South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Swanky new Dalmar hotel awaits big debut
Fort Lauderdale hotspot appeals to high-end clientele
Of course the Dalmar hotel in downtown Fort Lauderdale is open. The Terrace Grill, the much talked about restaurant, has been filling up since March 11. But now the fashionable hotspot of a hotel is finally get a big, splashy, official grand opening on April 27.
We sat down with Jake Wurzak, the owner of the Dalmar, and Craig McNeil, the executive chef at Terrace Grill, to get the concepts behind the hotel and it’s fine dining.
What’s the idea behind the Dalmar?
The 25-story hotel has 209 guest rooms, including 33 suites — all with iPad technology, keyless room entry and Amazon Alexa automation and rainfall showers. The Lobby Lounge, with its pink onyx bar and stained glass mural on the sixth floor, is already a popular late-night loungey sort of space.
“We wanted to bring some sophistication that we were seeing in design and experiential hospitality in New York, L.A., Miami,” Wurzak says. “That didn’t exist in Fort Lauderdale really until now. … So by creating the Dalmar
in an upscale way it was able to appeal to higher end clientele, an older clientele and a younger clientele.
And that’s really important because we want to catch the 60-year-olds and we want to catch the young professionals that are living in the downtown area, which is totally booming now.”
Aside from owning the Dalmar, Wurzak is a managing partner of WHG Supply, a furniture, fixtures and equipment company. The 33-year-old has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami and a law degree from Nova Southeastern University. A married father of two children, he also worked in the hospitality industry in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, his hometown.
“When we first built the hotel, there was’t much going on around here,” he says. “There was talk of things happening, but as we started to go up, other people started to go up. And a lot more people are moving in. People, the experience, is everything. The design will only carry you so far, but we really built it for the community, because the community is going to make the Dalmar in to the great hotel we hope it will be.” What is the Terrace Grill’s concept?
McNeil — a Scotland native who worked in the Turks and Caicos for 15 years before moving to South Florida five years ago to work at Fontainebleau Miami Beach and on Fisher Island — says the restaurant is all about delivering favorites.
“The Terrace Grill’s concept is sort of American bistro bar cuisine — slight hints of Italian,” the Oakland Park resident says.
“But we really try to capture most of the food that people like around the neighborhoods in Fort Lauderdale. So there’s a little bit of this on the menu and a little bit of that — some classics. You know, we have some highend pizzas and stuff on the menu, sandwiches — stuff like that.”
Wurzak says the unpretentious nature of the restaurant was very much part of his plan from the very beginning.
“The Terrace Grill was an idea that I [conceived] around the old stuff is always good, and people have their great American favorites. And you don’t always need to be creating the most fou-fou, newest thing to have it be great. And we wanted everything to be a crowd-pleaser. We wanted it to be loud. We wanted it to be built around the bar. We wanted it to have a scene. We wanted there to be amazing design elements. So what we did is we created a menu of things that I love and that I experienced from my favorite restaurants around the world. And then I found the best chef in South Florida to cook it.”
McNeil says some of the most popular dishes include “the artichokes alla Romana. It’s an appetizer. Being from Scotland, you know, scallops is one of my favorite dishes. So I’m a scallops snob, if you will. So that’s on the menu. Chicken is a very popular dish we did on the menu. We serve it with gnocchi and wild mushrooms … and English peas — very healthy. Octopus is a fantastic appetizer. We serve it traditional style, potatoes, chili — that kind of thing too.”
Is the Dalmar and Flagler Village a good match?
Wurzak says that in the past the hotel and resort business focused on Fort Lauderdale’s beach. But now he sees a focus on the downtown area.
“Flagler Village is an amazing attribute about Fort Lauderdale,” the Harbor Beach resident says. “It keeps getting better and better every year. And all it is really is an offshoot of downtown with a lot of cool and a lot of people that live here. So it just fit perfectly to put the hotel here. And then being so close to the downtown business community, people can walk to the hotel for after dinner drinks. People can stay here and walk to the office. It became a really important destination for us. And we’re still just two miles
away from the ocean.”
How does a downtown hotel take advantage of the outdoors here in SoFlo?
“You still want people to have a connection to nature, even though they’re downtown surrounded by all these buildings,”
Wurzak explains. “All of our guest rooms can actually see the ocean, you have an ocean view. And then everywhere there [was an] opportunity to have outdoor seat, we wanted them to put one. So you can have a meeting and kind of enjoy it because if you’re in the downtown, urban core there’s just not that opportunity to do it without a car driving right by you. And then Sparrow [the rooftop bar slated to open soon] is really like that too. It’s almost like you can imagine it’s your house. You have your indoor living room and then your back yard. The outdoor … there’s Astroturf and great views of the ocean.”
If you go
The Dalmar is at 299 N. Federal Highway. 954-945-9500. TheDalmar .com.
For reservation at the Terrace Grill, call 954-945-9300 or go to TheTerraceGrill.com.
rhagwood@sunsentinel.com