My spouse and I visited the Jack Nicklaus Golden Bear Grill at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport
(FLL) on a Monday morning in early January 2017. The restaurant opened
in the summer of 2016 in Terminal 3. The Golden Bear Grill serves breakfast,
lunch, dinner, drinks, and snacks daily. The Charleston (South Carolina)
Airport (CHS) hosts a second location of the Golden Bear Grill that opened in the
fall of 2016. (We visited the CHS outpost in mid-November 2016; see our
separate review called “The Main Bar/Restaurant for the CHS Airport”.)
The idea for the Jack Nicklaus Golden Bear Grill owes its
existence to golf’s popularity in Florida; however, even non-golfers recognize
the Nicklaus name and associate it with greatness in the sport. Nicklaus was the
first athlete to win an ESPY award (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly
presented by ESPN), the first golfer to receive the Vince Lombardi Award of
Excellence, the first player to have a Grand Slam on both the regular and
senior golf tours, and the first American inducted into the Asia Pacific Golf
Hall of Fame. Jack and Barbara Nicklaus (the “Golden Bear” and the “First Lady of Golf”) are
philanthropists as well.
The restaurant space seats guests in several areas: at the
bar, at tables, or in a small lounge area that offers comfortable leather
chairs with small cocktail tables between them. Walls display memorabilia that celebrates the life of Jack
Nicklaus and his family, including 15
Nicklaus family photos selected by Jack and Barbara to connect customers to
their family.
The restaurant management at the Fort Lauderdale must do a
better job of deterring non-paying customers from occupying precious real
estate. In the nearly two hours that we spent at the restaurant prior to our
flight (first eating a full breakfast and then ordering several rounds of
drinks), we observed a large group of friends/family traveling together who spent
that entire time fast asleep in the comfy leather lounge chairs, snoozing and
covered with clothing and blankets. They did not order one item, yet they occupied
and monopolized space where paying customers would have liked to sit and drink
and dine. Instead, those revenue customers were forced to wait outside the
restaurant in a long queue for the regular tables and barstools to become
available, and some passengers never got seated before their flights departed,
all while this group continued to occupy those seats. To us, it was clear that
the chairs are part of the restaurant, but perhaps those people thought that the
area was simply an airport lounge where anyone could nap for hours on end?
The Golden Bear menu offers dishes from the Barbara Nicklaus
recipe collection, as well as other classic fare with a modern flair (such as
meatloaf, chicken salad, seafood, macaroni and cheese, and key lime pie). To
design the menu, Barbara collaborated
with a team of chefs using family recipes and dishes from her cookbook, Well
Done! We visited at breakfast time, when a morning menu was available, so
we ordered the fruit and granola and also the beef and potato hash. The hash (diced
fried potatoes topped with tender beef short rib and crowned by a fried egg,
with a flaky buttermilk biscuit served alongside) was truly delicious, and we
would love to order it again!
We enjoyed a tasty meal at the Fort Lauderdale Airport’s
Jack Nicklaus Golden Bear Grill.
