Café Martorano

Café Martorano sits in Oakland Park, and the room reads exactly the way the Fort Lauderdale dining establishment expects a italian kitchen at this address to read — considered, particular, and exact about the things it cares about. Long-running Italian — DJ booth and tomahawks.

The cooking turns on signatures the Fort Lauderdale regulars order without looking at the menu: Tomahawk, Lasagna, and Tiramisu. The kitchen runs at the $$$$ register, with a wine programme that is either deep where the room is loud and tight where the room is quiet, and a service floor that has clearly worked at this register before.

For a close a deal dinner in Fort Lauderdale, this is one of the addresses you should already know about. Reservations skew very hard; dress is cocktail. The averaged Food/Ambience/Value line sits at 9.0/10 — high enough to mean the room is doing more right than wrong, calibrated against the sharpest other tables in the city.

Long-running Italian — DJ booth and tomahawks. For a deeper read on this occasion across other cities, the Close a Deal guide is the canonical reference.