{"id":207266,"date":"2026-03-26T18:59:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T18:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/207266\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T18:59:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T18:59:06","slug":"chef-from-michelin-starred-tampa-restaurant-to-open-mei-in-downtown-st-pete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/207266\/","title":{"rendered":"Chef from Michelin-starred Tampa restaurant to open Mei in downtown St. Pete"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"\" style=\"white-space:pre-wrap;\">\u201cMy sister has always meant home to me, and Mei is a way to invite St. Pete into our version of home,\u2019&#8221; says Chamberlain. \u201cOur goal at Mei is to make you feel like you&#8217;re visiting a lifelong friend, sitting around a dinner table and sharing a meal and bottle of wine reminiscing over shared memories and plans for new ones.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"white-space:pre-wrap;\">Chamberlain\u2019s background includes time in Denver at MICHELIN-starred Beckon, where he trained in classical French and Nordic cuisine.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"white-space:pre-wrap;\">That experience now shapes Mei\u2019s approach, which combines European techniques with Japanese ingredients and cooking methods like binchotan grilling, alongside in-house fermentation, koji aging, dry aging, and fire-based cooking. <\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"white-space:pre-wrap;\">\u201cAfter coming back to Florida, I\u2019ve found the community in St.Pete to be one of the most supportive and interesting cities in the state,\u201d says Chamberlain. \u201cI really wanted to bring my experiences from Colorado, the ethos and intentionality of service, to the same areas that I grew up in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMy sister has always meant home to me, and Mei is a way to invite St. Pete into&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-207266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}