Cousin Vinny's Sandwich Co. will make its national television debut on Friday, July 10, when its episode of Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives airs at 9 p.m. on Food Network. For a Tampa sandwich shop that once sold its first orders out of a commissary kitchen with weekend-only pickup, the booking caps one of the fastest rises the local food scene has seen in years.
The business started in 2023 as a ghost kitchen. Co-founders Vincent “Vinny” Andriotti, the executive chef, and Russell “Cuz” Leone, the operating partner, ran it out of a commissary on Nebraska Avenue, where customers could collect orders only on Saturdays and Sundays. Andriotti and Leone built the brand with partners Jake Schmidt and AJ DeSimone, friends they had known since their University of Tampa days more than a decade earlier. The name is a double nod, to the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny and to Andriotti himself.
In early 2025, Cousin Vinny's opened its first brick-and-mortar location at 1331 W. Cass Street, taking over the former Cass Street Deli space near downtown Tampa. The New York Italian-American menu drew a following fast. Within months, the Michelin Guide added the shop to its Florida selection with a recommendation, writing that “any sandwich aficionado knows it's all about the bread and the fillings, and both are top notch here.” A counter-service sandwich shop earning a place in a guide that launched its Florida edition in 2022 to catalog the state's destination dining rooms is an unusual distinction, and it arrived barely a year after the storefront opened.
The menu runs on chicken cutlets, eight versions of them. The best seller is Thee Parmesan Don, a chicken parmesan built on house-made red sauce, mozzarella, and grated parmesan. That Louie layers a hand-breaded cutlet with house pesto aioli, roasted red peppers, and mozzarella on an Italian sub. The Tony Piccante carries spicy vodka sauce, roasted red peppers, ricotta, and melted mozzarella. The Prosciutto Di Papo trades the cutlet for prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, arugula, and a roasted artichoke cream spread finished with balsamic glaze.
Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives has run on Food Network for more than two decades and remains one of the most durable traffic drivers in American food television. A single segment routinely fills a featured restaurant's dining room for months and converts a regional name into a destination, the kind of exposure no local advertising budget buys. Fieri has been working the Tampa Bay area lately: the network also filmed at Tampa's Supernatural Food & Wine, an episode that aired in May. For Cousin Vinny's, the July 10 broadcast introduces a shop that has existed as a storefront for roughly a year and a half to a national audience.
The exposure arrives as the company expands. Cousin Vinny's is opening its second location at 2063 Central Avenue in St. Petersburg's Grand Central District, taking over the space Little Philly vacated at the end of last year. The team is targeting a November opening, pending construction, with indoor seating and a patio the storefront can open onto through a garage door. That timeline would put a second Cousin Vinny's across the bay in Pinellas County within months of the national feature, a sequence that turns one episode of television into a two-market footprint.
For now, two dates anchor the calendar: July 10, when the Cass Street shop reaches Food Network's national audience, and November, when the cutlets are due to cross the bay to Central Avenue.
Editor's note (June 27, 2026): A companion social post published alongside this article dated Cousin Vinny's first storefront to 2024. Public reporting places the ghost-kitchen launch in 2023 and the West Cass Street storefront opening in early 2025; this article reflects the corrected timeline.
