Write Around Tampa

Toast

8552 Gunn Highway
Odessa

This is really just a breakfast/lunch place, but sometimes writers need to just sit and eat while they work, so I thought I’d check out the vibe.

Quality and pricing of food and drink:
Reasonably priced. $12.60 for scrambled eggs, corned beef hash, home fries and a hot tea. The hash was good, but the home fries included barely cooked green peppers and the entire potato, skins and all. Not appetizing. The eggs had those white patches in them, indicative of not so much scrambling as beating them around the grill a few times. I did check out someone else’s plate on the way out. They opted for the hash browns, which looked awesome.

Are there enough outlets?
Not really, but there was one located at the corner booth where I sat.

How’s the wifi?
No wifi. When I asked the server about it she said they do have it but the owner won’t share the password with them.

Will my muse come out?
Sadly, not really. It was an okay place to eat, but without wifi I could get very little work done and the place wasn’t so ambietic (that’s a word, I swear, to measure the amount of ambience in the ambience) that I was inspired to write anything creative or otherwise, including this post. I’m coming to you from a Starbucks right now.

How long can I park it?
They close at 2:00, so until at least then, though you probably won’t want to. They did have a counter, which looked inviting and I probably would have had a better experience sitting there, sipping tea and writing. I’m all about creating the second chances.

Final rating: 1 out of 5 laptops

Rachel Remick’s fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in various magazines, among them Rosebud, Bluestem and ellipsis . . . literature and art. A frequent contributor to women’s magazine Sasee, her writing has also been published in several volumes of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. She lives in Tampa, Florida.