Date Night in SoDo: Barbecue, a Brewery and a Living-Room Concert
No valet lines, no theme-park crowds. Three SoDo date nights — quiet at Timucua, classic at Cecil's and RockPit, polished at Delaney's — all within a mile.
3 minute read
The best date night in SoDo does not involve a reservation across town, a valet line or a theme-park crowd. It involves a barbecue line, a neighborhood brewery and — on the right evening — a concert in somebody’s living room, all within about a mile of South Orange Avenue. SoDo is a working neighborhood, which is precisely its romantic advantage: the places below are full of people who live here, not people performing a night out. Here are the three versions we recommend, from quiet to loud.
The quiet masterpiece: dinner, then Timucua
Start on Michigan Street. The plaza at 419 E. Michigan St. gives you two ranked kitchens sharing one address: SoDough Square’s Detroit-style squares (No. 5 in our Best Pizza in Orlando rankings, Net Score 92.1) and Tin & Taco’s cheese-crusted craft tacos (No. 3 for Mexican citywide, Net Score 87.9 — the full story is in our winner feature). Split a Detroit Rob City and a pair of tacos and you have eaten interestingly without eating heavily, which matters, because the evening’s main event requires you to sit still and listen.
That event is the Timucua Arts Foundation, at 2000 S. Summerlin Ave. — No. 2 in our Best Live Music in Orlando rankings (Net Score 92.6). Timucua’s white house is a three-story listening room inside a private home, where Benoit Glazer and Élaine Corriveau have hosted concerts since 2000. Guests traditionally bring a bottle of wine and something to share; the room seats about a hundred; the acoustics are engineered to a standard most concert halls would envy. A jazz set, a classical program, a visiting songwriter — whatever is on the calendar, it lands differently in that room than anywhere else in Orlando. Our Timucua profile explains why. Book the concert first and build dinner backward from it; free parking sits on Summerlin Avenue and at nearby Wadeview Park.
The classic: Cecil’s, then RockPit
For the date that runs on appetite and noise, go to South Orange Avenue. Cecil’s Texas Style Bar-B-Q, at 2800 S. Orange Ave. (No. 3 in our Best BBQ in Orlando rankings, Net Score 86.5), serves its Texas-style brisket cafeteria-style — trays, a line, no fuss — in a retro room that has been a neighborhood fixture since the early 1990s. It is dinner as shared ritual rather than occasion, and the free soft-serve cone long-timers swear by is a better dessert course than most restaurants manage on purpose. Our Cecil’s profile has the full story.
Then walk the evening next door, figuratively and nearly literally: RockPit Brewing & Distilling, at 10 W. Illiana St., is the family-owned, coal-mining-themed brewery and distillery that opened in February 2019 and now pours from a deep tap list of small-batch house beers alongside its own moonshine, vodka and gin. The taproom runs live music and trivia, keeps a family- and dog-friendly patio, and — in the district’s favorite arrangement — welcomes Cecil’s barbecue carried in from next door. If the date is going well, this is where it stretches: a flight, a cocktail made with house spirits, a band, no closing-time pressure until the room itself decides.
The tavern version: Delaney’s
Some nights call for a white-tablecloth-adjacent room without the downtown production. Delaney’s Tavern, at 1315 S. Orange Ave. in the Delaney Hotel, is SoDo’s grown-up dining room — ranked No. 2 for brunch citywide (Net Score 93.0; see our brunch guide) but equally useful at dinner, with a full bar, a dog-friendly patio and an outdoor firepit for the drink after the meal. It is the right call for anniversaries that want polish, first dates that want an easy exit to a neighborhood stroll, and any evening that might end with a nightcap by the fire.
The logistics that make it work
SoDo date nights fail on parking and sequencing, not on quality. Cluster your stops — Michigan Street with Timucua, Orange Avenue with RockPit — rather than crossing the district between courses. Check Timucua’s calendar before you plan around it, since the white house hosts on a concert schedule, not a nightly one. And pin everything on the Orlando Top Spots Map before you leave. The district’s whole pitch is that a memorable night out can be a neighborhood night out. On the evidence, it is right.
Orlando Citizen by email
The weekly edition, in your inbox
One email, every Saturday: the week’s edition of Orlando Citizen — the week’s stories, rankings and winners, gathered in one place. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Related Stories
Editor’s Picks
Spotted an error? Tell us — corrections · How we rank