Famed Seltzer's steakhouse closed, St. Petersburg building sold

Harold Seltzer’s Steakhouse, which has served meals in the Tampa Bay market under two names for nearly 30 years, has closed its final restaurant.

The Ross Realty Group, which represented Seltzer’s, announced Wednesday that the restaurant building at 3500 Tyrone Blvd. had been sold for $3.9 million. The buyer was Services Corporation International, a national funeral and cremation services company.

The sale follows the restaurant’s closing Sept. 30. Seltzer’s Port Richey restaurant closed in May and one in Clearwater closed last year.

With the St. Petersburg location shut down and sold, a local restaurant chain that traced its lineage to a Montreal butcher shop is gone after serving meals to local diners since 1995.

That’s when Harold Seltzer, then a lawyer in Montreal, moved to Tampa and opened a steak house named in honor of his grandfather, Sam.

The first Sam Seltzer’s Steakhouse was on Dale Mabry Highway, just south of Hillsborough Avenue and less than a mile from the stadium.

Seltzer told the Business Observer in an interview last year that it served over 500,000 customers the first year, a metric that convinced him and his investors to expand.

Over the next seven years he opened six more Sam Seltzer’s before selling the business in 2004.

According to reports, at its peak the chain had 13 restaurants, mostly along the Gulf Coast. But after Seltzer left, the company fell on hard times. It filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and shut down for good in May 2010.

Shortly after the closures, Seltzer says he was approached by several landlords of Sam Seltzer’s restaurants to gauge his interest in reopening.

He wound up buying the St. Petersburg and Port Richey locations which happened to be the last two opened before he left.

“They closed in May,” Seltzer told the Business Observer. “I purchased the contents of those two restaurants in July. I refurbished them and I hired back over 150 people that had lost their jobs in the middle of recession. And I changed the name from Sam’s to Harold’s.”

In 2020, he opened the Clearwater restaurant.

That one, it turns out, was the first to close. It shut down July 1, 2023, after a new owner bought the property and canceled its lease, Seltzer said.

Not long after that, Seltzer listed the business and leasehold to the 10,360-square-foot Port Richey restaurant for sale.

At the time, Seltzer, who also owns a Cuban sandwich shop on Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa named The Floridian, told the Business Observer that he was looking to slow down.

“Up until the Clearwater restaurant closed in July, I had four restaurants in four different cities,” he said in the interview. “And like I said, I work six plus days a week. And I'm just trying to manage my life a little bit better.”

Elliott Ross, president of The Ross Realty Group, and Chris Shryock, a senior associate, represented Harold Seltzer in the transaction. Melanie Jackson of Cushman & Wakefield Tampa Bay represented SCI.