THE WEEKENDER
worth leaving the house for
This is where we rate the places that deliver: the dinner spots with the right lighting, the cocktail bars with energy, the salon you can trust before a big night, the boutique that always has something, and the cultural moments that make you feel more like yourself again.
THE WEEKENDER is our curated guide to Sarasota, Florida, through a global lens. Not everything makes the list. These are the places that feel chic, consistent, and worth leaving the house for… even when you weren’t planning to.
sAVOR
HANAMI SUSHI, COCKTAILS & GRILL
1525 Fourth Street, Rosemary District
Vibe: Cherry blossoms, low light, sushi-forward fine dining
The most considered new opening in the Rosemary District. Hanami is the elevated reincarnation of Tsunami, relocated into a meticulously restored 1925 building that once anchored Florida's Citrus Exchange. The name translates to flower viewing, the Japanese tradition of pausing under cherry blossoms in full bloom, and the room reflects that ethos. Cherry blossom branches commissioned from a local artist, exposed brick, soft chandeliers, and a dedicated lounge attached. The menu spans sushi, hibachi prepared tableside, and a strong cocktail program.
Best for: A dinner that wants to feel like an occasion without trying too hard to be one.
LA MUCCA BALLERINA
1668 Main Street, Downtown
Vibe: Roman farmhouse, family-run, the most authentic Italian on Main Street
The Zappaterreno family has been running the original Agriturismo La Mucca Ballerina in Rome for more than twenty years, sourcing from their own organic farm just outside the city. Chef Mario Zappaterreno brought the same approach to Sarasota. Handmade pasta daily. Carbonara that tastes the way it should. The room is small, lively on a Monday night, and feels lifted from a Lazio side street rather than constructed for tourists. The carbonara, the lobster ravioli, the gnocchi.
Best for: A Wednesday dinner that recalibrates your sense of what Italian food is supposed to be.
LE COLONNE
22 S Boulevard of the Presidents, St. Armands Circle
Vibe: Old St. Armands, reborn
A longstanding St. Armands institution returned after Hurricane Helene, fully restored. Fresh seafood, premium steaks, handmade pasta, and brick oven pizza in a room that remembers what dining on the Circle is supposed to feel like.
Best for: A Sunday night that wants the comfort of tradition without the staleness.
ZŌTŌ
190 N. Cattlemen Road, Unit 5, University Park
Vibe: Izakaya energy, sushi-forward, a little theatrical
Sarasota has been receiving a wave of Japanese openings, and Zōtō is the one to know on the eastern side of town. A confident sushi program paired with a real izakaya menu, organized into starters, fried plates, skewered and grilled items, and proper entrées. It rewards ordering across the menu rather than fixating on rolls.
Best for: A group dinner where everyone wants to share, but no one wants to compromise.
RINGSIDE AT CIRQUE ST. ARMANDS
233 Benjamin Franklin Drive, Lido Key
Vibe: Red velvet, trapeze murals, Gulf views through floor-to-ceiling windows
The signature restaurant inside the Cirque St. Armands hotel is easily the most theatrically designed dining room to open on the island in years. A red velvet curtain at the entrance. Semi-circular booths lined in red, ringed by velvet drapery. Floor-to-ceiling murals of trapeze artists overhead. The menu reads modern American with a coastal lean, and the kitchen actually delivers on the design's promise. Across the lobby, Midway, the hotel bar, does inventive cocktails worth a stop on the way out.
Best for: A birthday, an anniversary, or any night that deserves an entrance.
SIP
STATE STREET EATING HOUSE + COCKTAILS
1533 State Street, Downtown
Vibe: Mid-century bones, the bar that pioneered craft cocktails in Sarasota
The room that essentially launched the modern Sarasota cocktail program when it opened in 2012, set inside a restored mid-century bakery. The kitchen leans Napa-inspired, but the lounge is the reason to come. Late hours on Friday and Saturday. A team that mulls cocktails by hand rather than by recipe. Award-winning year after year, and unlike most repeat winners, it actually still earns it.
Best for: A late drink that holds its own against any cocktail room in the state.
PERSPECTIVE ROOFTOP AT THE ART OVATION HOTEL
1255 N Palm Avenue, Downtown
Vibe: Rooftop pool bar, Sarasota skyline, sunset hour
The most considered rooftop in downtown Sarasota is set atop the Art Ovation Hotel. A heated pool, cabanas for the afternoon, an outdoor bar program that takes the cocktails seriously, and a cocktail menu structured around Florida art history. Views stretch across the theater district to the Gulf in the distance. The right room for a sunset that becomes a long evening without anyone planning for it.
Best for: A golden-hour drink with friends, a birthday cabana, or the night you decide to stay out.
CASK & ALE
Downtown Sarasota
Vibe: Bartender's bar, repeat-business energy
Repeatedly named Best Cocktails by local press, and it earns it. The team treats classics with respect and the seasonal program with intent. Weekend brunch and Sunday jazz are unexpectedly strong.
Best for: A drink after work that turns into dinner without anyone planning for it.
SOURCE
FIGGY CO.
533 South Pineapple Avenue, Downtown
Vibe: Clean beauty, founder-led, considered for the ingredient
The clean beauty and wellness shop opened a second location in Sarasota in the summer of 2024, expanding from its original home in Wilmington, North Carolina. The owner left a career as an ultrasound technologist after a Hashimoto's diagnosis pushed her to scrutinize not just what she was eating but what she was putting on her skin. What followed is a shop that reads as the physical extension of that scrutiny. The shelves carry REVERIE for hair, Flamingo Estate candles, makeup, and skincare that have actually been vetted rather than wholesale-ordered. Small, intentional, and the kind of room you leave with one considered purchase rather than five impulses.
Best for: Replacing the products you have been meaning to replace anyway, with something cleaner and more considered.
SOAK
SALTY MAYNE SALON
7670 S. Tamiami Trail, South Sarasota
Vibe: Coastal, modern, quietly luxurious
A newer addition to Sarasota's salon scene that feels more boutique retreat than traditional beauty destination. The atmosphere is relaxed, the aesthetic distinctly coastal, and the overall experience refreshingly personal
Best for: Effortless color, beachy dimension, and hair that looks expensive without looking overdone.
THE ST. REGIS SPA, LONGBOAT KEY
The St. Regis Longboat Key Resort, Longboat Key
Vibe: Resort-grade ritual, with the discipline to back it up
The 20,000-square-foot oceanfront spa at the St. Regis is the most fully realized wellness experience on the Gulf Coast. Finnish sauna, eucalyptus steam, a snow shower, treatment rooms calibrated for actual restoration rather than performance. Worth the drive across the bridge, and worth blocking out the full afternoon.
Best for: A half-day reset, a birthday, or the Sunday before a difficult week.
STROLL
SELBY BOTANICAL GARDENS
1534 Mound Street
Vibe: Lush, sensorial, restorative
The bayfront gardens remain one of the most underused luxuries in the city. Membership is worth it. Early-morning visits in summer are worth setting an alarm for.
Best for: A walk that costs nothing but recalibrates everything.
TED SPERLING NATURE PARK, SOUTH LIDO KEY
190 Taft Drive, Lido Key
Vibe: Mangrove tunnels, kayak silence, the Sarasota nobody photographs
The hundred-acre nature preserve at the southern tip of Lido is the city's most under-the-radar luxury. A maze of red mangrove tunnels, calm backwaters, and a quiet beach that locals know but rarely discuss. Launch a kayak or paddleboard from the north entrance, and the entire downtown skyline becomes a distant suggestion. Osprey overhead. Almost no one else goes midweek.
Best for: A morning paddle that resets the week, or an afternoon escape from the rest of Lido entirely.
on the calendar
summer 2026
Summer in Sarasota has a different rhythm. The crowds thin, the light lengthens, and the city's cultural life moves from spectacle to something quieter and, in many ways, more interesting. What follows is a curated calendar of the season's most considered moments. Not everything happening. The things worth showing up for.
A Constant Sky - Andrea Carlson
The Ringling | May 30 – November 15
The first museum survey of Andrea Carlson, a mixed-media artist of Grand Portage Ojibwe and European descent whose work interrogates landscape, sovereignty, and the act of looking. A serious exhibition for a serious summer. Worth the air-conditioned afternoon.
Designing the Cultural Coast
Art Center Sarasota | Opening reception May 21, on view through summer
An exhibition tracing Sarasota's design legacy through the work of architects and artists including Carl Abbott, Jerry Sparkman, Victor Lundy, and the Suárez artists co-curated by preservationist Morris Hylton III. For anyone who has wondered why the architecture here feels different, this is the answer.
Pair with: Art Center Sarasota's Second Fridays Creative Happy Hour June 12 and September 11. Drawing, drinks, and good conversation.
Lynn Goldsmith and Patti Smith: Flowers and Friendship
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens | June 20 – September 13
The summer exhibition we are most looking forward to. Photographer Lynn Goldsmith's intimate portraits of Patti Smith, Selby's artist-in-residence across the arc of her career, set against Goldsmith's fine art photographs of flowers throughout the bayfront gardens. Two women, decades of friendship, and a meditation on what it means to make a life around your work.
Sarasota Music Festival
Sarasota Orchestra | June 1 – 13
For three weeks each June, the city becomes one of the country's most quietly esteemed chamber music destinations. Internationally recognized faculty artists work alongside young fellows in a program built on intimacy and craft. The Artist Showcase concerts on Thursday afternoons are a particular kind of summer luxury.
SUNDAY: SLOW MORNINGS & SALT
Brunch: There, There | West Side A modern diner from the team behind a cult food truck, a great chicken sandwich, comfort done well, and coffee milk that honors Rhode Island history. Unfussy and exactly right before the drive.
The Send-Off: A Rhode Island Beach You can't leave the Ocean State without touching the water. Narragansett Town Beach, forty minutes south, is the classic, wide sand, a clean Atlantic break, the stone Towers presiding over the seawall. For something more polished, Newport's Second Beach sits below the Cliff Walk and the old estates. Either way, leave by midmorning. The whole point of a Rhode Island beach is having nowhere else to be.
48 Hours:
PROVIDENCE
With a pre-college daughter cameo.
Providence in summer feels unhurried, rivers catching the evening light, College Hill quiet under the elms, students drifting between coffee and the water. We were up to see our younger daughter through a few weeks of Summer@Brown program, and the city made an easy case for lingering. It rewards walking, conversation, and asking very little of the day. This is our version: polished, personal, and just a little proud.
SATURDAY: CULTURE & coffee
Morning: The East Side Start at Bolt Coffee, there's a counter in the Dean Hotel and another tucked inside the RISD Museum or Seven Stars Bakery on Hope Street, where the almond croissant earns the walk. Coffee Exchange on Wickenden has held its corner for decades and does the unhurried morning better than anywhere.
Late Morning: RISD Museum | College Hill For a museum attached to an art school, it's astonishing Egyptian antiquities, French painting, contemporary work, and a design collection that reflects the school's obsessions. It's rarely crowded. It deserves to be.
Midday: Benefit Street Walk the Mile of History afterward. Colonial and Federal homes stand shoulder to shoulder, lit at night by gas lamps, in one of the best-preserved streetscapes in the country. Let the brick do what it does best.
Afternoon: Brown & Thayer Street Climb through the Van Wickle Gates and cross the Main Green under the elms, then let her show you the corners she's claimed in a few short weeks. Thayer Street, just beyond, has the bookstores, the bustle, and the late-night slice every college town owes its students. The joy is watching your daughter move through a place that was new to her a month ago.
SATURDAY NIGHT: A LITTLE EDGE
Dinner: Nicks on Broadway | West Side Derek Wagner has cooked seasonal New American here for years, and the room has the ease of a place with nothing left to prove. Less polish than downtown, more soul. (Craving a raw bar instead? Gift Horse, Oberlin's seafood sister, does Korean-inflected oysters, smoked fish dip, and a tower worth sharing.)
Drinks: The Eddy | Downtown The Eddy has been quietly excellent since 2013, dim, intimate, classic and contemporary drinks, oysters and conserva at the bar. It is the one we kept returning to. The city's bar talent has only sharpened since: Loma, a 2026 James Beard finalist for Best New Bar, is the newer standout, and worth the detour now. And if WaterFire happens to be lit, summer full lightings land on July 4, August 1, and August 29 abandon the plan and walk down to the water, where eighty braziers burn from sunset, and the whole downtown comes out to wander among the flames.
48 Hours:
PROVIDENCE
With a pre-college daughter cameo.
Providence in summer feels unhurried, rivers catching the evening light, College Hill quiet under the elms, students drifting between coffee and the water. We were up to see our younger daughter through a few weeks of Summer@Brown program, and the city made an easy case for lingering. It rewards walking, conversation, and asking very little of the day. This is our version: polished, personal, and just a little proud.
FRIDAY: ARRIVE & SET THE MOOD
Dinner: Oberlin | Downtown Ben Sukle's downtown room is the reason Providence holds its own against any city its size. Housemade pasta, impeccable local fish, and a quiet confidence that never overreaches. A James Beard finalist for Outstanding Restaurant, and exactly the right way to start a weekend. Reserve ahead.
After: A Gondola at Dusk | Providence River The one the tourists do and the locals secretly love. La Gondola rows authentic Venetian boats from a landing at One Citizens Plaza, and the gondoliers actually sing under the bridges, where the acoustics turn the whole thing unexpectedly lovely. Bring a bottle of prosecco. Forty minutes of the city softening around you.
SATURDAY: CULTURE & coffee
Morning: The East Side Start at Bolt Coffee, there's a counter in the Dean Hotel and another tucked inside the RISD Museum or Seven Stars Bakery on Hope Street, where the almond croissant earns the walk. Coffee Exchange on Wickenden has held its corner for decades and does the unhurried morning better than anywhere.
Late Morning: RISD Museum | College Hill For a museum attached to an art school, it's astonishing Egyptian antiquities, French painting, contemporary work, and a design collection that reflects the school's obsessions. It's rarely crowded. It deserves to be.
Midday: Benefit Street Walk the Mile of History afterward. Colonial and Federal homes stand shoulder to shoulder, lit at night by gas lamps, in one of the best-preserved streetscapes in the country. Let the brick do what it does best.
Afternoon: Brown & Thayer Street Climb through the Van Wickle Gates and cross the Main Green under the elms, then let her show you the corners she's claimed in a few short weeks. Thayer Street, just beyond, has the bookstores, the bustle, and the late-night slice every college town owes its students. The joy is watching your daughter move through a place that was new to her a month ago.
SATURDAY NIGHT: A LITTLE EDGE
Dinner: Nicks on Broadway | West Side Derek Wagner has cooked seasonal New American here for years, and the room has the ease of a place with nothing left to prove. Less polish than downtown, more soul. (Craving a raw bar instead? Gift Horse, Oberlin's seafood sister, does Korean-inflected oysters, smoked fish dip, and a tower worth sharing.)
Drinks: The Eddy | Downtown The Eddy has been quietly excellent since 2013, dim, intimate, classic and contemporary drinks, oysters and conserva at the bar. It is the one we kept returning to. The city's bar talent has only sharpened since: Loma, a 2026 James Beard finalist for Best New Bar, is the newer standout, and worth the detour now. And if WaterFire happens to be lit, summer full lightings land on July 4, August 1, and August 29 abandon the plan and walk down to the water, where eighty braziers burn from sunset, and the whole downtown comes out to wander among the flames.
SUNDAY: SLOW MORNINGS & SALT
Brunch: There, There | West Side A modern diner from the team behind a cult food truck, a great chicken sandwich, comfort done well, and coffee milk that honors Rhode Island history. Unfussy and exactly right before the drive.
The Send-Off: A Rhode Island Beach You can't leave the Ocean State without touching the water. Narragansett Town Beach, forty minutes south, is the classic, wide sand, a clean Atlantic break, the stone Towers presiding over the seawall. For something more polished, Newport's Second Beach sits below the Cliff Walk and the old estates. Either way, leave by midmorning. The whole point of a Rhode Island beach is having nowhere else to be.
Why PROVIDENCE Works
Providence is small enough to walk and serious enough to surprise you. It holds art, water, and an outsized food scene without ever raising its voice. It's a city that respects women who notice things: the gas lamp, the right oyster, the quiet room.
Forty-eight hours. Long enough to see her settled and to remember what it feels like to wander somewhere just for yourself.
FRIDAY: ARRIVE & SET THE MOOD
Dinner: Oberlin | Downtown Ben Sukle's downtown room is the reason Providence holds its own against any city its size. Housemade pasta, impeccable local fish, and a quiet confidence that never overreaches. A James Beard finalist for Outstanding Restaurant, and exactly the right way to start a weekend. Reserve ahead.
After: A Gondola at Dusk | Providence River The one the tourists do and the locals secretly love. La Gondola rows authentic Venetian boats from a landing at One Citizens Plaza, and the gondoliers actually sing under the bridges, where the acoustics turn the whole thing unexpectedly lovely. Bring a bottle of prosecco. Forty minutes of the city softening around you.
Why PROVIDENCE Works
Providence is small enough to walk and serious enough to surprise you. It holds art, water, and an outsized food scene without ever raising its voice. It's a city that respects women who notice things: the gas lamp, the right oyster, the quiet room.
Forty-eight hours. Long enough to see her settled and to remember what it feels like to wander somewhere just for yourself.