Smugglers Tavern

St. Petersburg, Florida

Field Note

The word ‘Tampa’ can be a bit of a catch-all, an umbrella term for Clearwater, St. Petersberg and every town within a 30-minute drive of downtown. Smugglers Tavern exists at the southern tip of that expanse, a tiny dive bar that occupies one of a handful of islands sewn together by a network of ocean bridges.

The drive to Smugglers Tavern is a worthwhile tour of vacation homes and timeshares so pleasant that it’s hard to picture a dive bar of any authentically rusty variety at the end of the rainbow. But not only does Smugglers Tavern exist, it doubles as a liquor store and lives a few steps away from a stone crab & oyster shop. As Florida combinations go, it occupies a spot just above theme parks and price gouging.

A better analogy might be that Smugglers Tavern represents a better combo than dive bars and overstated, comically large signs, of which Smugglers has an epic example. The block letter sign sits above a modest porch that overlooks the bar’s parking lot, a communal lot among the double decker strip mall that houses Smugglers Tavern. The cubbyhole liquor store lives just inside the front door, a cooler for the cold stuff and a handful of shelves for the mixers and seemingly every variety of flavored vodka.

The space is as simple as it gets, a square room with a horseshoe bar in the middle ringed with tall, padded seats (with backs!). During this reviewer’s trip, the doors were open to let in the breeze off the literally surrounding ocean, giving Smugglers Tavern the vibe of a beach bar with a couple of extra walls. The beer selection runs the gamut of basic, timeless dive bar favorites (also Shock Top, a Florida dive bar staple it turns out), and this reviewer scored a pretty tasty Bloody Mary, so don’t be afraid to wander the catalog.

Aside from a handful of baseball trophies occupying a thrown-together shrine in one corner of the outside wall, the décor is built off of dive bar standard bar signs and a couple of TVs. On your visit, keep your eyes peeled for an epically-80s Smugglers Tavern sign that attempts to recreate a real Thunder in Paradise feel crossed with a dash of Magnum PI.

For our dive bar tour, Smugglers provided the perfect starting spot to establish a southern base before venturing north along the coast, with special attention paid to a gem that’s probably a 3-minute boat ride and a 20 minute winding drive away, Shadracks. And that’s really the story of Smugglers Tavern, a tiny Tampa dive bar that isn’t a Tampa dive bar at all, the farthest flung dive bar destination on the southern tip of the St. Pete peninsula.