FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA

Inside Fort Lauderdale’s Florida Room: Where Pickleball Meets Celebrity Chefs

FLORIDA ROOM | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton | Oct. 16, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

It’s not every day that a wagyu meatloaf debuts inside a pickleball complex. But that’s Fort Lauderdale now—where Florida Room, the new restaurant from celebrity chefs Jeff McInnis and Janine Booth, opened this week at The Fort, the city’s sleek new sports and entertainment hub.

The 4,000-square-foot restaurant is beautiful—sunlight bouncing off the lake, glass walls framing the courts, the kind of place that feels equal parts dinner and daydream. It’s the first Broward County spot for McInnis and Booth, the husband-and-wife duo behind Miami hits like Stiltsville Fish Bar and more recently Root & Bone in Hendersonville, N.C. Together, they’ve built a menu that takes Southern comfort on a road trip through the tropics.

Chef Janine Booth Jeff McInnis Florida Room The Fort Pickleball complex Fort Lauderdale

Booth and McInnis at the Florida Room

Expect fried chicken with a shattering crust, short-rib meatloaf braised for two days, and a double smash burger that could end your loyalty to any drive-thru.

Watermelon and feta salad

Smaller plates land somewhere between playful and indulgent—pimento cheese with melted tomato and focaccia, caviar-topped tater tots, and peaches n’ cream with stracciatella and basil that sounds like a Floridian midsummer afternoon.

Spicy Rigatoni Florida Room The Fort Fort Lauderdale

Desserts keep the nostalgia running hot: a torched-tableside Baked Alaska, a coconut key lime pie almost too pretty to eat, and a chocolate spumoni tart with bourbon cherries. Inside, 100 seats face an indoor-outdoor bar that will likely become the post-match hangout spot; another 100 spill out to the patio overlooking the water.

Watermelon and feta salad

If you’re wondering who eats dinner at a pickleball complex, the answer is maybe everyone I know. As a regular at The Fort, I’ve had a thousand conversations about Florida Room in the past month. I’ve watched the restaurant go from drywall to dim light, and as a food writer, I’ve fielded nonstop questions from friends who assume I have insider intel. Players won’t head straight there post-game—it’s too polished for sweat-soaked dinkers—but there are few prettier dining rooms in the city. They took a risk going upscale with this concept. The obvious answer would’ve been sports bar (with pro pickleball on the TVs, because, yes, that’s a thing), but competitors know the easy play rarely gets the point.

Double smash burger

Baked Alaskan lemon meringue

McInnis says he wanted a place that felt “familiar and comforting in the best possible ways.” That’s exactly what this appears to be: an easygoing spot elevated by technique, opened just in time for the season when Florida remembers how good it can be.