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Why The Palm made the SteakMap list

The Palm has been owned and run by the same two families since 1926 — the Bozzis and the Ganzis, now four generations deep. There is almost nothing else like that left in American restaurants at this scale.

It was never supposed to be called The Palm

Pio Bozzi and John Ganzi came to New York from Parma, Italy, and opened a restaurant on Second Avenue in 1926. They went to register the name “Parma.” Their accents were thick enough that the clerk wrote down “Palm.” Nobody corrected it, and a century later it is one of the best-known names in American steak.

It was not even a steakhouse at first — it was an Italian restaurant for an Italian neighborhood. That changed around 1931, when a newspaperman from one of the nearby papers asked for a steak. Ganzi walked out, went up Second Avenue to a butcher shop, bought one, came back and cooked it. The reporters kept asking, and the kitchen kept obliging.

The caricatures

The walls are covered in cartoon caricatures, and that tradition is a Depression-era accident too. Bozzi and Ganzi could not afford to decorate, and the neighborhood was full of cartoonists and illustrators who could not always afford dinner. So they traded — a plate of spaghetti for a drawing on the wall.

Every Palm since has carried the same treatment, with local figures drawn onto the walls of each city’s room. It is worth looking up from the table.

The Orlando room

This location is on Universal Boulevard in the Universal Orlando resort area — a convention and vacation address rather than a business-district one, which makes it a more relaxed room than the downtown Palms.

Prices

The Palm does not publish per-location pricing online, so SteakMap has no verified Orlando figures to quote. The house is known for large-format cuts built to share rather than single portions.

Read more about steak in the state — browse every dry-aged steakhouse in Florida.