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TEMPLE TERRACE — You could say Augustin “Omi” Gutierrez started his food truck business as, well, a food van.
While working as an independent contractor for a large office chain, Gutierrez would keep a cooler in his van filled with ceviche to hand out to his customers to build relationships.
Who knew he was building a food truck business in the process?
Soon, those customers started buying the ceviche from Gutierrez.
That led to Omi’s Grill, a food truck he bought and set up down on Armenia Avenue (after being booted from his first location) about a year later.
And that led to the popular Omi’s Bar & Grill restaurant, now a Temple Terrace favorite specializing in Puerto Rican cuisine and other Latin influences at 7827 Temple Terrace Hwy. in the River Run Preserve.
Gutierrez, who lives in Wesley Chapel, bought a food truck in 2015, serving his specialty, Mofongo Bowls, and other Puerto Rican and Latin dishes, and worked it on the weekends.
He was booted from his first site, and then settled in on Armenia Avenue about a year later. The truck grew in popularity. Push came to shove, and he had a tough choice to make and eventually walked away from his more lucrative contractor job to follow his heart and make food fulltime.
Was he scared?
“Super,” Gutierrez said.
When COVID hit in 2020, everyone suddenly had a food truck.
“My street went from having two to having 8-10,” he said.
So, he started to look for a brick-and-mortar. Eventually, his ace in the kitchen, Joe Malave, a Temple Terrace resident, pointed Gutierrez to Tequila, a Mexican restaurant that was for sale.
“We bought it and haven’t looked back,” he says.
Liquor license in hand, Omi’s Grill became Omi’s Bar & Grill, and opened in April 2023.
Last month, Gutierrez sold his food truck.
Omi’s Bar & Grill is often cited as a local favorite on local Facebook groups, it has a 4.6 Google rating with more than 650 reviews, and it’s just getting started.
Last week, “Florida Eats,” a show that focuses on relatively unknown but popular restaurants, came out to film a feature about Omi’s.
“It’s really starting to take off now,” said Gutierrez, who said that the Temple Terrace Chamber of Commerce told him he is the first restaurant to offer Puerto Rican fare in the city.
The Mofongo Bowl is Omi’s most popular item, with a mashed deep-fried plantain, seasoned with herbs, spices and cilantro, as the base. You can order it with yellow rice and pigeon peas, or white rice and beans, and get it topped with a variety of proteins like fried or roast pork, which is marinated for a minimum of two days, fried or garlic chicken or flank steak.
But the garlic shrimp — wild caught from Argentina — is the best, Gutierrez says.
And the plantains are fresh, not frozen, as Gutierrez says he thrives to run a scratch kitchen.
“It’s hard to find a good, fresh scratch place anymore,” he said.
Omi’s also serves other meat and seafood dishes — octopus salad, anyone? — sandwiches, and “Crazy Fries” loaded with pork, chicken or steak.
We really like that the menu keeps it relatively simple.
Omi’s is Puerto Rican through and through, from the food to the weekly pig roast and live music on Saturday nights, but Gutierrez has a few surprises up his sleeves.
The smash burger, in fact, may be the best in Temple Terrace, as are the fries.
“That’s what really blew me up here with the American population,” Gutierrez said. “I season it a little differently. My way. That’s what they love about it.”
Don’t sleep on the rotisserie chicken, either. It’s fall-off-the-bone delicious, and Malave thinks it’s the most underrated item on the menu.
And because of his success with the smash burger, Gutierrez now has a Philly cheese steak sandwich that may not yet be on the menu, but is off the chain, as the kids might say.
“I grabbed the Philly and started thinking the same thing I did with the smash burger, so that’s what I did,” Gutierrez said. “Now, I got people hooked on that. And they’re like, dude, you need to put this on the menu.”
And while there is a full-service bar at Omi’s, consider washing down your food with a natural juice, like the passion fruit (most popular) or lemonade, just like the kind Gutierrez’s grandmother used to make for him growing up in Puerto Rico.
Not sure why, but the white rice and red beans have really lingered on our taste buds, like two forlorn lovers who share a moment and can’t get over each other, eagerly dreaming about when they shall meet again so they can once again bask in each other’s warmth.
