The Wine List: Wine Spectator Awards
We felt ambitious this morning, and we had grand plans to sift through the list of restaurants in Florida recently given awards from Wine Spectator. We were going to post all of the South Florida restaurants here. When we realized we were only halfway through the Florida list and already had 41 SoFla restaurants, we decided to forgo what would've been the longest blog post ever and instead encourage you to peruse the Florida list or search by city.
The awards — Award of Excellence, Best of Award of Excellence (these names could use some help), and Grand Award — were awarded to 4,000 restaurants worldwide "whose wine lists offer interesting selections, are appropriate to their cuisine and appeal to a wide range of wine lovers."
Some highlights from the list:
• Only two Florida restaurants, L'Escalier at The Breakers in Palm Beach and Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa, were among the 76 restaurants worldwide chosen for the Grand Award.
• You'll see a few departed restaurants on the list; Duo and Norman's were posthumously given awards.
• Chain restaurants — think steakhouse-type places — did pretty well overall.
• There were a surprising number of Orlando-area restaurants on the list. Perhaps we should revisit the Central Florida dining scene and reassess our image of it as a culinary wasteland.
