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Snapshot: Tampa’s Cigar Culture | Listen

Tampa’s diverse cigar culture is steeped in history

At the corner of North Florida Avenue and East Francis Avenue in sunny Tampa, Florida, a soaring brick cathedral has overlooked the neighborhood for nearly 120 years. For decades it served as a spiritual center for the Tampa Heights neighborhood. Now the institution worships a different deity: cigars.

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The History

Angela Yue opened Grand Cathedral Cigars in the historic church in January 2021 after years of developing cigar shops and lounges in other states. Grand Cathedral is a cigar bar and lounge with live entertainment and private smoking spaces, plus retail space specializing in Arturo Fuente cigars. Yue quickly learned Tampa has a cigar scene like no other. “The Tampa cigar culture is so unique [in] that every demographic of people smokes cigars here,” says Yue. “It’s not uncommon on a Friday night to see four females sitting at the bar smoking a cigar by themselves, or younger people smoking; it’s really a way of life here in Tampa.”

That unique scene isn’t just due to the more casual Floridian culture, although Yue says looser laws around liquor licenses are a big help for business, allowing Grand Cathedral to have both a full bar and cigar retail. For nearly a century starting in the late 1800s, Tampa was the cigar-making capital of the world. J.C. Newman Cigar Co. was recently named the only remaining operational cigar factory in the United States. They’ve been hand-rolling cigars since 1895, in Tampa since 1954, and they now provide tours of the historic factory, El Reloj. J.C. Newman is located in Ybor City, the historic hub of cigar making in Tampa, which was founded in 1885 by its namesake Vicente Martinez Ybor.

The People

In the early 1900s, there were around 200 cigar factories in Ybor City and almost everyone in town worked for one of them. Immigrants from Spain, Italy, Cuba, Germany, China, and other countries flooded Tampa for these job opportunities. “We had this melting pot of cultures, of languages, of religions, all here working together in the cigar industry,” says Drew Newman, fourth-generation owner of J.C. Newman and general counsel for the company. “It was not very common for women to be working. But in the cigar industry, men and women worked side by side.” Employees were paid but also received a daily ration of cigars, which meant most everybody smoked.

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Making and tasting cigars has a lot in common with spirits and even with cooking. J.C. Newman’s cigars, which are still hand rolled as they were a century ago, are made using carefully crafted recipes that blend different types of tobacco from around the world. Cigar smokers also choose their blends like they might a cocktail. Yue says most dedicated cigar smokers will smoke multiple in a day, starting with a lighter-bodied cigar in the morning, the way you’d order a mimosa at brunch, and progressing to full-bodied cigars in the evening, like a rich after-dinner scotch. King Corona Cigars, with two locations in Tampa, one in Ybor City and one at International Plaza, is popular with African American fraternities and sororities that often hold conventions in town. Black-owned cigar bar Chaney Cigar Lounge is another well-loved spot to pair red wines and whiskeys with earthy Nicaraguan and bold Cuban cigars.

The Culture

Although statistics in the US vary depending on the type of cigar, premium cigars like the ones found in many lounges are mostly smoked by affluent white men, according to research from Oxford Academic. Ybor City and Tampa are unique in their diverse, inclusive cigar bar culture. “I love walking into a cigar lounge here in Tampa and seeing people, different ages, different races, speaking different languages, different backgrounds, different socioeconomic status,” says Newman. “And none of that matters, because they’re all there together enjoying a cigar.”

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