Start from 28 curated places around Staunton, VA, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Zynodoa
The anchor of downtown Staunton's food scene, serving inspired Southern cuisine from a kitchen that obsesses over locally sourced ingredients — produce from the Shenandoah Valley, livestock from the Piedmont, seafood from the Chesapeake Bay. The room inside a historic building on Beverley Street is stylish without being stiff, and the signature brûléed cast iron cornbread with whipped honey butter is the kind of thing you'll be thinking about on the drive home.
The Shack
Twenty-six seats, a tiny kitchen, and some of the most talked-about cooking in Virginia — The Shack built its reputation on a tasting menu that blended Jewish Eastern European roots with Appalachian ingredients, earning its founder two James Beard nominations and a three-star Washington Post review. The concept has evolved into high-end burgers and wood-fired pizza under a new chef, but it remains the spot locals take guests who think small Virginia towns can't punch above their weight.
Trails & outdoors
Betsy Bell Wilderness Park
Two small forested mountains on the western edge of Staunton with a network of hiking paths and an observation platform at the summit that opens up views over the entire city, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Blue Ridge. Locals come here to escape — it's a genuinely quiet green space that most visitors drive right past.
Ramsey's Draft Wilderness Trail
One of the premier old-growth forest hikes in the Virginia highlands, following Ramsey's Draft stream up through a stunning hemlock and hardwood grove in the George Washington National Forest west of Staunton. The trail is rated difficult and gets harder as you go deeper — but the mature forest and the cascades along the draft make every mile worthwhile.
Things to do
American Shakespeare Center
The company that built and runs the Blackfriars Playhouse keeps a robust performance schedule year-round — multiple plays in rotating repertory, educational programming, and frequent special events. Even on nights when you're not seeing a full show, the building is worth visiting: theater history is embedded in every architectural detail.
Staunton Music Festival
A summer chamber music festival that brings together top musicians each August for a week of intimate concerts in historic venues across downtown Staunton — churches, the Blackfriars, outdoor spaces. The programming ranges from Baroque to contemporary, and the intimacy of the settings makes it unlike most classical festivals.
Landmarks & sights
Blackfriars Playhouse
The world's only re-creation of Shakespeare's indoor theater, built by the American Shakespeare Center in 2001 on South Market Street. It's a 300-seat candle-lit room where actors perform in the same light as the audience, with no offstage darkness — a staging convention from Shakespeare's time that makes even familiar plays feel completely different. Staunton is a small city with a world-class theater, and this is why.
Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum
Staunton's most famous native son was born in the manse here in 1856, and the museum across the street does justice to both the man and his complicated legacy — seven gallery rooms covering Wilson's presidency, World War I, suffrage, and Prohibition, including a state-of-the-art trench exhibit and his fully restored 1919 Pierce-Arrow limousine.