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It looks like a mash-up of sets from True Blood and Penny Dreadful with bonus inspiration from Amsterdam’s Red Light district. Reading up on this place after my meal, I understood why its chroniclers have favored words like "rococo" and "bordello." Also, there are 150 wines by the glass, including a flute of Dom Perignon for $52 and — offered, if I’m not mistaken, without irony — a $3.50 pour of Sutter Home White Zinfandel. I watched people order bottles of fruit bomb California blends and glasses of sake or skip alcohol altogether.
Dinner Menu
All Bern’s waiters are highly trained and very competent servers, however if you have a favorite, please make your request for this waiter when you make your reservation by phone. We will note it in your reservation and do our best to seat you at a table in their section. However, we cannot honor all requests due to scheduling and volume in the restaurant.
Bern’s Steak House – One of America’s Finest Steak Houses
Gift Cards are processed Monday-Friday Only and mailed out the following business day.Orders placed on holidays and/or weekends will be processed the next business day. Dry-aged Prime steaks are hand cut to order and available in any size you can imagine. The upstairs is 48 private dessert booths, each crafted from wooden wine vats. Tampa’s most famous restaurant, Bern’s Steak House, also makes this list. I just returned to Tampa for the first time in years to catch a couple of Yankees spring training games, and even before I bought airline tickets I made a reservation for Bern’s way in advance, because they are always really hard to get. But if any travel takes you to Tampa, it is absolutely worth the effort.
The Best Restaurants In Fort Lauderdale
All of this acclaim set the expectations quite high for our visit to Bern’s Steak House. We explored the wine cellar, followed the steaks from dry age to grill, and tasted the experience that makes Bern’s special. To start, we pored over the extensive menu of appetizers, caviar, steaks and additional entrees.
James Beard Awards Outstanding Wine Program
We selected the King Midas, a moist carrot cake with macadamia nut ice cream over a dark chocolate sauce. It tasted precisely as good as it looked, the ideal cap on a truly excellent dining experience. It is quite common to see formal wear since we are fortunate to be visited often for special occasion meals.
For Retro Decadence, Bern’s Steak House in Tampa Still Delivers
We offer oysters, escargot, 16 different caviars and many other mouth-watering selections. If you have already secured your dinner reservation, there is no need to call the restaurant to reserve a dessert room table, one has already been secured for you. If you are interested, please inform your dining room server when you are seated for dinner that you would like to finish your culinary experience with a table upstairs in our famous Harry Waugh Dessert Room. What first attracted us to Bern’s Steak House was its wine cellar.
All are grilled over natural hardwood charcoal, and for those who prefer rare or medium rare, the menu suggests two people splitting one thicker steak will work out better than two thinner ones totaling the same weight. You could not ask for more information and it is very useful and may well lead you to make a great decision you might have overlooked. Bern Laxer was a World War II vet and passionate gardener who visited his aunt in Tampa with his new bride, Gert, and never left. While gardening and producing a gardening newsletter he and his wife opened a small luncheonette which served juice, coffee and cold sandwiches. It was a hit and soon they eventually added hot breakfast and lunch. All of this was in the early Fifties, long before anyone had coined the terms “farm to table” or “localvore,” but from the beginning, Bern and Gert emphasized the best ingredients possible including fresh veggies and fruit from his own gardens.
I have covered restaurants for decades and especially steakhouses, and there are a lot of great ones in the U.S., where cities like New York, Las Vegas and Dallas each have a dozen or more that would qualify as exceptional. But nonetheless, there are several things that make Bern’s notably different from every other venerable steakhouse you can visit, and puts it in a very elite group atop the red meat pantheon. At any given time, Bern’s Steak House has nearly 600,000 bottles of wine ready to be opened on site. Its list alone includes 6,800 different labels with 150 available by the glass.
Many options are available in current vintage releases as well as older, rarer offerings. If your generationally wealthy friend from England opened a steakhouse in their parents’ old manor, it’d probably feel a lot like Bern’s. The lobby is all gilded furniture and ruby lights, and there are eight different dining rooms lined with wall-to-wall photos from the founder's travels to Bordeaux, Burgundy, and beyond. Every meat on the menu is given its own paragraph explanation, which sounds like it was written by someone who's an e-commerce copywriter by day and a steak scholar by night. The Delmonico that they dry-age for 100 days is always our go-to.
Bern’s Steak House was created from what was once an ordinary business block on Howard Avenue, containing a grocery, barber shop and dime store. Bern and Gert, with the help of their own carpenters, metalworkers, painters and electricians, built what you now see today. Big Italian subs, fried seafood, and more great reasons to go eat in Fort Lauderdale. Bern’s can put a candle in the dessert of the person celebrating while in the Harry Waugh Dessert Room. Please make sure to notate the occasion when making your reservation or let your dessert room server know the occasion the evening you dine with us. Videos are not allowed in the dining rooms or any portion of the tour.
Bern’s Steak House reopens after undergoing renovations - WFLA
Bern’s Steak House reopens after undergoing renovations.
Posted: Fri, 28 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
If you are dressed in more relaxed attire, you may be seated in our lounge area instead of the main dining rooms. After dinner, every table gets a tour through the kitchen and wine cellar that’s stocked with over 100,000 bottles, along with a trip to the dessert parlor upstairs. That’s where you’ll slide into your own private wine-cask cubby and try the banana cream cheese pie and a deconstructed chocolate sundae as a pianist plays anything you want. Bern’s perennially wins the highest possible Wine Spectator Grand Award of Excellence, which less than 100 places in the world receive, and has won it ever year for more than four decades.
Famous for its dry-aged steaks, world-leading wine selection and private dessert room, Bern’s is a beloved retreat for dignitaries, celebrities and foodies alike. After hours of eating and drinking, settling into a nook one among the room’s woozy lighting felt trippy and out of time, like a tiki-themed David Lynch movie filmed in an alternate universe. As delightful as they were, I could barely muster bites of banana cream pie and macadamia ice cream.
Yet the steakhouse’s basic blueprint provides plenty of freedom for individual expression. Yesteryear’s carnivorous dens like Keens and Peter Luger in New York or London Chop House in Detroit cleave to tradition, their clubby machismo inseparable from their menus. The steakhouse’s mutability, coupled with our everlasting blood lust for charred beef, means the genre will never fade. Very few steakhouses, even the best, dry age their own meat in house, and even fewer do it for ... Bern’s stores its collection, containing over half a million bottles and 6500 labels from all over the world, in both its on site 50° working cellar as well as its own temperature controlled warehouse. Nightly, guests can enjoy a red, white, sparkling or fortified wine either by the bottle or from over 150 selections by the glass, inclusive of our extensive dessert wine and port by the glass selections.
All of that comes with each steak, which are priced lower than almost all other top steakhouses to begin with. A 12-ounce dry-aged NY Strip is $60 with all the extras, and two weeks earlier I ate at a high-end chain steakhouse where a not as good one was $72 with nothing. That’s the point we have to emphasize about Bern’s Steak House. This restaurant is a welcome departure from what most of us see as a “dining experience”, where get-in/eat/get-out is the recipe for guest and chef alike. A typical experience at Bern’s would last longer than two hours– starting at the dining table (or the lounge before that), continuing on to a tour of the kitchen and wine cellar, then finished over dessert in a private room upstairs.
Adjacent to the kitchen and in the warehouse next door, Bern’s houses nearly 600,000 bottles of wine from recent vintages all the way back to the 18th century. That includes a bottle of 1947 Chateau Latour which can be yours for just $30,000. No other restaurant in the world can boast such a large wine collection– and the second largest is a hundred or two thousand bottles behind.
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