When Jeff Gigante walked into the Sundial in downtown St. Petersburg, it didn’t feel like a typical site visit. It felt personal.
“St. Pete’s my hometown,” Gigante told Tampa Bay Business & Wealth. “So this is a real homecoming for me.”
The longtime restaurateur is bringing Forbici Modern Italian to the Sundial, a mixed use property that has struggled in recent years to attract consistent dining traffic.
Gigante sees the project as both a business opportunity and a chance to help reset one of downtown St. Petersburg’s most visible properties.
“This place has really fallen hard,” he said. “It’s been a blight for too long.”
Gigante is co founder of Next Level Brands, the hospitality group behind Boulon Brasserie & Bakery and Union New American in Tampa.
The St. Pete opening marks the next major expansion for Forbici, which debuted in Tampa’s Hyde Park Village and quickly became one of the area’s most talked about Italian restaurants.
A familiar menu, adapted for the coast
The St. Pete location will retain about 90% of the Forbici menu served in Hyde Park, including its Roman style pizzas and shareable plates. But Gigante said coastal markets require their own point of view.
“When you’re close to the water, you have to respect that,” he said. “We’ll be adding more seafood and leaning a little more coastal.”
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That approach mirrors how Gigante has built concepts throughout his career. The foundation stays consistent, but the execution responds to the neighborhood.
A concept years in the making
Forbici represents a turning point in Gigante’s career. After decades building the Ciccio Restaurant Group, he launched Forbici as his first concept outside that umbrella.
Raised in St. Petersburg after moving from New Jersey as a child, Gigante entered the restaurant business while pursuing acting, eventually choosing hospitality as his long term path.
He spent years reinvesting profits, building slowly and learning how scale, staffing and culture intersect.
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Forbici, which takes its name from the Italian word for scissors, reflects that discipline. Roman pizza is cut with scissors, a detail Gigante often points to as symbolic of the brand’s simplicity and precision.
Bringing the concept to downtown St. Petersburg closes a loop. It returns his first solo brand to the city where his story began, backed in part by local St. Pete investors, some of whom Gigante has known for decades.
Local backing and regional confidence
This is not a distant expansion driven by outside capital.
A portion of the investor group behind Forbici Sundial includes St. Petersburg business leaders, reinforcing Gigante’s belief that the city can support large scale dining concepts with staying power.
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“St. Pete is on fire right now,” he said. “We’re excited to bring our hospitality, our energy, live music, all of it.”
Scale and ambition at Sundial
At roughly 400 seats, Forbici Sundial will be one of the largest restaurants in downtown St. Petersburg. Renderings show a design by Zébulon Perron, who also designed Boulon and Union in Tampa.
The space includes a large outdoor patio, multiple bars, private dining areas, live music indoors and out and televisions positioned for major sporting events.
The restaurant will also launch with the company’s branded happy hour, which Gigante described as aggressive and festive.
Staffing and execution
Gigante acknowledges that scale brings challenges, particularly when it comes to staffing. To ensure consistency, the company plans to bring an opening crew from Tampa while training new hires locally in St. Pete.
“Forbici in Tampa is in Hyde Park Village,” he said. “We understand mixed use environments. Staffing is always the challenge, but when we put the call out, the response is strong.”
What comes next
The St. Pete opening is part of a broader regional plan. Gigante confirmed Sarasota is next, with a lease in the works. Additional concepts in Pinellas County are also under consideration.
“This is the first of several restaurants we want to do there,” he said.
For Gigante, the Sundial project is about more than expansion. It’s about returning to his roots, helping revive a cornerstone downtown property and proving that St. Petersburg can sustain large scale hospitality concepts built on consistency, atmosphere and local ownership.
