Courtyard Café
2211 Wilton Drive
Wilton Manors, FL 33305
954-563-2499
Cliff Dunn
Let’s face it: the Gayborhood—a Mecca for nightlife, outdoor activities, guest houses, and living La Vida LGBT—can sometimes feel like a twosquare- mile Sushi Emporium. I realize that this is a “high-class” problem, but when swimming in a sea of seafood doesn’t quite feed the need, it’s comforting to know that a familiar friend stands ready—at all hours, no less—to provide the right guilty pleasure at the right time.
Courtyard Café is the flagship restaurant of Shawn Bombard and Nick Berry’s Comfort Food Empire. Open for five years, the café offers a wide selection of traditional American cuisine and bistro fare, with breakfast, lunch, and dinner cooking fresh at all hours, including all 24 of them on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. In an extremely competitive “gay ghetto”-market, the business duo of Bombard and Berry (known to friends and likewise “branded” as “Shawn & Nick”) have to offer potential new customers an enticement to come through the doors and regular patrons a reason to come back.There winning formula proves to be a menu that is both familiar and fluid, coupled with late hours, friendly service, and the comforts of home cooking. A tour of the week’s dinner specials at Courtyard Café include their Monday Night Burger Madness, with 14 “guest” burgers joining their regular dozen classic-takes on the American, and Gayborhood, fave. That’s 26 mouth-watering burger varieties ($7.50-$8.26)- and a free soda or iced tea with the purchase of one between 4 and 11 p.m.
On Tuesdays, your hosts invite youplus- one to a $20 dinner-for-two including your choice of appetizers, and entrees including delicate Lemon Pepper Haddock, succulent Yankee Pot Roast, a robust Chicken Carbonara served on a bed of tender pasta, and flavorful Jack Daniel’s shrimp, from 5 to 11 p.m.
Wednesdays are also kind to the budgetconscious, with 2-for-1 dinners, and Courtyard’s weekend dinner specials start at $10.95 and include your choice of soup or salad–Thursdays through Sundays from 4 till 10 p.m. The restaurant’s success in a neighborhood packed full of eateries is partly due to a mission to ensure every guest is happy when he or she leaves. There’s a reason you can see the same familiar faces on a daily basis, enjoying breakfast, lunch, as well as dinner. Co-owner Bombard showed me how it can actually be cheaper to eat at Courtyard Café every day than it is to shop, cook the food, and then do the dishes (not to mention all that wear-and-tear on a boyfriend’s dishpan hands). At a time when you seeing a lot of “sidewalk dining” popping up along Wilton Drive, Courtyard has the “original” outdoor breakfast dining spot, with their famous outdoor patio, a perfect spot to enjoy a beer, a glass of wine, or one of their six varieties of mimosas.
The owners have two satellite locations, including Courtyard Café 2 at The Depot Cabana Bar & Grille at 2935 N Federal Hgwy., where you will find many of the same food favorites from the Mother Ship Location, including homemade meatloaf and brown gravy. Unique to the Courtyard Café 2 menu: A basket of Mac-N-Cheese Nuggets–seriously! An additional satellite location can be found inside the popular Gelato Station at 2031 Wilton Drive in Wilton Manors, offering 36 flavors of ice cream, sorbet, sugar-free, and homemade gelato.
As Berry and Bombard like to say, there is always something going on at the Courtyard Café, and we will be going back soon.
