Brenda and Harlan's Trip Blog

We left the hotel around noon and headed to Tampa for a day of errands and good food.

We stopped in Tampa to visit a restaurant that Harlan has wanted to visit for at least 8 years. It is called Bern’s Steak House. We made reservations for 5:00pm. We first visited a shoe store that contained a selection of purses Brenda has been looking for since Asheville (called Ameribag). She finally found the size, color and style she wanted and purchased one from Happy Feet Plus in Tampa. We then went to the post office to take care of some errands.

We finally arrived at Berns about 5:10. The entrance was beautiful with paintings and lighting reminding Brenda of the Biltmore estate. We were seated and given a large 30 page menu describing the history of the restaurant as well as detailed descriptions of appetizers (35 types of caviar on 2 pages, for example), salads, dressings, side dishes, vegetables, meats, sauces, and cooking times and the effects of cooking times and methods on the meat. All the vegetables are grown on their own farms and are organic. Harlan had the Kobe beef Delmonico steak. Brenda had the crab encrusted snapper. We each had French onion soup and salad (with 4 different dressings on the side) before the dinner. It is by far the best food we have ever had….ever….ever….ever. We then went for a short tour of the kitchen and the wine cellar. They have about 100,000 bottles of wine in their cellar…some date back to the 1800’s. Now for the best part…the dessert. They have a separate room upstairs for dessert and coffee. Each booth upstairs is very private, enclosed in dark wood with murals on the walls and a choice of music to play for our dessert dining experience. There were 4 pages of desserts and about 30 pages of dessert wines and other alcoholic ‘after dinner’ drinks. Harlan had the carrot cake with macadamia nut ice cream and Brenda had the chocolate-chocolate-chocolate dessert. Awesome. Not too sweet. We may just have to stop back here on our way out of Florida.

We left the restaurant about 8:30 and headed south on I-75. After making several phone calls to hotels we discovered all the hotels were booked from Tampa to Marco Island because this is the tourist season for Florida. We ended up turning around and heading back to the north side of Tampa to stay at a Comfort Inn.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Early 2005 Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.