The kites came down before the sun did. On August 16, families packed the sand for Surfside's last Summer Sunday of the year, an event the town's own recap called Kites, Bites and Beachside Fun, three hours of color overhead and shade underfoot before the season's signature beach series folded up its Shibumi tents for the year. If you were there, or saw the photos land in the Gazette a day later, it felt like a clean ending. Summer's community calendar had run its course.
Except nothing else in Surfside actually stopped that Sunday. A few blocks south, Lido Restaurant at The Surf Club is still seating Miami Spice diners every Sunday through Thursday, and will keep doing so through the end of September. And sometime this fall, the town's Resort Tax Board is set to debut a monthly series it's calling Third Thursdays: Cruising the Globe, described in its own announcement as an elevated block party bringing the world to Surfside. The beach event ended. The dinner deal is still running. The next gathering hasn't started yet. None of these three things are on the same clock, and that's the part worth understanding if you actually live here.
One Calendar Just Closed
Summer Sundays is Surfside's own program, run by the town's Parks and Recreation department and paid for out of the municipal events budget. It's free, it's built for families, and it has a defined start and end date every year. This cycle wrapped with the kite flying at the town's usual spot on 93rd Street Beach, the kind of afternoon where you bring your own kite or grab one on-site, in a series past editions have filled out with food partners like Shake Shack and a local taco stand. That's a town-run calendar with a hard stop. When it closes, it closes for everyone on the same day, and the next entry on that same municipal calendar isn't scheduled to open for a few more weeks.
This is the calendar most residents actually track, because it's the one with a beach, a flyer taped to the community center door, and kids involved. It's also the one that just went dark.
The Other Keeps Ticking Toward September 30
Miami Spice isn't a Surfside program. It's a countywide dining promotion that happens to include some of the town's best tables, and Lido Restaurant at The Surf Club is running its version through the end of this month. Chef Michele Esposito's three-course dinner menu, built around dishes like Wagyu beef carpaccio and spaghettone alla nerano, is priced at $65 per guest and available Sunday through Thursday only. Nobody in Surfside's town government controls that deadline. It's set by the regional promotion, and it closes at the end of September no matter what the beach calendar is doing.
That gap matters more than it sounds. A resident who treats "the season" as one continuous thing, ending with the last kite on the sand, might not realize they've still got three or four weeks left to use a dinner deal that has nothing to do with the beach calendar at all. September 6 to September 30 is not a long runway for a Sunday-through-Thursday reservation window, especially at a table this well known.
What's Queued Up Behind Both of Them
The town isn't leaving a gap once Summer Sundays and Miami Spice both wind down. The Resort Tax Board has already announced its 2026 Third Thursdays series, a monthly block party built around a rotating global theme, meant to become the next recurring gathering on Surfside's own calendar. That's a third clock, and it hasn't started ticking yet. Exact fall dates for the first Third Thursdays gathering are being shared through the town's Visit Surfside channels rather than baked into a single announcement, so residents who want the specifics are better off checking there directly than assuming a date.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood's steadier fixtures don't run on any promotional calendar at all. Café Ragazzi has been serving pizza and pasta in the heart of Surfside for more than twenty years, open on the same schedule in September as it is in February. That's worth naming because it's the counterweight to everything else here. Not every good meal in this town is tied to a countdown.
Why the Distinction Actually Matters
Three separate clocks are running in Surfside right now:
- The town's own recreation calendar, which just closed its summer chapter with Kites, Bites and Beachside Fun and won't reopen with a new recurring event until Third Thursdays launches
- The regional Miami Spice promotion, which has nothing to do with the town calendar and closes at Lido on September 30 regardless
- The year-round dining scene, represented by places like Café Ragazzi, that never had a season to begin with
Confusing these three is an easy mistake, and it's the kind that costs you a reservation window rather than anything bigger. If you assume the fun ended on August 16 because the beach event did, you'll miss a few more weeks of a discounted three-course dinner that was never tied to that date in the first place. If you assume nothing new is coming because the summer series just closed, you'll miss the first Third Thursdays gathering because you weren't watching the right channel for it.
The practical move is simple. Treat the town's own news feed and its Visit Surfside updates as the source for what's next on the municipal calendar, since that's where the actual Third Thursdays dates will land first. Treat the Miami Spice deadline as its own separate countdown, unconnected to anything the town itself is running, and book Lido before the end of the month if a reservation is on your list. And keep going to the places that were never on a promotional clock at all, because those are the ones that will still be here in October regardless of which series just started or just ended.
Surfside in September isn't a town between seasons. It's a town running three different schedules at once, two of them institutional and one of them just the neighborhood being itself. Knowing which is which is the difference between catching what's left of the summer and missing it by a few weeks you didn't know you had.
If you're weighing a move to a town that runs this many overlapping calendars and still keeps its footing, that's worth a longer conversation than a blog post can hold. Work with Alan, a Miami Beach-based advisor with three decades of South Florida roots, for a grounded read on what daily life here actually looks like, season after season.
