Three Days Around Tampa Bay: Great Food, Warm Welcomes, and a Few Moments That Weren't

Last week a friend flew in from Seattle, and we spent a few days moving around Tampa Bay and Sarasota.

This was not a carefully planned travel itinerary. There were no spreadsheets, no color-coded reservations, no attempt to hit the 14 places some website insists you have to see before you die. We arrived Tuesday night, ate, drove around, got caught in a ridiculous Florida rainstorm, ate again, walked into stores that looked interesting, had a few drinks, took far too many pictures of food, and by 5 a.m. Friday we were heading home.

Most of it was really good.

A couple of moments were not. In Clearwater Beach I was called a gay slur. On another occasion somebody told me to go back to San Francisco. My friend was actually visiting from Seattle, so geographically they were a little off.

It is funny enough to joke about now. It was not particularly funny while it was happening.

And it landed right on the reason this directory exists. When you are LGBTQ+, the useful question is rarely "does this city have a Pride festival." It is much smaller than that. Where can I eat, shop, have a drink and simply not think about it?

Over three days we found quite a few places where the answer was: right here.

Where	City	What we did
Tico's Bakery	Tampa	Croissants and sandwiches, 2 p.m. Tuesday
Sekushi	Clearwater Beach	Quiet Tuesday dinner, poke bowl
Abode Beach House	Clearwater Beach	Where we stayed, and the pool
Green Zebra Cafe	Sarasota	Lunch after the rainstorm
Destination Sarasota and Beach House	Sarasota, St. Armands Circle	Shopping on a slow afternoon
COCKtail St. Pete	St. Petersburg	Drinks with the windows open
Cococello	St. Petersburg	Coconut slushie and a matcha
Ekeko Gallery	St. Petersburg	Photographed the storefront, did not go in

Tuesday: a pistachio croissant on the way to the beach

Around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, on the drive to Clearwater Beach, we stopped at Tico's Bakery in Tampa, a Venezuelan-owned bakery on East 7th Avenue.

This was supposed to be a quick stop. It was not.

We had croissants and sandwiches, and the pistachio croissant was genuinely one of the best things I ate all week. Flaky, rich, generously filled, the kind of thing I would drive back for on its own. The sandwiches were good enough that a fifteen-minute stop turned into a very successful late lunch.

The pistachio croissant, and the two sandwiches that were supposed to be a quick stop.

The bakery is bright and easygoing, the pastry case does not encourage restraint, and the staff made us feel completely comfortable. Nothing performative about any of it. We walked in, ordered, sat down and enjoyed ourselves.

The case, which is the reason fifteen minutes turned into lunch.

That is increasingly what I want these stories to capture. Not every business needs an elaborate explanation for why it belongs in a directory like ours. Sometimes the recommendation is simply: we went, we felt welcome, and you should order the pistachio croissant.

Tuesday night in Clearwater Beach: Sekushi

Tuesday night took us to Sekushi in Clearwater Beach.

It was around 8 p.m. in early September and surprisingly quiet. Honestly, very quiet. Sometimes that works in your favor.

Our waitress was lovely and made us feel welcome from the moment we sat down. No weirdness, no sense of being watched, none of the discomfort I ran into elsewhere on this trip. And my poke bowl was excellent.

This is the thing I keep coming back to. A business does not need a rainbow flag on every available surface for me to want to recommend it. Sometimes inclusion is remarkably ordinary. You walk in. Somebody is nice to you. You order dinner, you talk to your friend, you eat a very good poke bowl, and nobody makes you feel like you do not belong there.

That is enough. Sekushi was one of those places.

Clearwater Beach was more complicated

The uncomfortable moments happened around Clearwater Beach, and I want to be careful about how I say that.

I am not writing an article declaring an entire beach town hostile to LGBTQ people because two or three individuals behaved badly. That would be ridiculous. Clearwater Beach is beautiful, our hotel was great, and dinner at Sekushi was one of the best experiences of the trip.

But I am also not going to edit the rest out. I was called a slur. I was told to go back to San Francisco. There were stretches where I became noticeably more aware of who was around us and where the exits were.

Both things are true, in the same place, on the same trip.

That is exactly why individual businesses matter more to me than a label stuck on a whole city. Nobody is handing out a safe or unsafe rating for a destination. The real difference can be one doorway.

Thursday: a Florida downpour, then Green Zebra Cafe

Thursday gave us the full Florida weather experience.

About 30 minutes before lunch, the sky opened. Not drizzle. We ended up pressed against the side of a building on St. Armands Circle, near the glasses store, waiting out about 15 minutes of it while everything around us got soaked.

When it finally eased, we made a run for Green Zebra Cafe, where being dry and sitting in front of actual food felt like a luxury.

I had the chicken pesto sandwich, and I can absolutely see why it is a fan favorite. Chicken, pesto, melted cheese, a really satisfying combination that somehow does not sit heavy. If you are watching your carbs, having some of the bread off to the side is not exactly a tragedy. The roasted sweet potatoes on the plate were particularly good. It was the rare healthy-looking meal I would order again by choice rather than out of a sense of duty.

The chicken pesto sandwich and those roasted sweet potatoes, after fifteen minutes of standing in the rain.

The room was relaxed, we came in damp and slightly ridiculous, and nobody blinked. Easy.

The shops counted too

This trip reminded me that a directory like ours needs to tell more retail stories, not only restaurant ones.

At Destination Sarasota, the staff could not have been more inviting. It was a slow day, and instead of that turning into the slightly awkward experience of walking into an empty store, they were helpful and left us alone to browse in exactly the right proportion. The store was spotless.

Then there was Beach House on St. Armands Circle, which stuck with me the most.

We ended up in a long conversation with an associate named Mileena, who was genuinely friendly and started suggesting other things to try and places to go in the area. That is the kind of interaction you remember. We did not walk in announcing that I run a directory. Nobody was trying to earn a review. We were two customers, and we were treated like people somebody was happy to have in the store.

For me, that is close to the best endorsement a business can get.

Thursday evening: COCKtail, and the bar next door

By about 6 p.m. we were in St. Petersburg at COCKtail St. Pete.

Different energy entirely. It was still fairly chill when we arrived, which I liked. The windows were raised and open, so the bar essentially spilled onto the sidewalk. You can walk up off the street and have a drink without feeling shut away from everything happening outside. After a few days of running around, it was a close to perfect place to stop.

Next door, the Wet Spot was considerably less chill. Music pumping, more energy, and an environment I had failed to prepare for. Unfortunately, I had left my Speedos at home.

Next trip.

That corner of St. Pete felt different from most of our other stops. LGBTQ life was not tucked into a corner or treated as a special event. It was just there. Bars open to the street, people walking around, music coming from next door, restaurants and shops mixed in.

Coconut slushies on Central Avenue

We also stopped at Cococello, the Thai coconut ice cream shop on Central Avenue.

There are businesses I can walk past. A Thai coconut ice cream shop is apparently not one of them.

I went with a coconut slushie and my friend had the matcha.

The slushie was exactly right for that point in the day: cold, creamy, properly coconut-forward, and not a milkshake wearing a disguise. The matcha disappeared fast enough that I took it as a positive review.

Cococello also photographs ridiculously well, which is a legitimate thing to want from an afternoon of walking around St. Pete. But again, what stayed with me was how easy it all was. Walk in, order something cold, take too many pictures, keep going. No second thought required.

One I only photographed: Ekeko Gallery

While we were in St. Pete, Ekeko Gallery caught my eye. I took a photo of the storefront, but we did not go inside, so I am not going to pretend this is a review.

This is the photograph. That is the whole extent of my research so far.

This is honestly how a lot of businesses end up on my research list. You are walking down a street, something catches your attention, and you think, I need to look them up.

That distinction matters to me. There is a real difference between "we researched this business and believe it belongs in the directory" and "I actually went here." Both are useful. They are not the same, and readers deserve to know which one they are reading.

Next time, I am going in.

Thursday night: an IPA and the pool at Abode Beach House

The last thing we did, late on Thursday, was drive back to the hotel. After three days of running around, there is very little better than an IPA and a hotel pool.

We stayed at Abode Beach House on South Gulfview Boulevard in Clearwater Beach, a small retro-styled place across from the beach, close enough to walk to most of what you would want to walk to.

The kitchenette, which I thought about stealing.

The pool was probably my favorite part of the stay. Pinks and pastels, a bit of a mid-century beach look, and nothing like one of those enormous resorts where you share the property with several thousand of your closest friends. The beach is right there, but there was something particularly good about coming back, grabbing a drink and doing absolutely nothing for a while.

After some of the less comfortable moments elsewhere around Clearwater Beach, having somewhere to come back to and switch my brain off mattered more than I expected.

IPA. Pool. Florida evening, and a 5 a.m. drive home a few hours later. I am not sure the itinerary needed to be more complicated than that.

Why I am going to keep doing this

This trip changed how I think about writing for this site.

There are already roughly 900,000 articles online titled some version of "the 10 most LGBTQ-friendly cities you must visit." I do not need to write another one, and you do not need to read it.

What I can do instead is go places. Take my own photos. Eat at the restaurant. Talk to the person working in the shop. Walk the neighborhood. Notice which places feel comfortable, notice when one does not, and then tell you what actually happened.

Because cities are not uniformly welcoming or unwelcoming, and neither are neighborhoods. On one trip somebody told me to go back to San Francisco, and Mileena spent 10 minutes helping us plan the rest of our day. Same region, same few days, completely different experiences.

That is real life, and a rainbow icon next to a city name cannot describe it.

Where I would go back

I would eat at Sekushi again. I would absolutely return to Tico's, preferably hungry. Green Zebra is on the repeat list. I would shop at Beach House again and stop back into Destination Sarasota. I would happily spend another evening wandering St. Pete with a drink at COCKtail and enough time to investigate whatever is happening next door, ideally with more appropriate swimwear. I would get another coconut something at Cococello. And I would finally walk into Ekeko.

Clearwater Beach too. A couple of unpleasant people do not get to decide where I travel. But next time I will know more about where I want to spend my time and my money.

That is really what I want this directory to become. Not a list telling LGBTQ people where we are allowed to go, because we can go wherever we want. A way to answer a different question: where are the people who are genuinely glad we showed up?

After three days of bakeries, poke bowls, rainstorms, shops, coconut ice cream and one regrettable shortage of Speedos, I found quite a few. If you run a business like these, or you know one, you can submit it to Inclusivity.org free and we will take it from there.

FAQ

Sources

• Everything here comes from one visit, Tuesday, September 1 through Friday, September 4, 2026, by me and one friend. No business knew we were coming, and nobody paid to be mentioned.
• Descriptions are limited to what we saw and ate. Where I could not confirm something myself, such as how a business is owned or how many locations it has, I left it out rather than repeating it from a search result.
• Ekeko Gallery is the exception I want to be clearest about. We never went inside, so nothing here is a review of it, and it carries no claim about who runs it.
• Of the places named, only COCKtail St. Pete currently has a listing in our directory. The rest are businesses I would like to see in it.