Few Fort Lauderdale restaurants make you pause and take a beat before making your way to your table, but TIMBR restaurant — newly positioned in a Las Olas building with grittier past lives as Automatic Slims and Tilted Kilt — is worthy of lingering to drink in all its fantastical beauty.
In the main dining room aptly named The Parc, live trees soar skyward and flickering firefly lights — 750, to be precise — dangle from the ceiling, adding to the room’s magic. Diners sink into denim-upholstered banquettes that feel more like comfy sofas and surround live-edge dining tables. In the background, a glassed-in kitchen is abuzz with a small army of chefs orchestrating the restaurant’s proclaimed vineyard cuisine. “My idea was to create an estate kitchen,” says Michael Tronn, creative director of TIMBR and 3 Hospitality. “Like, here we are in this forest and having a twilight picnic, and in the distance is this little chateau where they’re making fabulous food.” Even in the middle of downtown Fort Lauderdale, he nailed the vibe.
There’s no flashy big-name design firm involved; instead, Tronn, one of the restaurant’s three partners, worked for five years to bring his vision to life. The team gutted the 110-year-old building and transformed its exterior with a black-and-white facade, iron Juliette balconies and flower boxes. “I worked with a brick maker to come up with every brick silhouette. It’s made to look like the building has been here,” Tronn says of the bricks’ pie-crust effect, noting that the contractors thought he was crazy for using exterior wood in Florida. “We’re not doing a Disney version of a European building, but creating a European-style building,” Tronn explains. “The older it becomes, the more authentic it will look.”
The open kitchen boasts extravagance rarely seen in a restaurant kitchen: a copper hood extending the length of the kitchen (“You could buy a car for that,” Tronn quips about the hood’s price tag), walls are impractically covered in Ann Sacks handcrafted tiles, and crème de la crème Hestan appliances add to the legitimacy. But the real fairytale factor strikes in the adjacent Atrium, another dining room where 90,000 faux flowers organically grow from the walls and ceiling.
On the second floor, Tronn exhibits his version of “tiki” in a moody lounge dripping in surprising global accents, like a wall flaunting Tibetan dialect based upon a poem Tronn wrote, and a nearby table where marbles continuously design sand mandalas. “This is the 34th place that I have been responsible for. I always try to inspire people creatively and give some sparks to their imagination,” Tronn says. Despite a world where restaurants often disappear as quickly as fairy dust, when it comes to the great expense of a standout design, Tronn believes this enchanting establishment has staying power. “We are built to last. We used a lot of classic elements, so it’s fresh, but timeless,” he says.
Not too far away, at newcomer Mykonos set along the New River, owner Aydin Kharaghani and his team at The Entourage Group touched every space, also declining the use of a design company. “Everything you see is a collaborative effort,” Kharaghani says. “We feel like when everyone comes together, you have a lot more creative flow. Whereas, when you focus on one designer, the creative juices are limited.”
Like its name implies, the restaurant’s aesthetics are meant to transport guests to Greece as they dine on Mediterranean-influenced cuisine. A beautiful breeze off the river flows through the open-air restaurant dressed in white-washed spaces and accents like an evil eye mural created by Kharaghani’s brother, hanging rattan lamps, oversized planters with lush greenery, and eye-catching billowing curtained ceilings that add warmth and texture to the former industrial space. A strategic highlight is the indoor-outdoor dining spaces that capitalize on the riverfront views, and westward-facing windows that bathe the dining room in golden-hour light to easily transition the space from happy hour to a sexy, evening vibe.
But for Kharaghani, the design goes deeper than what’s in plain sight. “With our extensive experience in developing food and beverage concepts in hotels, we are focused on perfecting the finer details that create a significant impact,” he says of the group’s robust hospitality portfolio from Fort Lauderdale to Canada. “For example, the height of a table can change a guest’s entire experience. If it’s a little too high, they feel uncomfortable, but they don’t know why they’re uncomfortable. For us, we’ve got it down to a science, from the feels to the textures and even the smells.”
To his point, the faint scent of fresh herbs grown in the open kitchen mingled with burning incense floats through the restaurant. Kharaghani’s design ethos goes as deep as perfecting the lighting, which not only makes the dishes ready for “camera-eats-first” photographs, but for flawless selfies. “Why not have an experience where everyone can say, ‘I look great in that photo,’” he says. Tapping into social media trends that drive patrons to eateries and hotels, they’ve built photo-ready spots around the restaurant, from a sand box backdrop at the entrance that mimics a Grecian beach to a large peacock sculpture that garners center stage on the outdoor terrace.
At Pier Sixty-Six, a behemoth resort set on 32 acres, a bevy of interior designers transformed the 60-year-old icon into a modern showstopper. The resort’s signature restaurant, Calusso, imagined by ASD|SKY firm, is an architectural masterpiece where you’re instantly hit with the “wow” factor. “Guests are immediately swept into a strikingly carved walnut tunnel, whose rich, earthy tones serve as a dramatic prelude,” says Rebecca Wilcox, interior designer at ASD | SKY. She suggests guests cozy up to the Zebrino marble bar, which is edged by Arteriors hammered iron stools that are upholstered in a custom Opuzen fabric. “It’s a vintage-inspired Italian pattern, a delicate, tactile contrast that adds to the overall sense of refined luxury,” Wilcox notes. The space unfurls into intimate niches, each outfitted with plush velvet sofas, yet the dining room offers a swift transition thanks to a Shaw Contract rug dripping in a serene palette of blues and greens that evoke the splashes of the ocean’s waves. “Above, the ceilings curve in a graceful mimicry of a beach swell, its gentle undulations mirrored above to create the sensation of gazing upward at the reflective surface of the sea,” Wilcox says, although diners may wish to retreat to the wraparound terrace meant to transport diners to the Italian Riviera. And if that’s not impressive enough, move to the rotating Pier Top lounge, where bubbly, caviar service and 360-degree views will elevate the night. Seems that elevated design is on the menu as Fort Lauderdale restaurants make space for inferiors that are just as important as the food.