At 1208 S. Howard Ave., on a block that once held a grocery store, a barber shop, and a dime store, Bern’s Steak House has spent seven decades building one of the most singular dining experiences in the country. Bern and Gert Laxer moved to Tampa from Manhattan in the early 1950s and opened a small restaurant of their own before buying out the existing Beer Haven Bar on this block and relocating there in 1956 — reusing the letters from the old bar’s sign to spell out “Bern’s.” Bern ran the kitchen; Gert ran the floor. The room they built from it looks like nothing else in Tampa: gilded stairway rail padding, an antique bust near what one food writer called “an ornate chair that could double, in a pinch, as a throne,” painted portraits on craggy white brick, and scarlet wallpaper glowing under wrought-iron light fixtures.
The steaks are dry-aged in-house for five to eight weeks and cut to order, charbroiled over natural hardwood lump charcoal. Time Out Tampa singled out the dry-aged strip steak “for the intense beef flavor and perfect sear,” and recommended starting with “the six oysters on the half-shell, which are served with truffle mignonette.” For bigger appetites, the 36-ounce WinterFrost Wagyu Tomahawk, served with bone marrow chimichurri, anchors the large-format end of the menu alongside A5 Japanese Wagyu and a 100-day dry-aged Delmonico.
Wine is treated with the same seriousness as the beef — the cellar holds more than half a million bottles across 6,500 labels, a collection that earned Bern’s a James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine Program in 2016. After dinner, guests are led upstairs to the Harry Waugh Dessert Room, nearly 50 private booths built for lingering over dessert, where the King Midas carrot cake with macadamia nut ice cream and hot fudge is among the most requested.
The reputation holds up in the numbers: a 4.9 rating from over 60,000 votes on RestaurantGuru, ranking #4 out of more than 5,200 Tampa restaurants. Not every visit is perfect — some diners have noted the cost relative to the experience, and tables without a reservation can face unpredictable waits — but as one repeat visitor of 35 years put it, that’s rare enough to be notable rather than expected. Bern’s is open Tuesday through Sunday from 5 p.m., closed Mondays.