People who keep regular dining hours are not morally superior to people who don't. It just makes you feel like a lowlife when restaurants shut their doors in your face at 10 p.m., after the last of the respectable dinner crowd has finished its daily feeding and trickled out. Dinner is over. You missed it again. What's your excuse?
Never mind. We've got you covered. Without further ado, five Broward restaurants that serve full entrées and creative cuisine until midnight (or later) and the perfect excuses for late-night dining.
Fish Tales on 33rd
Your excuse for missing dinner: I'm living
Your type is not a stranger here. In fact, Fish Tales puts up live bands five nights a week. Not only do
Off the Hookah
Your excuse for missing dinner: I was taking a disco nap.
The late-night club crowd has to work its eating schedule around its partying and sleeping schedules. Off the Hookah's reputation as a dance club overshadows its status as a restaurant, but this is one of the few places where you can grab high-quality fare at an unreasonable hour. The kitchen stays open until about 2 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday nights, serving a menu that's a mix of Mediterranean, sushi, and steak-house classics like filet mignon and rib eyes. Offers from the Med include include beef, chicken ($15.95), or shrimp kebabs ($18.95), lamb chops served with rice and green beans ($26.95), and gyros. The sushi menu includes standard rolls such as spicy tuna, California and J.B., and signature rolls with exotic names like the Cleopatra, a riceless roll of tuna, avocado, and masago that comes wrapped in cucumber.
Mugs Bar & Grill
Your excuse for missing dinner: My sports obsession leaves time for nothing else.
A passion for sports can be distracting. You probably don't notice that you talk about the Dolphins at an ear-shattering volume, and it's a given that you're useless around the house, but you're a person too. As such, you deserve to feast on high-quality fare (while surrounded by flat-screen televisions) until midnight at least. Try Mugs. The Fort Lauderdale sports bar kicks off its menu right with baked escargots ($8.95) and a pound of snow crab legs ($9.95). Chicken and fish entrées are served with sophisticated sauces, like frances and piccata. Baby back ribs are on the menu. Even the nightly dinner specials run until 11 p.m.
The Pirate Republic Seafood Bar & Grill
Your excuse for missing dinner: I don't care about your dinnertime. I play by my own rules.
Regular dinner hours are not for a reckless liver of life such as yourself. Be it on the high seas or on your block in the suburbs, you live by your own set of laws. But where do you eat when your adventuring takes you well past the dinner hour? Steer your boat or car to the southern bank of the New River in downtown Fort Lauderdale, where there sits a two-story, pirate-themed restaurant and bar that serves your type until midnight most nights of the week and tends to keep its kitchen open until at least 2 a.m. on the weekends. There's a raw bar, of course, with oysters and peel-and-eat shrimp (both $9 for half dozen, $17 for a dozen), steamed clams ($10), and fish ceviche ($7). Clam, lobster, and conch chowders are on the menu alongside pasta dishes named after exotic locales that no landlubber will ever see, such as Bequai chicken alfredo ($10) and Monsterrat seafood pasta ($18), a mix of shrimp, clams, and mussels in fresh tomato and garlic sauce.
ROK:BRGR
Your excuse for missing dinner: I got drunk at happy hour and partied on Himmarshee.
So, you partied a little too hard and missed dinner. Big deal. Before you shed that person who wants to be more than friends and collect your parking ticket from your windshield, sit yourself down at ROK:BRGR for your third square meal of the day. Downtown Fort Lauderdale's party crowd has staked its recovery from wild nights on the offerings of area pizza joints and diners for years now, but things changed this December with the opening of ROK:BRGR. The Himmarshee neighborhood gastropub that specializes in gourmet hamburgers keeps its kitchen open until 2 a.m. during the week and until 4 a.m. on weekends. The word hamburger, in this case, doesn't necessarily mean a beef patty or two between buns. In addition to beef burgers that range from the Skinny ($9), which comes wrapped in lettuce, to the King ($20), which comes topped with Hudson Valley foie grois and red wine reduction, ROK:BRGR serves ahi tuna, turkey, and chicken burgers as well as lobster corn dogs and truffle mac and cheese.
Follow Clean Plate Charlie on Twitter: @CleanPlateBPB.
