Bern's Steak House — The 600,000-Bottle Wine Cellar, the Dessert Room With Private Phones, and Why the $80 Steak Is Actually a Five-Course Dinner

There is a small, unflashy two-story building at 1208 South Howard Avenue in Tampa's Hyde Park neighborhood. From the outside, nothing about it suggests anything unusual. The sign over the door reads BERN'S STEAK HOUSE in dim white letters. There's no patio. The valet stand is a folding card table. If you weren't looking for it, you'd drive past.

Inside that building, and in a warehouse across the street, is the largest restaurant wine collection in the world: more than 600,000 bottles, spanning roughly 6,800 different selections. About 100,000 of those bottles are in the working cellar directly under the kitchen, organized numerically, kept at 50°F. The other 500,000 are stored in the warehouse, waiting for shelf space in the main cellar to open up. The whole collection has never been fully catalogued — staff occasionally find bottles in the stacks nobody knew were there.

That is the first thing to understand about Bern's Steak House. The famous part — the half-million-bottle wine cellar that holds a 1947 Château Latour priced at $30,000 and a 1957 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti at $25,000 — physically does not fit inside the restaurant. It has overflowed across the street.

The second thing to understand: you do not need to spend $30,000, or even $300, to experience any of this. The menu structure, the dessert room, the free tours, and the lounge-seat workaround all make the actual high-end-Tampa-icon experience accessible at a price most travelers can stomach. Here is how it actually works.

The math nobody tells you about the steak menu

Bern's prices its steaks in a way that confuses first-time visitors and makes them think the place costs more than it does. The trick is in what's bundled.

A standard 8-ounce filet mignon is $62. A 14-ounce cognac-aged Delmonico runs $82. A 32-ounce cowboy ribeye is $141. At the top, a 6-ounce A5 Japanese Wagyu filet sits at $180. Every cut is USDA Prime, dry-aged in-house for five to eight weeks, then charbroiled over natural hardwood lump charcoal on a single massive grill in the open kitchen.

The thing that goes unsaid on most reviews: every steak entrée includes French onion soup, house salad, a baked potato, onion rings, and the vegetable of the evening. Not as an "add a side for $9" option. Included. The $62 filet is a five-course meal.

If you order something off the menu other than a steak — the famous Chicken Gert with roasted garlic rosemary butter, for example, or a seafood entrée — you can buy the same complete sides bundle for $26 per person. That's the number that gets called "the $26 add-on" in older menus, and it's worth knowing because it does the same math in reverse: it tells you, roughly, that Bern's values the steak portion of a steak dinner at around $36 on the cheapest end, and the surrounding meal at $26.

The practical conclusion: the 8-ounce filet plus a glass of wine plus the dessert room upstairs gets a single diner out the door for about $130 before tip and the 12% service charge. That's not cheap, but it's a long way from the $400-per-head number people imagine when they think "world's largest wine cellar."

A wine cellar that doesn't fit in the building

The on-site cellar holds about 100,000 bottles in numerical order at 50°F, organized so that any bottle on the 6,800-strong active list can be pulled in under three minutes by one of the five sommeliers on staff. The current wine director, Eric Renaud, runs the program with a senior sommelier named Brad Dixon and three others. The rest of the collection — roughly 500,000 bottles — lives in a temperature-controlled warehouse across the street, waiting for slots to open in the main cellar.

The collection spans the early 1900s through the present (Bern's quietly cleared out the 1800s stock in recent years; a 1845 Château Gruaud-Larose at $49,000 is one of the few survivors). It was built by founder Bern Laxer, who traveled the world buying — sometimes "every last drop" of selections he favored — which is why some of the bottles in those stacks literally do not exist anywhere else.

Here is the part regulars know and visitors don't. Bern's prices wine without the usual restaurant markup: a glass costs roughly one-fifth of the bottle. The "more than 200 wines by the glass" list runs from a Sutter Home White Zinfandel at $3.50 — listed without irony — to Dom Pérignon at $52. The Wine Spectator Grand Award has been a fixture here since 1981 (the longest unbroken Grand Award streak of any American restaurant), and in 2016 the James Beard Foundation handed Bern's its Outstanding Wine Program award. Renaud's stated philosophy, in an interview with VinePair: "We don't want to gouge people."

What this means in practice: you can drink genuinely interesting wine — an aged Bordeaux, a Madeira from before the Cuban Missile Crisis — for $25 a glass at a restaurant that has the deepest cellar in the world. That is the value lever almost no one pulls.

The tour is free, if you ask

Every dinner reservation at Bern's includes — at no additional charge — a tour of the kitchen and a tour of the wine cellar. They are not promoted. They are not on the menu. The staff will not bring it up.

If you don't ask, you eat dinner, you go upstairs for dessert, you leave. If you do ask, somewhere between your last bite and dessert your server will walk you through the kitchen (a single open room, surprisingly small, with the massive charcoal grill at the center) and down into the working cellar (rows of numbered bins, the air noticeably colder, faint smell of cork). On the kitchen side you'll see the dry-aging room — racks of beef sitting at temperature for the full five-to-eight-week cure. On the cellar side, the sommelier on the tour will often pull a rare bottle to show you.

Tours stopped during the 2022–2023 renovation and came back on July 25, 2023. They run nightly. Tell your server when you sit down, not when the bill arrives. Photos are fine; videos are prohibited in any part of the building, including on the tour. They will enforce that.

Upstairs is essentially a separate restaurant

The Harry Waugh Dessert Room opened in 1985 and is in some ways the most distinctive room in the building. It occupies the entire second floor — by floor area, it's larger than all eight downstairs dining rooms combined. Bern Laxer named it for Harry Waugh, the longtime director of Château Latour, after visiting Waugh's formal drawing room in London in the late 1970s and deciding he wanted to build something like it.

The room contains 48 private booths, each one constructed from a repurposed wine cask — redwood, curved, the original cask staves still visible. The booths seat between two and six people. Each one has its own sound system fed by a nightly pianist who plays on the floor; each one also has a private telephone you can pick up to call song requests directly to the pianist. (The pianist plays by ear; common requests include Billy Joel, Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody.") On a busy weekend, the pastry team produces more than 1,000 desserts a night.

The signature item is the macadamia nut ice cream, which founder Bern Laxer reportedly spent seven years developing across 300 separate test recipes before signing off on it. The banana cheese pie, which predates the dessert room itself, is currently $19. Most desserts run $14–22; the dessert wine list — Sauternes, Tokajis, Madeiras, vintage Ports — has more than 1,000 entries.

The thing about the dessert room that almost no Tampa visitor exploits: it takes its own reservations, independent of dinner. The dessert-room-only window runs daily between 6 and 6:45 PM and is booked by phone at 813-251-2421. You skip dinner, walk straight upstairs, sit in one of the cask booths, order desserts and a glass of port, and leave having technically been to Bern's Steak House for under $50 a person. It is the single best Bern's-budget hack in Tampa.

The 70-year story behind the name

Bern Laxer was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1923 and grew up in the Bronx. He served in the Army in World War II, came home, earned an advertising degree at NYU, met a fellow copywriting student named Gertrude, and married her in 1950. In 1951 the Laxers packed for California; passing through Tampa to visit Bern's aunt, they ran out of money and decided to stay.

In 1953 they bought a luncheonette called the Gator Juice Bar, renamed it Bern and Gert's Little Midway, and learned to run a restaurant. In 1956 they bought a small bar called the Beer Haven at 1208 South Howard with backing from 10 to 20 investors. They couldn't afford a new sign, so they pulled the letters off the existing Beer Haven sign and reassembled them — adding an S they bought separately — into BERN'S. The phone company refused to list a one-word name, so they added STEAK HOUSE. Through the 1960s the Laxers bought the shops on either side, knocked through the walls, and grew the restaurant from one dining room with 40 seats to eight dining rooms with 350. Bern died in 2002; Gert lived until April 2020. Their son David runs the operation today, along with the sister restaurant Haven and a 2013 partnership with the Epicurean Hotel directly across South Howard.

What to skip, what to order, what to wear

A few things compress all of the above into a working plan.

Wear something. Bern's dress code is business casual to semi-formal — no shorts, no flip-flops, no athletic shoes, no ball caps, no torn jeans. If you show up in casual clothes you'll be seated in the lounge instead of the main dining rooms; that's a real option if you don't have a reservation, but it's not the experience you came for.

Don't fill up on appetizers. They're tempting and they're expensive ($14–40 for most, $22–200 per ounce for caviar). The included sides plus a steak is a lot of food.

If you're picking one steak: chateaubriand if you're trying to order what made the place famous; the 8-ounce filet if you're optimizing value. The 32-ounce cowboy ribeye is for parties of two who want a single dramatic cut.

Take the tour. Order the macadamia ice cream upstairs.

Plan your visit

Address: 1208 S. Howard Ave., Tampa, FL 33606 (Hyde Park neighborhood, about 5 minutes from downtown). Reservations: 813-251-2421 or bernssteakhouse.com. 60-day rolling window. Credit card required; $25/person cancellation fee within 24 hours. Hours: Tue–Thu and Sun, 5–10 PM. Fri–Sat, 5–11 PM. Closed Monday. Dessert room only: Call between 6:00 and 6:45 PM daily. Parking: Valet $8 (cash only at some hours), free self-parking in the Bern's lot at Watrous & Howard, plus street parking on the surrounding Hyde Park blocks. Walk-up option: Arrive a few minutes before 4:30 PM to try for a lounge or bar seat without a reservation.

Hyde Park itself is worth wandering before dinner — leafy streets, 1920s bungalows, the Hyde Park Village shopping district four blocks west, Bayshore Boulevard's 4.5-mile waterfront sidewalk one mile south. Stack Bern's at the end of a Tampa-Cuban-and-cigars afternoon in Ybor City, and you've covered the two restaurants in town that most define the city. If you're building a "Florida fine-dining" tour, the closest parallel on the east coast is Joe's Stone Crab in Miami — same idea, same multi-generational family, same line of people willing to wait. And if you came to Florida for the food in general, Miami's seafood scene is the obvious follow-up day. The Tampa Cuban sandwich, incidentally, has its own running argument with Miami's version about whose recipe is correct — Tampa's includes salami, Miami's doesn't, and the answer depends on which bakery you trust.

None of which is at Bern's. Bern's is its own thing, in its own unmarked-looking building, holding a wine cellar that doesn't fit inside it.