Podcast: Vilano Beach, Florida is St. Augustine’s Secret Hideway
If you enjoy visiting St. Augustine, Florida for it’s historic charm and its proximity to the beach, then you should very much know about Vilano Beach. A tiny beach community less than 10 minutes from the heart of Old Town St Augustine. It is everything you could want quiet time on the Florida coast.
Jesse Blanco: I always enjoy my trips down to St. Augustine. I get down there probably four or five times a year, every single year, working with a couple of different food festivals that they have in that area. Always love the trip. Sometimes I stay in Old Town, which I very much enjoy, as touristy and as piratey and all of that stuff, that it is. I do enjoy it very, very much, walking down St. George and doing all the things that you can do in Old Town, St. Augustine.
But sometimes, I get the opportunity to stay out at the beach, very literally about a stone’s throw from the beach. St. Augustine has two most popular beaches, one is St. Augustine Beach, which is your big, touristy, t-shirt shop, fried shrimp shack kind of stretch of beach. It’s massive. It’s St. Augustine Beach, it’s the side of the coast where the St. Augustine Amphitheater is, where the concerts are, and the lighthouse and all of that stuff. But if you wrap around to the other side, headed north around the bay there and center St. Augustine, and you go up A1A— you cross over a bridge before you turn left and go up A1A all the way up to Pontevedra and Jacksonville, there is a tiny–and when I say tiny, I mean tiny–beach town called Vilano Beach. This is right over the bridge from Old Town. And right there, I mean, it’s the last thing you see if you’re coming south before you turn right to cross the bridge into Old Town St. Augustine. Vilano Beach—I wish I knew more about the history before I decided to talk about it, I could have done some research, but it doesn’t matter for the purposes that I’m discussing it here. It’s a fascinating little slice of old Florida.
I was there a couple of days ago as I record this, and as I was walking this little strip, I was thinking, you know, there’s a million stories that can be told about this place. First of all, this strip—there’s a road, it’s a street that I would guess at most is a half a mile long. At most. And this street, which I don’t even know the name of, stretches from the Atlantic Ocean past a handful of hotels, Hampton Inn, Hyatt, Holiday Inn, whatever, a couple of abandoned businesses that were there probably in the 40s and 50s that have been shut down and never made it into anything else, and it ends at the other side with a fishing pier and a playground for the kids where you can enjoy the intercoastal waterway. That is the stretch, about a half a mile at most, from the intercoastal to the Atlantic Ocean. And so you can walk them both, if you go out for a walk from your hotel, you can walk to the ocean and the intercoastal in a grand total of 25 minutes tops, and enjoy views of both. For that reason, you know, you get the sunsets on this side, you get the sunrises on that side… it’s pretty fascinating.
Well, the other night, there’s a brand new pub—shout out to Durty Nellie’s Pub in Vilano Beach, I wanted to see it the last time I was there and it hadn’t opened yet. So I took a walk down there, and, you know, as pubs go, this was a brand new one. Everything was new. They had some TVs in there, and a pool table and all that. They had Guinness on tap, which was lovely, and it was properly poured, shout out to the young lady there who was pouring them, she did it right. But it was interesting to see this pub on this little strip of land at the end of the island there, if you will, with not a whole lot else going on. You walk past some mom and pop motels.
There’s some old 1940s-1950s era signs, neon and otherwise, that have been there forever. A couple of them have been restored by local government, and there’s signs and plaques explaining what this little slice of Americana is on this, again, not even half mile stretch of road here at the southern tip of this island. I keep saying island because you turn right and go into the mainland and into old town St. Augustine. But, in addition to Dirty Nellie’s Pub, there’s a couple of other restaurants.
There’s a Publix there next to the hotel that I pop into time and again—for all the talk about all the fancy food that I get to eat, the other night I had a lot of work to do, and so was in my hotel and I got a Pub Sub and I sat outside. It was a beautiful, low humidity evening, and I enjoyed the sunset, and my sandwich with my barbecue Dirty Chips, and I was just soaking up the scene, looking across the way from my room at the Holiday Inn, which I very much love, at the brand new Art Deco Hyatt place that they have built over there, and over to the left is a Hampton Inn, and then you get into the mom and pops… I was sitting there going, ‘you know, I wonder how many people know about all of this right now.’
This is just… It’s changing, it’s growing. I’ve been going for a few years and I’m watching it. There’s another hotel, there’s a condo that’s being built, there’s all kinds of activity being developed there, but right now it’s kind of a secret little community. They do have a food festival in November called Whiskey Wine and Wildlife that I attend every year, but that is kind of contained within the Hyatt Hotel there, indoor-outdoor situation. It’s a beautiful way to see this little corner, this little pocket, this tiny little waterfront alcove, if you will, of old Florida, on the Florida coast there, just seven minutes, if you will, tops from St. Augustine. I mean, I walked out to the beach the other day, and I’m walking back to the hotel, and I’m seeing—we all know the scene, these old mom and pop hotels, where the swimming pool is in the parking lot, and there was a gentleman smoking a cigarette sitting in a chair outside of the little motel window–I mean, the little motel door. We’ve seen this scene a million times in the movies and otherwise, and this still exists in Vilano Beach, Florida. And so I’m fascinated by this whole thing. Movies have been shot there, all kinds of stuff. Again, I wish I’d done a deeper dive on the history of Vilano Beach, which now I’m curious myself. I’m probably gonna go look it up.
But all that to say, there’s some really good food in Vilano Beach as well. Obviously, this is a food podcast, and I was enchanted by this little community, but as it has developed, there’s now a steakhouse there in the Hyatt Place Hotel. There’s a seafood restaurant on the rooftop of the hotel. Next to the Publix, there’s takeout Chinese, which, I think it’s kind of like a requirement where Publix has to have takeout Chinese in their strip mall. But there’s a little family friendly pizzeria with outdoor seating.
Right up the street, there’s the The Reef restaurant, which I think in St. Augustine is the only restaurant on the actual beach. Right up there, maybe a mile away. And then, that’s to say nothing about all the amazing, amazing food that you can get in and around St. Augustine these days. It’s a really, really vibrant scene, and if you pull out of any of those hotels in Vilano and you drive into Old Town St. Augustine, you’re probably down there in under 10 minutes if there’s no traffic. I beg to say 6-7 minutes. It’s a scene. It’s a beautiful, quiet piece of Americana that I’ve come to very much enjoy every time I go down there and I get to stay out at the beach. If you’ve not been, you should at least take a look. Vilano, V-I-L-A-N-O, Vilano Beach. It’s really, really cool. They’ve done some stuff to try to help the revitalization along, it’s clearly coming along very nicely. I would guess in probably three to five years, it’s going to look very different than it does now, but I say that in so much as they are preserving the history. All of that Art Deco is not going anywhere. I’ve heard lots of arguments about that, but they’re trying to keep it as much as it looked like before.
Now, lots of great options for food. You can find–I’ll have a list of them right now here. Good eats in Vilano Beach that are either right there in Vilano Beach, or very close by that you should check out. There’s a thousand-million-bazillion waterfront little utopias, if we will, in the state of Florida along the coast. If you love Florida, then you know that. This is just another one, probably 20 minutes south of Ponte Vedra. I’m sure everybody in Ponte Vedra knows about it. But if you don’t know about it, and you do enjoy visiting St. Augustine, you need to take a peek at Vilano. It is really, really cool and there are lots of options for you to eat it and like it. So again, I’ll put a list of a few places where you can find great eats in and near Villano Beach. And hopefully if you get down there in the next little bit, you can try out one of these places. And if you do, hit me up, t-i-p-s tips@eatitandliket.com. We’ll see you next time.