Start from 32 curated places around Daytona Beach, FL, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
The Cellar Restaurant
Classical Northern Italian fine dining in a downtown Daytona building that served as President Warren G. Harding's winter retreat, with a dining room that feels preserved from another era of tablecloth restaurants. The menu runs to house-made pasta, veal, and fish preparations finished tableside, paired from a deep Italian wine list. It is the kind of occasion restaurant that a beach city of this size rarely sustains at this level.
Zen Bistro
A consistently packed Thai restaurant one block from The Cellar on Magnolia Avenue, with a covered courtyard that has a fire pit and monthly live music. The kitchen does green curry and pad see ew that hold up to Thai-restaurant cities far bigger than Daytona, and the lunch specials are one of downtown's best-value options. Voted best Thai in the area by local readers year after year.
Trails & outdoors
Tomoka State Park
A 2,000-acre state park in Ormond Beach protecting the site of a Timucuan village and a colonial indigo plantation at the confluence of the Tomoka and Halifax rivers, with over a mile of hardwood hammock nature trails plus paddling through a tidal creek system ringed by cypress and Spanish moss. The Parknership Loop is an easy 0.8-mile family trail; longer paddling routes extend through the same protected watershed. One of the most ecologically rich short drives from Daytona.
Smyrna Dunes Boardwalk Trail
A 2.4-mile boardwalk loop at the southern tip of a barrier island in New Smyrna Beach, threading through sea oat dunes to the Atlantic on one side and the Ponce de Leon Inlet on the other, with panoramic views of the lighthouse across the water. The elevated boardwalk is wheelchair accessible and keeps hikers above the dunes, with side spurs dropping to the beach for more rugged approaches. Gopher tortoises and shorebirds are routine sightings.
Things to do
MOAS - Museum of Arts & Sciences
Daytona's primary museum complex in Tuscawilla Park, housing a Smithsonian-affiliated collection that spans a Florida Giant Ground Sloth skeleton, the Cuban Foundation Museum, a gallery of American art, an antique automobile collection with the largest Coca-Cola memorabilia assortment in Florida, and a planetarium. The adjacent Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum of Art holds the world's largest collection of Florida landscape paintings. Budget two hours for the main building alone.
Cici & Hyatt Brown Museum of Art
On the grounds of MOAS in Tuscawilla Park, the Brown Museum holds the largest collection of Florida art in the world, with 2,700 paintings spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present, every single one depicting Florida landscape, people, or history. The purpose-built gallery is architecturally notable, naturally lit, and organized to show the full arc of how Florida has been seen and painted over two centuries. It is startlingly comprehensive for a city of Daytona's size.
Landmarks & sights
Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse & Museum
Florida's tallest lighthouse at 175 feet, a National Historic Landmark at the southern tip of the peninsula where the Halifax River meets the Atlantic, with a fully preserved keeper's quarters complex dating from the 1880s. Climb 203 spiral steps to a panorama that takes in the inlet, barrier islands, and open ocean. The grounds museum fills in the keeper family stories with original furniture and equipment left in place.
Halifax Historical Museum
A small but densely curated museum inside a Beaux-Arts building on historic Beach Street, covering Volusia County history from 5,000-year-old Timucuan artifacts through the early automobile racing era on the hard-packed beach. The racing section is particularly sharp, with photographs and equipment from when the beach itself was the track. On the National Register of Historic Places.