The Boheme

The Restaurant

The Boheme occupies the ground-floor signature dining room of the Grand Bohemian Hotel Orlando at 325 South Orange Avenue, in downtown Orlando facing the Lake Eola pedestrian district. The hotel is a member of Marriott's Autograph Collection and is the city's most architecturally distinctive luxury hotel, defined by its preserved 1990s Bohemian-collector aesthetic and the corridor of original early-twentieth-century European art that lines the lobby and hallways from the entrance to the elevator banks. The Boheme dining room is the hotel's visual centerpiece: a soaring two-storey space defined by deep crimson and burgundy walls, ornate gilt-framed European oil paintings, hand-blown Murano-glass chandeliers, polished black marble floors, dark mahogany panelling, white-clothed tables under deep banquette lighting, and a small jazz stage along one wall that hosts live music four nights a week and during the popular Sunday Jazz Brunch service. The cumulative impression is of European-revival opulence that no other Orlando dining room attempts.

The kitchen at The Boheme is a Modern American programme with deliberate French Revival technique, the kind of room that reads as polished and classical without slipping into hotel-restaurant convention. The dinner menu rotates seasonally but holds a recognisable spine of celebration-grade preparations: the Boheme Calamari with curry and cumin aioli, the coffee-marinated beef medallions, the New Zealand rack of lamb with goat-cheese polenta cake, the seared scallops with seasonal vegetables, the wood-grilled fish with citrus-butter sauce, and the headline Tomahawk Experience, a forty-eight-ounce dry-aged tomahawk steak that is carved tableside by the dining-room captain and served with a tableside-prepared cognac sauce, accompanied by tableside-finished asparagus, wild mushrooms and pomme puree. The Tomahawk Experience requires advance ordering, runs at approximately $185 per person for two and is the room's most-photographed and most-considered celebration order. The desserts (the Black Bee Honey cheesecake using honey from the local Black Bee Apiary, the seasonal souffle, the Grand Marnier creme brulee) are the deliberate close of a kitchen that knows its register.

The wine list at The Boheme runs to about three hundred and fifty references with serious depth in Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy, California Cabernet and the kind of celebration-grade Italian (Brunello, Barolo) that the room's clientele expects. The cocktail programme at the small marble-topped bar leans toward classical preparations: a properly built martini, a Manhattan, a vintage daiquiri, a thoughtful selection of after-dinner brown spirits. The Sunday Jazz Brunch service is among Orlando's most considered weekend social occasions, drawing the city's senior banking, legal and medical principals across late-morning service. The Boheme has held AAA Four Diamond status perennially across more than two decades. For an Orlando proposal, a milestone birthday, or a deal-closing dinner that wants European-revival theatrical seriousness inside a genuinely beautiful room, this is the city's calibrated first call.