Skipper's Smokehouse

Blues legend Lonnie Mack called it "the club that washed ashore," and once you've seen it you understand why. Skipper's is a ramshackle sprawl of cracker and Key West architecture on Skipper Road in north Tampa, covered in murals, hung with weathered posters and neon, with an oyster bar full of vintage junk including an antique moonshine still and a Pachinko machine.

Three Air Force buddies who met while stationed in Alaska bought the place in 1980 with a simple goal: never be cold again. Their little smokehouse takeout counter turned into a full restaurant and, out back, one of the most distinctive concert spaces in the Southeast.

That's the Skipperdome — a backyard stage with a sand beach, a covered tiki deck, mismatched benches and picnic tables, and a canopy of hundred-year-old live oaks overhead. The booking runs blues, reggae, zydeco, bluegrass, jazz, folk, rock and world beat, with artists arriving from around the corner and from Nigeria, Madagascar, Brazil, Russia and the British Isles.

Buddy Guy played here. So did John Mayall and Albert King, and a young Derek Trucks. Skipper's won Best Blues Club in America in 2001, got Adam Richman on TV for its grouper reuben, closed in 2020 after forty years, and then reopened — same owners, same oaks — as Skipper's 2.0.