FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA
Mai-Kai Reopens in Fort Lauderdale, and the Fire Finale Still Hits
★★★★☆
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By Michael Lessne | Feb. 6, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: A South Florida native, Michael Lessne is an expert on Fort Lauderdale’s dining scene. By day, he is a bankruptcy and creditors’ rights attorney and commercial litigator.
Mai-Kai just might be Florida’s most iconic dinner-and-a-show, an old-school roadside Fort Lauderdale attraction that just recently reopened. It is big atmosphere, big drinks, and dinner that overperforms for a restaurant this theatrical, which is saying something when the property greets arriving cars like it has a lighting designer on staff.
Before we even got there, the pre-arrival confirmation texts felt like a small, modern courtesy from a venue that is otherwise committed to mid-century escapism. Pulling in, fire tiki torches line the drive and immediately set the tone. Valet is mandatory at eight dollars, which is the price of admission to stop thinking about logistics and start thinking about whether the night is going to involve chanting, drumming, and a stranger handing me a lei.
It did.
First, a bit of background. Mai-Kai opened in 1956, then went dark in 2020 for what turned into a four-year closure, and its return in November 2024 came with a reported $20 million restoration that had one job: bring the place back without sanding off the details that made it a legend in the first place.
The first move at Mai-Kai is a walk through the grounds. The gardens are not background scenery; they are part of the act. Waterfalls, rock formations, dense greenery between buildings—it feels like entering a theme park, in the best way, with that specific South Florida pleasure of realizing someone committed to a difficult idea and then maintained it. It is lush and slightly surreal, like the landscape is also in costume.
We arrived early for our 8 pm seating and went straight to the bar, because that is the point of a place built around spectacle and rum. The bar gives a choice: outside or inside. We went inside, to the sunken ship style bar, and the room does exactly what it wants to do. Dim lighting. All wood. The feeling of being inside a vessel. There’s stained glass above flickering lights, a folded sail with rope accents, and behind us, windows with water streaming down, colored lights illuminating tiki carvings and straw rooflines like a sunken wreck. It is committed, and that commitment is half the reason to come.
Service at the bar was friendly and mostly attentive, which matters when a room is this busy and this dark. I started with the Mara Amu in the classic Mai-Kai tiki glass. It was not sweet, slightly sour, tasty, and burdened by too much ice, like the bartender was trying to keep the drink cold through sheer insurance. My guest had a glass of Nicolas Feuillatte, though a minor lipstick stain on the glass needed fixing. My second drink was a paloma that repeated the theme: again not sweet, with a good citrus bite, the kind of drink that keeps cocktails from turning into dessert.
The dining room, once we moved over for dinner, is all atmosphere, but they pack you in. They initially tried to seat us at the end of what looked like a very long picnic table, which is a specific kind of social gamble at 8 p.m. on a weekend. We asked for space, and they politely accommodated, which set the tone for the rest of the meal: warm service, reasonable flexibility, and a staff that seems to understand that people are here for a big night but still want to feel like adults.
Service stayed warm all night. It was not always fast about clearing plates, but it was friendly throughout. Our server Sergei can keep things moving without acting like the room is inconveniencing him. The soundtrack was modern pop played as Polynesian string instrumentals. Hearing Taylor Swift island-style is surreal but works, which is basically the Mai-Kai thesis in one sentence.
The food landed more confidently than the setting suggests it has to. We started with lobster and shrimp dumplings that were solid in the way dumplings should be: tidy, savory, satisfying, and gone quickly. A tuna crudo came with shredded papaya salad, lime-forward and fresh, flower-adorned, and bright enough to cut through the room’s darkness and the drinks’ seriousness.
For mains, my guest had branzino in a smoky sweet sauce with good flavor and the kind of comfort that makes fish feel like a main event rather than a compromise. I went with tenderloin served with rice, peppers, and scallions. The meat was tender and flavorful, flirting with salty before balancing out, and I finished it and used the sauce on the rice afterward, which is usually my most honest restaurant compliment.
Dessert was pineapple upside-down cake because there was no scenario where we were not ordering pineapple upside-down cake here. It leaned into the authenticity and delivered, the right combination of kitsch and competence, sweet without being fussy, and exactly what the room demands.
The total bill for two of us came out to about $300, which is not subtle, but neither is anything else happening here. Then the show starts—and it sealed the night, even after a night spent in a shipwreck bar under flickering stained glass.
More than anything, this room is packed thanks to the show. Live musicians appeared under the tiki-topped stage. Drumming and chanting were woven into the dining experience like it was always meant to be this way, as if every table had signed up for the full program. Two women and three men danced with serious energy, not the half-committed “dinner theater” version of performance but something that felt rehearsed, athletic, and proud. I got pulled on stage, which was equal parts thrill and panic, and I earned an authentic lei for surviving it.
The finale was a full fire-twirling performance with multiple performers, the kind of ending that makes a restaurant feel less like a place to eat and more like a memory factory. It is hard to do that without tipping into corny. Mai-Kai stays on the right side of it because it believes in itself, and because the execution—food, drinks, choreography, sheer atmosphere—mostly backs up the belief.
Mai-Kai is a theme park restaurant and I mean that as praise: fire torches on arrival, a shipwreck bar, a packed dining room, better-than-expected food, strong drinks, and a live Polynesian show that actually lands. It’s a small civic luxury to have something this singular down the road. Fort Lauderdale feels more like itself with Mai-Kai back.
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