Café Del Mar

Café Del Mar has been family-owned on Fort Lauderdale Beach since 2002, built around homemade Italian cooking rather than a beachfront tourist-menu approach: pasta, seafood pulled straight from an on-premise lobster tank, and steaks alongside vegetarian options. The Oven Roasted Seafood Cartoccio, a pomodoro pasta loaded with shrimp, clams, calamari, and mussels, and a whole roasted snapper served on a plank both come up repeatedly as the dishes worth ordering. The mood shifts as the night goes on: daytime beachfront dining gives way to live saxophone on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, with the bar leaning into dessert martinis and cocktails for a more lounge-like evening feel. Ratings run respectable but not exceptional, a 3.8 on Google across nearly 1,900 reviews, with fresh seafood, generous portions, and attentive service coming up as the consistent strengths. A lobster tank you can actually see on a beachfront Italian restaurant, at a place that's been in the same family for over two decades, isn't something most tourist-strip spots can claim, that alone separates it from the beachfront pack it sits among. Menu items, prices, and hours may have changed since this was written.