Tommy's Chophouse opened this month at 1622 E. Seventh Ave., occupying the ground floor of the Kress Contemporary building in Ybor City. The steakhouse comes from Kenneth Emery's Foodi Group — which also runs Ocean Ink Raw Bar a few blocks east on Seventh Avenue and Burwell's Stone Fire Grill in Charleston, S.C. — and it arrives with an old federal vault in the building that Emery's team is converting into a private dining room.
Foodi Group's move into the steakhouse format gives the group two active concepts within a few blocks on Seventh Avenue. The operator's presence at Ocean Ink provides an established local footprint, though the two concepts target distinct occasions: a raw bar and a steakhouse share a corridor without significant menu overlap.
The kitchen is all-electric, no gas — a configuration Foodi Group bills, via Instagram, as one of the first of its kind for a steakhouse in the country. The claim is the operator's own and has not been independently verified. Still, the decision to forgo gas in a steak-focused kitchen is a meaningful operational commitment: steakhouses have historically depended on high-BTU gas burners for searing, and building an all-electric program at this category represents a departure from the segment's standard infrastructure.
The menu positions Tommy's away from the conventional steakhouse cut list. Hanger and shoulder filet anchor the program alongside traditional cuts and wagyu sourced from small American ranches. Both the hanger and shoulder filet tend to appear at the margins of most steakhouse menus, if at all — they're cuts that reward technique and sourcing more than prestige nomenclature, and leading with them signals a kitchen oriented around differentiation rather than the familiar prime-and-filet default.
