Florida Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Florida

Florida has 220 steakhouses across 84 cities, the third largest count in this directory. It also has two things that exist nowhere else in American steak: the largest private wine collection in the world, and kitchens that cook beef over citrus wood.

Both are in Tampa Bay, which is not where most people would guess Florida's best steak lives. Miami has more listings and more money. Tampa has the two most singular restaurants in the state.

The SteakMap Ten: Florida's best, ranked

1. Bern's Steak House — Tampa. One of the genuinely great American restaurants, open in Hyde Park since 1956. Prime steaks are cut to order and dry-aged in house for five to eight weeks. Bern Laxer started his own farm to grow the restaurant's produce. And the wine cellar holds more than 600,000 bottles — the largest private collection on earth. It gets its own section below.
2. Charley's Steak House — Orlando, Tampa and Kissimmee. USDA Prime and Choice aged on site for four to six weeks, cut daily by management and seasoned for thirty hours before it ever sees heat. Then it goes over a 1,200-degree wood pit burning citrus and oak. Founded by Charley Woodsby — a co-founder of Red Lobster — and still run by his family.
3. Bourbon Steak Miami — Aventura. Michael Mina's room, and the most technically accomplished cooking in South Florida.
4. A Land Remembered — Orlando. Named for the Patrick Smith novel about Florida cattle ranching, which is the right frame — Florida ran cattle long before it ran theme parks.
5. Truluck's — Naples. Owns its own stone crab fisheries, so the claw on the table went from trap to table in 24 hours during the October-to-May season. USDA Prime on the beef side, and the menu is rewritten weekly.
6. BLT Prime — Miami. The Miami end of the classic American chophouse.
7. Abe & Louie's — Boca Raton. The Palm Beach County standard.
8. Alpine Steakhouse and Butcher Shop — Sarasota. A steakhouse with a butcher counter attached, which as this directory keeps demonstrating is one of the most reliable signals of a kitchen that breaks down its own beef.
9. Council Oak Steaks & Seafood — Hollywood, and Tampa. The Seminole Hard Rock rooms, and the best of Florida's casino steakhouses.
10. Smith & Wollensky — Miami Beach. A chain, but the only national group that dry-ages and hand-carves USDA Prime on premises at every location — and this one sits at the tip of South Pointe Park with the cruise ships going past.

The largest wine collection in the world is in Tampa

Not in Napa, not in New York, not in London. Bern's holds over 600,000 bottles — the largest private wine collection anywhere.

The restaurant is built around that fact in ways that sound invented. Dinner reservations come with an optional tour of the kitchen and the cellar. Afterwards you go upstairs to the Harry Waugh Dessert Room, named for one of Bern Laxer's mentors, where 48 private booths are built out of floor-to-ceiling redwood wine casks.

The beef holds its end up. Prime, cut to order, dry-aged in house for five to eight weeks — a longer window than most steakhouses in this directory attempt, and it has been running since 1956.

If you make one steak pilgrimage in Florida, it is this one, and it is worth booking well ahead.

Florida cooks steak over citrus wood

Every serious wood-fired steakhouse picks a wood, and the choice is usually regional: red oak on California's Central Coast, hickory and post oak across the South. Florida grows oranges, so Florida burns citrus wood.

Charley's has been cooking over custom-built wood pits for more than forty years, running citrus for its mellow smoke and oak to hold the heat at around 1,200 degrees. Citrus burns sweeter and lighter than hickory, which is why it works on seafood as well as beef — useful in a state where the same kitchen does both.

It is the only regional wood tradition in American steak that comes out of a fruit crop, and you will not taste it outside Florida.

How Florida ages its beef

• 5 to 8 weeks (35–56 days) — Bern's, in house, cut to order. The deepest in the state.
• 4 to 6 weeks (28–42 days) — Charley's, on site, plus 30 hours of seasoning before cooking.

Browse every dry-aged steakhouse in Florida → · Browse wagyu in Florida →

Florida by city

Miami has 22 listings, the most in the state, and Orlando has 20 — a reminder that Orlando's restaurant market is built on conventions and tourism rather than locals. Fort Lauderdale has 12, Tampa 10 and Naples 9.

The pattern worth knowing: Miami and Orlando have the volume, but Tampa Bay has the two restaurants that could not exist anywhere else.