like the Sanchez y Haya building, El Reloj, with its iconic 100-foot clock tower, was built in 1910. At the time, it was one of Tampa’s 150 cigar factories. The Sanchez y Haya building, at 1601 E Columbus Drive, was constructed to serve the cigar workers at the factory as well as neighbors and visitors to the area. While it initially had a restaurant and lounge on the first floor and a hotel on the second floor, over the years the building’s colorful history has included a grocery store, distillery, coffee mill, knitting shop and Prohibition-era speakeasy. At the end of its tenure, the building housed the Chip-In, a notorious dive bar that shuttered in the 1990s, after which the dilapidated building sat vacant for decades.
Newman’s family purchased the Sanchez y Haya building in August 2020 for $650,000. Newman, the fourth-generation owner of J.C. Newman Cigar Co., said the building was barely standing at the time.
“For years we would watch from our cigar factory as potential buyers would visit the building hoping to redevelop it but ultimately walk away after seeing its condition,” Newman said. “We realized that if we didn’t try to save this building no one else would, and we didn’t want to lose this piece of Tampa’s history.”
Rehabbing and renovating has been an extremely timely and costly endeavor, tallying around $20 million in total, Newman said. His team has received assistance from a variety of sources, including the East Tampa Community Redevelopment Agency, which invested $5 million; a $600,000 grant from Hillsborough County and $2.3 million from the National Park Service.
Part of the National Historic Landmark District, it was the first building in the city of Tampa to be built out of reinforced concrete. Since 2023, the team has been working to manually restore beams, ceilings, columns and has used more than 1,400 bags of concrete to patch the building’s original frame. There have been other hurdles, including a colony of roughly 5,000 bats that had to be relocated (they now live in architecturally recreated bat hives across the street).
“Our part of the historic district has always been forgotten,” Newman said, adding that he hopes this project will act as an anchor to “attract further preservation and development” in the neighborhood.
“We’re not restoring the building to flip it and sell it,” he said.
The restaurant and cigar lounge
Newman said he drew inspiration from other destinations catering to niche food and beverage experiences, like the wine-producing region of Napa and the Kentucky Bourbon trail — both of which draw connoisseurs from all over the world. He thought: “Why not build that for cigars?”
He hopes the success of his neighboring cigar factory — which last year clocked 25,000 visitors — is an indicator that tourists and locals will find something to love in his new endeavor.
Just like the original building, the renovated Sanchez y Haya space will have three entrances and three different businesses under one roof: Elaine’s, a contemporary American restaurant, and the cigar lounge Stanford Cigar Club, on the first floor; and an 11-room boutique hotel — The Inn at The Reloj — on the second.
To help design and curate the space, Newman approached Siegel, after the opening of Willa’s. But getting Siegel on board wasn’t easy, he said: It took roughly two years for him to agree to the project, because at first he thought it was “a crazy idea.” “But I finally broke him down,” Newman said.
Siegel, who has been working alongside Newman for the past two years, said he was drawn to the project because of the building’s location and deep cultural and historical significance.
“This is a mecca for cigar smokers and also history lovers,” Siegel said.
Elaine’s is named after Newman’s grandmother, Elaine Newman, and is an homage to both her cooking as well as his grandparents’ hospitality and role as “consummate hosts.”
Newman recalled how his grandmother, who learned to cook during trips to Paris and was the director of community relations for the department store Maas Brothers, was always welcoming people into their home, where his grandfather would make cocktails while she prepared a meal.
To design the space, the team poured over archival photographs of the original building, incorporating elements that nod to its former life, including the original bar. The restaurant will seat roughly 100 people inside and include a separate private dining area, a 12-seat bar and additional patio seating.
The restaurant’s street-facing doors are bright red, a nod to Elaine Newman’s penchant for all things “fire engine red,” her grandson said, including her shoes, clothes and car.
There will also be an homage to a relic of another long-lost Ybor institution: The “power table” in the corner of La Tropicana Cuban Cafe, which was reserved for Roland Manteiga, the longtime editor of La Gaceta. A corner of Elaine’s will house the table with a reserved sign along with a replica of the iconic red phone, which sat on the carved wooden table and was used to alert reporters of breaking news (or gossip). Old photographs taken from newspaper archives will decorate the walls, offering diners a glimpse of the “movers and shakers” who once held court there.
The menu at Elaine’s is still being designed, Siegel said, but he described the theme as “classic American with continental influences,” and said guests can expect a raw bar selection and prime steaks among other dishes that evoke nostalgia. Some will be culled directly from Elaine Newman’s salvaged recipes. In a nod to the neighborhood’s roots, Siegel said there will be Spanish, Cuban and Italian influences, including a Cuban sandwich, rice and beans, and a roasted pork or chicken. In overall decor and theme, Siegel said Elaine’s will evoke the “Great American Brasserie,” a place where white tablecloths and professional service will set the scene for a casual breakfast and lunch spot and a more elegant and refined dinner experience. “I want it to be nice,” Newman said. “I always want it to be accessible. It can’t feel elitist or snooty.” Inside Stanford’s Cigar Club, which is named for Newman’s grandfather, floor-to-ceiling windows will look out on Columbus Avenue, and guests will be greeted by a long, wraparound bar to their right when they enter. Siegel said the lounge will feature a humidor showcasing a large variety of J.C. Newman cigars, a shaded patio outside and cozy booths for lounging. He described the space as “casual, with fine dining details,” and said he imagines the space as a place that’s swanky but not exclusive — no private membership required, he said.
The bar menu will focus on brown spirits with an emphasis on barrel-aged whiskeys, and will include a full cocktail program, wine list and a small food menu.
Altogether, Siegel said he hopes to employ roughly 75 people and said that interviews for an executive chef and other members of the spot’s executive team are already underway. It will help, he hopes, that the restaurant is offering a full benefits package to all employees — hourly and salaried — including a 401K and parental leave (a rarity in the current restaurant landscape).
Siegel’s role as a principal consultant on the project means he won’t stay forever, but he plans to stick around at least the first few months until Newman’s team is ready to take the reins.
The hotel
Upstairs, The Inn at El Reloj will feature 11 rooms in a boutique setting. Both Siegel and Newman emphasized that the project is a restaurant with a hotel, not a hotel with a restaurant (they referenced the building’s boarding house days and said they chose to run the spot independently rather than partner with an outside management company).
Nine of the rooms are a standard 300 square feet while two larger suites are roughly 850 square feet. A breezeway in the middle was once occupied by a “jungle” of plants before renovation, Newman said, and will be reimagined as a landscaped “sky garden.” There’s also a long wraparound porch that will be exclusive to hotel guests.
The timeline
Newman said they are shooting for a fall opening and hope to be fully operational by Thanksgiving. At Elaine’s, Siegel said they will first launch with breakfast and lunch service and then eventually add dinner. Once fully open, Elaine’s, Stanford’s Cigar Club and the Inn at El Reloj will be open seven days a week. “Our hope is that the building will look and feel just like it did in the early 1900s,” Newman said.
