Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Etaru on Las Olas closes for good
As restaurants on downtown Fort Lauderdale’s Las Olas Boulevard began opening last week, Etaru’s doors remained locked. And now the Japanese eatery confirms that those doors will remain shuttered.
“We are closed permanently,” Nigel Marumahoko, general manager of the sister restaurant in Hallandale Beach, told the Sun Sentinel on Thursday. “We are not planning on reopening.”
The Hallandale location will remain open, Marumahoko said.
Etaru in Fort Lauderdale is on the ground floor of the 45-story Icon Las Olas luxury apartment tower and has a patio/piazza area that stretches all the way to the Historic Stranahan House Museum on the New River.
The restaurant — which opened on Las
Olas, a dining and shopping enclave, on June 21, 2018 — got a three and a half stars rating from dining critic Michael Mayo, who noted that the “food, drink and service are all topnotch” even if he did lament the “lousy” acoustics.
In his August 2019 review, Mayo also noted that the restaurant ended “lunch service earlier this year after failing to attract the downtown business crowd.”
The comprehensive menu had everything from sashimi and a pork belly ramen dish to burgers and dumplings. The dessert platter was a fan favorite.
A key feature was its family-style service for sharing and the robata grill, which “locks in all the flavoring,” general manager Angelo Rifici told the Sun Sentinel at the time.
Signs attached to doors at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown read in part: “It is with heavy hearts that we announce that Etaru Las Olas will be closed until further notice.”
Marumahoko says that the Hallandale
Beach restaurant, the original South Florida location for the brand based out of London, has been doing “really well” since reopening last Thursday, just in time for Memorial Day weekend. There are plans to re-introduce an expanded brunch next Sunday.
“Hallandale is a different thing,” he says. “It’s a lot more like a multifunction location. On the ground floor we have the beach bar with access to the beach where you can dine outside or rent a beach chair or lounger. And then we have a private members terrace on the third floor and the [second floor’s main dining room] with an incredible view over the ocean; It’s almost like a destination restaurant.”