Premium Steaks in Tampa Largest Wine Collection

Table Of Content

• We do not manage reservations through our contact form or email.
• All reservations require a credit card to hold the reservation at the time of booking
• A unique culinary experience
• James Beard Awards Outstanding Wine Program
• For Retro Decadence, Bern’s Steak House in Tampa Still Delivers
• MAKE A Reservation
• Bern’s Steak House – One of America’s Finest Steak Houses

Once a small mall, it’s a multi-leveled, disproportionate construct plastered with white stucco and all but windowless. Without the restaurant's sign out front it could be mistaken for a distribution center or a sound stage. In the foyer, gilded padding wraps around stairway rails and an antique bust sits near an ornate chair that could double, in a pinch, as a throne. Painted portraits hang on a craggy white brick, doused in eerie light from wrought-iron fixtures across the room that reflect the glow of scarlet wallpaper.

We do not manage reservations through our contact form or email.

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.

All reservations require a credit card to hold the reservation at the time of booking

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.

A unique culinary experience

70 Years later Bern’s is still doing what has recently become trendy among top chefs elsewhere and growing its own. A few years after opening, they moved to a new space and added steaks, and the rest is restaurant history. What is now the Bordeaux Room in Bern’s was once the entire steakhouse, and it has been added to and expanded again and again.

This is dining as entertainment, an experience that brings people together over a truly phenomenal meal. All the standard steaks at Bern's are USDA Prime, dry-aged in house for at least 45-days, hand cut ... [+] to order and served with starter, baked potato, salad and sides including signature onion rings and daily vegetable.

The Bordeaux Room held 40 diners and today there are eight dining rooms seating 350 guests and serving about 500 nightly. These elements have combined since 1956 to provide our guests with a unique culinary experience. Our prime steaks are cut to order, we serve vegetables that are grown locally on the Bern’s farm when available and sourced from the finest purveyors, and our menu includes 21 choices of caviar. Each visit to Bern’s Steak House takes you on a gastronomic adventure that defines Bern’s not as a meal but as an experience. Our prime steaks are cut to order, and dry-aged in house for 5-8 weeks.

MAKE A Reservation

They also won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine Program, and the cellars are so extensive and impressive that they offer guests guided tours with dinner, something that stopped in the pandemic and is being re-introduced shortly. Stepping into Bern’s Steak House is like entering a different world. Its interior is refined, elegant and decidedly classical, lined with fine art that feels to be as carefully curated as its wine list. The curator in this case is Bern Laxer, founder of Bern’s Steak House, who opened the restaurant in 1956 with an appreciation for great food, fine wine and organic farming. Long before farm-to-table was the phrase du jour, Laxer sourced most of his vegetables from an organic farm that still supplies much of the restaurant’s produce today. Bern Laxer passed on in 2002, leaving the restaurant to his son David who has continued Bern’s commitment to the food, wine and fine dining experience that made it famous.

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Bern's adds artistic, historical mural to restaurant decor - Tampa Bay Times

Bern's adds artistic, historical mural to restaurant decor.

Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

It is our policy to only seat complete parties as delayed guests impact following reservations. Alongside those steak house onion rings and vegetables from Bern’s farm was our 2″ Special Chateaubriand. We laid our knife on the grain and lightly pulled it toward us– and this magnificent steak opened like a theater curtain. It was the most tender and flavorful steak we had ever experienced, to the point that our grocery store rib eye will never be the same. This whole process, from dry age to chopping block to grill had yielded something we now want to mark every special occasion with. While we still had quite a ways to go to explore Bern’s further, we had understood just why this restaurant was held in such high acclaim.

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.

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.

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 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.

After the entrée, Waugh suggested they adjourn to another room for dessert, port and cigars, and Bern loved the idea. He loved it so much that when he returned to Tampa he turned the upstairs into the Harry Waugh Dessert Room, with 48 private booths, each made from a repurposed redwood wine cask. Today when you first take your seat at dinner, the waiter asks if you would like to book a booth upstairs for dessert and you simply must say yes.