It’s set in a strip mall, but once you’re inside you’ll forget about that.
Last month, as a very late Christmas present, Michael and I treated his sisters to a lovely dinner at Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, Florida. It was our second visit to the famed steakhouse and we were so glad to share in their delight at their first Bern’s experience. Built in the 1950s in a portion of a strip mall, Bern’s has grown to house the world’s largest wine collection in a restaurant (who would have thought?). The interior is old-school and over-the-top with dark red and wood interiors, golden accents, and lots of paintings. The opulence from days past is part of the restaurant’s charm, even though the darkness doesn’t lend itself to great photos.
Although the front entryway can get quite congested with parties waiting to be seated, from the moment you arrive at your table the service is impeccable. Our server explained that only 1.5 out of every 10 servers make it through their extensive training program and that it can take years for servers to begin serving diners.
Of course, when you visit Bern’s, you’re really there for a great meal. They always suggest choosing a larger steak for the group rather than smaller individual steaks, and each comes with a French onion soup, house salad, vegetables, and crispy onions. We chose a 30-oz Chateaubriand for the four of us, and we still had food remaining on our plates after all was said and done.
If you can manage to climb out of your chair after your meal, the Bern’s staff will gladly take you on a tour of their very large and very busy kitchen. It’s incredibly fascinating to see the staff hard at work at their stations cutting steaks, frying onions, chopping vegetables, crafting soups, pulling shots of espresso – and most impressively – not bumping into each other or the guests. It seems they have the whole operation down to a science. Following a walk through the kitchen, the tour leads to the wine “cellar.” It’s nearly impossible to have any sort of underground space in Florida because of the low elevation, so the wine storage is just located down a short ramp. The portion of the wine collection we saw was only a fraction of what Bern’s truly has on hand (many more bottles are located across the street), however, we did manage to catch a glimpse of bottles totaling $10,000 and up. They even allowed Suzy to climb the ladder, which we did not expect!
If you desire (and, I promise you do), you can book a table upstairs at the Harry Waugh Dessert Room. The dessert room is a newer addition to the space and opened in the 1980s, with over forty semi-private booths set in wine holding tanks. The dessert menu is almost overwhelming, although I trust you’ll manage to complete the task. Dessert wines and spirits are available, along with many different types of cakes, ice creams, cheesecakes, mousses, and the like. Each booth is equipped with a phone and speaker, and songs can be made by request to the pianist (though nothing will beat the time that Michael and I went and we turned the music on just in time to hear Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” play. How romantic).
In any case, I think a visit to the dessert room is the sweetest way to end this opulently wonderful (and at times almost absurd) experience.
Will I be back? Absolutely. It’s funny, because on both of my visits, I saw people who must have been “regulars.” But Bern’s isn’t a place I would want to visit regularly, I think. When you visit a place like this too often, it tends to lose its charm – and isn’t that kind of the whole point?
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