Premium Steaks in Tampa Largest Wine Collection

Table Of Content

• Dinner Menu
• The Best Restaurants In Tampa
• We do not manage reservations through our contact form or email.
• THE BERN’S FAMILY
• Experience the difference of award-winning standards
• All reservations require a credit card to hold the reservation at the time of booking
• Finding America's Best Restaurants: Bill Addison's Road to the 38
• For Retro Decadence, Bern’s Steak House in Tampa Still Delivers

Bern’s wine collection and the cuisine it accompanies has earned Bern’s Steak House the Grand Award by Wine Spectator Magazine for 30 straight years. During that stretch, in 1996, Wine Spectator named Bern’s the best steak house in the United States. So, the wine list itself is reason to go, and one of the standout features that elevate Bern’s above its peers, but that’s just one. Waugh was a famed British wine merchant and on one trip, Bern visited him for dinner in his London home.

Dinner Menu

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.

The Best Restaurants In Tampa

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.

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

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.

Bern's Steak House partners with Mastry's Brewing for Legacy Series - Tampa Bay Business & Wealth - TBBW

Bern's Steak House partners with Mastry's Brewing for Legacy Series - Tampa Bay Business & Wealth.

Posted: Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

Experience the difference of award-winning standards

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.

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

Does the food and wine at Bern’s Steak House match the high acclaim? While the expectations were lofty to start, the experience delivered. Bern’s provides a fascinating dining experience including a stroll through history, the process of fine food preparation and rare wine 101.

Finding America's Best Restaurants: Bill Addison's Road to the 38

The appropriate attire at Bern’s Steak House is business casual to semi-formal. We ask that no t-shirts, tennis shoes, flip-flops, shorts, or torn or faded blue jeans be worn. If any of these items are worn to Bern’s, you may be seated in our lounge area instead of one of the dining rooms.

For 2 decades at Bern's Steak House, this piano man has delighted Tampa - Tampa Bay Times

For 2 decades at Bern's Steak House, this piano man has delighted Tampa.

Posted: Tue, 31 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

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.

Bern and Gert Laxer moved from Manhattan to Tampa in the early 1950s, wading into the restaurant business by first running a luncheonette until they bought a place called the Beer Haven in a retail complex in 1956. They started their steakhouse with Bern overseeing the kitchen and Gert running the floor. One by one, the Laxers bought the other businesses around them as they grew their restaurant to a 350-seat behemoth. So much has made Bern’s Steak House a destination and conversation-starter in its almost sixty years in business, but for first-timers the surprise always begins with the building itself.