The Concept
Omni Hotels & Resorts has opened Barchetta, a coastal Italian chophouse at its Fort Lauderdale property, positioning the 50-plus-unit hotel brand's newest F&B outlet as a destination for both convention business and the broader Broward County dining market. The restaurant occupies a waterfront plaza adjacent to the hotel and the Broward County Convention Center at 1880 SE 17th St., overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway.
Executive Chef David Caceres leads the kitchen, where the menu pairs imported Italian ingredients with South Florida sourcing across three core categories: handmade pasta, premium seafood, and prime steaks. Anchor plates include a Bistecca Fiorentina prime T-bone for two, a Frutti di Mare featuring Florida black grouper and Kaluga caviar, and a Bucatini Cacio e Pepe finished with black truffle. "This is the kind of food I love — great ingredients, bold flavors and dishes with a lot of character," Caceres said.
Bar Program and Local Sourcing
The cocktail program leans on aperitivo culture with a Florida edit. The signature Pomodoro Negroni uses tomato-basil-washed gin with Campari and sweet vermouth, while the Day Drift — Prosecco, lemon juice, and St-Germain — incorporates J.F. Haden's Lychee Liqueur from Miami-based Tropical Distillery, a craft spirits operation founded by Florida natives and former NFL players Mike and Maurkice Pouncey. The Haden's lineup also appears in cocktails across the broader Omni Fort Lauderdale bar program, reflecting a deliberate local-sourcing strategy that hotel F&B operators increasingly use to differentiate managed outlets from freestanding chain competition.
The room itself channels the dual meaning of "barchetta" — Italian for the small open boats of the Adriatic coast and later applied to open-top sports cars — through warm reds, leather, stone, and Italian-inspired artwork. The design language is aimed squarely at convention attendees and leisure travelers who expect polished hotel dining without the stiffness of a traditional hotel steakhouse.
Portfolio and Market Context
Barchetta is the seventh food-and-beverage outlet at the Broward County-owned property, joining Reef 76 Kitchen + Bar, Fair Ketch, Ibis Sky Lounge, Hidden Key, Tide Coastal Kitchen, and Leeward Market. The hotel itself opened in December 2025, making Barchetta part of the continued ramp-up of one of South Florida's largest new convention hotel openings in recent years. The opening creates approximately 52 positions, a staffing footprint consistent with a full-service dinner concept running six nights a week.
"Barchetta is an important part of that vision," said Gayla Guyse, General Manager of Omni Fort Lauderdale. "It gives our local community, convention attendees and visitors a new reason to experience the waterfront."
For hotel operators, multi-outlet F&B strategies at convention properties have become a key lever for capturing captured-audience spend while also drawing local traffic — a dynamic that lifts overall hotel revenue per available room without requiring additional keys. Barchetta operates Tuesday through Sunday, 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., with midnight closes on Friday and Saturday. Reservations are available via OpenTable.
The opening fits a broader pattern in upscale hotel foodservice, where brands are investing in chef-driven, regionally anchored concepts to compete with the independent restaurant market on their own grounds — a strategic shift covered extensively in restaurant industry trend reporting.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
