Ciccio Restaurant Group brings Meeting House to 901 S. Howard Ave. on August 20, stepping into a SoHo space that Daily Eats vacated on June 15. The name is not a fresh invention: The Old Meeting House occupied this address for more than 50 years before Daily Eats moved in, making the revival a deliberate acknowledgment of the block's history rather than a rebranded version of the outgoing tenant.
The window between Daily Eats closing and Meeting House opening runs to about nine weeks — a short turnaround for a concept reworking an existing operation rather than building from scratch. That speed tracks against the continuity Ciccio is preserving: the same team that ran Daily Eats stays on, and several menu staples carry over with them. The steak and eggs bowl, which built a following under the previous operation, holds its place on the new menu.
The changes come in what surrounds those holdovers. Meeting House introduces a burger lineup approaching double digits in options and a handmade mac and cheese built on JayLuigi pasta and aged cheeses. The JayLuigi sourcing puts a named local producer at the center of a dish that most operations would execute with commodity product. Service covers lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, giving the address the full-day coverage a foot-traffic-dependent stretch of South Howard demands.
Ciccio has operated in SoHo since the 1990s and now runs roughly 30 restaurants across the region, a portfolio that includes Fresh Kitchen, Green Lemon, Taco Dirty, and Water + Flour. Meeting House does not represent an expansion into unfamiliar territory so much as a continuation of the group's hold on one of Tampa's most competitive dining corridors. Reviving the Old Meeting House name — rather than importing an established Ciccio brand into the space — signals a read on South Howard as a corridor where neighborhood identity still carries commercial weight.
The address opens August 20. South Howard absorbed the Daily Eats closure in under three months, and with a known operator, a preserved staff, and a name carrying more than 50 years of local recognition behind it, the transition carries considerably less risk than a ground-up launch at the same address would. The question the next few months will answer is whether the burger program and the pasta sourcing give Meeting House enough distinct character to hold the room past the initial reopening audience.
