FLORIDA | CHEF PROFILES
Inside Maru: Chef Billy Brannen Brings Romance to a Tampa Rooftop
Maru | $$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | Photos by Studio 1415 |
Aug. 29, 2025
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
The first thing you notice about Maru isn’t the view—though yes, the sunsets on the seventh floor of Bayshore Gardens are outrageously pretty. It’s the food. A strip of hamachi laid out in an aguachile where dashi sneaks in under the chili, or a tiradito scattered with crunchy little rice crackers Brannen brought back from Japan. The menu reads like a chef who isn’t trying to impress you so much as convince himself he’s found the right balance.
That chef, Billy Brannen, didn’t set out to be anyone’s culinary savior. In 2008 he was just a kid drifting across Georgia from Jesup to Savannah, where he stumbled into a job at a friend’s aunt’s sushi joint. Hosting turned into bussing, bussing into the line, and somewhere along the way he realized kitchens gave him what school never did: a way forward. “It became a path,” he says. “A direction.”
Maru Chef Billy Brannen
Brannen has now taken over the kitchen at Maru, a rooftop bar dressed up as date night, but with a seriousness about Nikkei food that goes beyond the cocktails and champagne list. Japanese precision meets Peruvian exuberance, and Brannen plays referee. He’ll make a sauce from bonito flakes and sneak in Peruvian peppers, a sleight of hand that turns out layered and sharp.
His road here ran through kitchens in Jacksonville Beach and Alys Beach, a company-man tour that forced him to adapt. “One size fits one,” he says of the way he learned to manage cooks. Every kitchen, every crew, every fire-line sprint required a different version of him. It made him less of a technician, more of a leader.
Caviar service
What he brought back from Japan on a scholarship trip was something else entirely: intention. He noticed the way even a rice cracker was treated with respect. Now at Maru, a dish isn’t just plated; it’s arranged with care, meant to hold up against the chaos of service. “Whether it’s two people or two hundred, it doesn’t change,” he says.
Lobster roll
Maguro Tiradito
It would be easy to sell Maru as a rooftop with good bubbles and flattering lighting—and it is—but the story is Brannen. A grandson of a Georgia farmer who taught him work ethic without ever calling it that. A father of three who spends his rare off-days at the pool or on the couch, not behind a stove. A chef who admits he didn’t plan this, but once the kitchen pulled him in, he never looked back.
Maru is the proof: part romance, part rigor, and entirely Brannen’s.
