Family Flan

A Tampa matriarch shares a family recipe that's traveled continents and generations

- BY JENNIFER JUSTUS

Sitting across from the Tampa restaurant that's been in her family for 120 years, Andrea Gonzmart Williams smooths her hand over a page from a yellow legal pad.

It’s where her grandmother's hand also moved across the paper decades ago as she wrote out the family recipe for Spanish custard.

“This is the flan,” says Williams, the fifth generation in her family to steward the Columbia Restaurant. “It was kind of my ice cream growing up. For my child, it was probably one of the first desserts she ever tried.”

The hands that wrote the cursive script also trained as a classical pianist at Juilliard. Adela Hernandez Gonzmart was one of the first women to graduate from the prestigious school. Williams grew up hearing her grandmother play the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona and followed her rhythm in both music and food.

Williams began working at the restaurant, filing papers, at age 10. She was hostessing by the following year and has since worked every station. After college, she became the first woman to cook in the Columbia kitchen. While she’s on the business side of the operation today, she still cooks often at home from The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook, which began from her grandmother's written pages on a legal pad. Williams discovered the pages recently in her grandmother's burgundy briefcase.