Restaurant

Blue Flame

A Tampa soul food favorite, a hurricane that closed it for 16 months, and a comeback that made local news.

The challenge

Blue Flame Tampa is a Southern soul food restaurant built around the kind of food people come back for. When SHTROM started working with Blue Flame, the restaurant had around 300 followers. The food already had character — the challenge was finding the right language and visual direction to make that character translate through a screen.

The approach

Finding the Blue Flame language

We built a social direction that felt like Blue Flame. The food stayed at the center, but how we filmed it, talked about it and presented it changed. We found the visual language, the tone, and what made people stop, watch and share. There was no paid media behind the growth — the account went from approximately 300 followers to more than 23,000 with $0 in ad spend. Content started reaching well beyond the existing audience, with most videos now consistently generating more than 10,000 organic views. One video approached 1 million views. Another generated more than 500,000 views in 48 hours.

Then everything stopped

In October 2024, Hurricane Milton flooded the restaurant and caused major structural damage. Blue Flame would remain closed for roughly 16 months. But the brand did not disappear. We saw the reopening as more than an announcement — it was a comeback people had been waiting for. The social strategy shifted around that story, and the return of Blue Flame became the campaign. We built anticipation around the reopening and created content that brought the audience back into the story. Reopening content generated more than 300,000 views, while the return of Blue Flame became local news across Tampa Bay.

The comeback

When Blue Flame finally reopened, people were ready. Customers lined up outside. Local television crews came to the restaurant. The story was picked up across Tampa Bay, and the restaurant returned with an audience significantly larger than the one it had before. What could have been a year of lost momentum became part of the brand story.