The Restaurant Strip Bermuda Riviera Walks To, Not Drives Past

Step out of the guardhouse at Bermuda Riviera and turn south, and within a block or two you're standing in front of Bokamper's Sports Bar & Grill, dockside on the Intracoastal, with a Water Taxi stop parked right next to it. Keep walking east along NE 32nd and 33rd Streets and the block turns into a run of Italian kitchens, a Greek taverna, a jazz club, and a barbecue joint, all inside a stretch the City of Fort Lauderdale's own facility directory labels North Beach Restaurants and Shoppes. Most online guides to this corner of the city don't bother with that name. They fold it into "Galt Mile" or lump it in with North Beach Village, the boutique hotel district built a few miles south near the W. It isn't either of those. It's its own strip, and it happens to sit closer to Bermuda Riviera's gate than almost anything else described as nearby.

That distinction matters if you live here, because Bermuda Riviera itself holds no restaurants, no shops, no commercial parcels of any kind. Everything you eat, drink, or buy happens outside the gate. Knowing exactly what's out there, and where it starts and stops, is the difference between defaulting to a drive across the bridge and realizing dinner is a five-minute walk.

The Cluster Has A Name, Even Though Most Guides Skip It

The pocket runs roughly from Oakland Park Boulevard on the west, where Bokamper's anchors the corner, east toward A1A, where Fishtales and Blue Jean Blues sit closer to the water's edge. In between, the mix reads like a small European high street plunked into a beach grid: Cafe Martorano and La Dolce Vita for Italian, Patrizia's and Scolapasta for more of the same, Greek Islands Taverna and Thasos for Greek, Smoke BBQ for something entirely different, and Colombian Mountains Cafe and Bohemian Latin Grill covering Latin American cooking. Scolapasta, opened by New Jersey transplant Denise Silvano, built a following fast enough that regulars were reportedly coming back two and three times a week within months of opening, according to a feature on the strip's development from Lifestyle Media Group.

The drinking side of the strip runs its own lane. Blue Jean Blues brings a jazz-club program most nightlife guides to Fort Lauderdale beach don't mention. Fishtales leans into live music on a bigger stage. The Boardroom and 33rd Street Wine Bar cover quieter nights, and FL's Bar & Lounge rounds out the later end of the block. None of this is the postcard version of Fort Lauderdale Beach with its hotel bars and valet lines. It's a working restaurant row that happens to be walkable from a gated, no-commercial neighborhood, which is a rarer combination than the marketing copy for either side usually admits.

The Farmers Market Goes Quiet Every Summer

Walk the other direction, north instead of south, and the character changes completely. Bermuda Riviera sits about a mile by foot or bike from the beach in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, home to Aruba Beach Cafe and, a short distance further, El Prado Park. From December through early May, El Prado Park hosts a Sunday farmers market that runs from 9 a.m. into the early afternoon, with vendors selling produce, honey, baked goods, and crafts a short walk from the sand. As of this writing in late September, the market is in its off-season. It closed in early May and won't reopen until the first Sunday of December, when it returns for another winter run.

That gap matters for planning a weekend. Residents who assume the market runs year-round will find an empty park through the summer and fall, then a full one again once the season turns. The rhythm has held for years now: closed roughly May through November, open every Sunday from December through the first days of May.

Two Different Walks From The Same Gate

What makes Bermuda Riviera's position unusual is that these two options don't blend into each other. They're distinct enough in character and distance that the choice of direction changes the kind of evening you're having.

South gets you dinner and a drink without a car. North gets you the ocean, a cafe on the sand, and, for five months of the year, a Sunday morning market. Neither direction requires crossing a bridge or fighting Las Olas traffic, which is usually the first thing outside guides assume residents here have to do for a decent meal.

Why The Naming Gap Is Worth Correcting

The reason most descriptions of this area stay vague isn't a lack of information. It's that North Beach Restaurants and Shoppes doesn't have the brand recognition of Las Olas or the postcard status of Fort Lauderdale Beach proper, so writers default to "Galt Mile" as a catch-all. That's a real place too, just a different one, built around the high-rise condo corridor further south along Galt Ocean Drive. Conflating the two makes both sound less specific than they are, and it means a resident searching for what's actually near Bermuda Riviera often ends up reading about restaurants a mile or more away instead of the ones a block from the guardhouse.

The two blocks along NE 32nd and 33rd do more of the daily work for this neighborhood than any single tower or hotel restaurant along the wider beach corridor, precisely because Bermuda Riviera has nothing of its own to compete with them. That's not a complaint about the neighborhood. It's the reason the strip exists in the shape it does, dense enough with restaurants and bars to function as a de facto town center for a community that was never built to have one.

Veroushka MacLean Volkert works and lives this stretch of Fort Lauderdale daily, from the Water Taxi dock by Bokamper's to the Sunday crowd at El Prado Park once the market reopens in December. If you're curious about how this corner of the city fits together, from the walk south for dinner to the ride north for the beach, Veroushka MacLean Volkert is glad to talk through it. Schedule a free consultation any time.