At Chima Fort Lauderdale this month, two parties can order the same three courses on the same night and walk out with different totals that have nothing to do with what they ordered. One table mentioned the word "DineOut" when they booked. The other didn't. That single word is the difference between a regular check and a $60 prix fixe menu built for Dine Out Lauderdale, the citywide dining promotion running through September 30.
Visit Lauderdale, the tourism arm behind the program, publishes the participating restaurant list and price tiers on its own site. The details for accessing the menus vary by restaurant, as the examples below show.
Four Price Tiers for One Promotion
Dine Out Lauderdale isn't a single deal. It's four of them, stacked by meal and by ambition. Lunch runs a flat $35. Dinner splits into three tiers: $45, $60, and a $75 "Lux" tier for restaurants that want to put their best plates forward. Neither the entree price nor the restaurant's usual reputation tells you which bracket you're getting until you check.
Daniel's Steakhouse, a Michelin Guide-recommended restaurant, is offering the $75 Lux dinner this year. MAASS, the only Michelin-starred restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, is running both the $60 and $75 tiers at its chef's counter. That puts the city's single most decorated dining room in the exact same price bracket as plenty of neighborhood Italian spots a few blocks away. The tier tells you almost nothing about the kitchen behind it. It only tells you what you're committing to spend before tax, tip, and drinks.
If you've been saving a MAASS reservation for a special occasion, this is the seven-week window where "special occasion" pricing and "regular Tuesday" pricing land in the same range. That's worth building a night around, not stumbling into by accident.
How to Access the Dine Out Menu
Not every restaurant sets the Dine Out menu next to the regular one on the table. If you don't see it, ask your server specifically for the Dine Out Lauderdale menu when you sit down.
Chima Fort Lauderdale makes this explicit rather than implicit. Its $60 menu is unlocked by entering the reservation code "DineOut" when you book, not by showing up and hoping. Other restaurants leave it to the verbal ask at the table. The way to access the promotion depends on the restaurant.
Ask for the Dine Out menu when you book or sit down.
It's a useful detail to remember before you sit down anywhere on this list.
The Water Grants You Access Too
Dine Out Lauderdale doesn't stay contained to one strip of restaurants. The 2026 lineup deliberately spans the waterfront, pointing diners toward Ocean Prime at the new Las Olas Marina for elevated seafood with direct boat access, a three-course lunch overlooking the ocean at Beach Terrace Restaurant in Deerfield Beach, and a meal along the shore at Aruba Beach Cafe, which sits right on the Lauderdale-by-the-Sea pier. None of these are in walking distance of each other, which is where the Water Taxi becomes more than a tourist novelty. Its routes run as far north as Pompano Beach and as far south as Hollywood, which means you can string together a waterfront dinner circuit across several of these Dine Out spots without hunting for parking at each stop.
If a formal sit-down isn't the mood, three of the city's food halls, Sistrunk Marketplace, Block40, and Baoshi, are also part of the lineup this year. They're a lower-commitment way to sample the same two months of promotion without locking into a single restaurant's prix fixe structure, which matters if you're trying to convince a group with different budgets and different appetites to agree on where to eat.
The New Events Come With Actual Deadlines
The prix fixe menus run the full two months, but the new experiences layered on top of Dine Out Lauderdale this year don't work that way. Some of them have hard dates, and at least one has already partially passed.
MAD Arts is hosting "Ode to Tomato," a six-course immersive dinner built around interactive storytelling and local ingredients, on exactly two nights this year: August 7 and August 21. The first date is already behind us as of this week. The second is still eight days out, which makes it the only remaining shot at that specific evening this season.
Temple Street Eatery is running hands-on dumpling-making classes and a pottery workshop where guests craft their own ramen bowls, a pairing of cooking and craft that wasn't part of past years' program. The Wilder has built its own version around cocktails rather than food, pairing a four-course menu with handcrafted drinks inside its 1920s-styled Lobby Bar as part of an exclusive "Cocktail Club" evening. And if you'd rather walk than sit still for one restaurant all night, Craft Food Tours is running a Las Olas Boulevard dinner and drinks tour that includes three tasting courses, cocktails, dessert, and a stop inside a private art gallery.
None of these operate on the same open-ended, walk-in logic as the standard prix fixe menus. They're built around reservations, limited seating, and in MAD Arts' case, a calendar that's already half spent. Treating this year's Dine Out Lauderdale like a two-month open door misses the fact that some of its best additions are one-night events with a shrinking number of chances left to book them.
Two Months, Not One Coupon
The promotion technically runs as a single block from August 1 through September 30, but it doesn't behave like one offer. It's a menu of separate decisions: which price tier fits the night you want, which restaurant needs you to say a specific word or code before the discount shows up, whether you'd rather sit still at MAASS's counter or hop the Water Taxi between three waterfront spots, and whether one of this year's new one-night events is worth building a reservation around before the remaining dates disappear.
Fort Lauderdale residents who treat these seven weeks as a single blanket discount will eat fine. The ones who ask the right question at the right table, and book the events that only exist for one or two more nights, get a noticeably different two months out of the same promotion.
That kind of attention to the details underneath a surface-level deal is the same instinct worth having when you're making decisions about this city that carry a lot more weight than a dinner check. Michelle Nelson has spent her career reading Fort Lauderdale and the rest of Palm Beach County at that level of detail, whether the question is where to eat this month or where to put down roots for the next decade. If you're thinking about buying or selling anywhere in this market, schedule your free consultation and get the same kind of local read that actually holds up when you check it against reality.
