Savannah is the most beautifully preserved downtown in the American South — twenty-two historic squares laid out in 1733 and protected with extraordinary fidelity ever since. The trick is staying inside it, eating well in it, and timing one walk through Bonaventure Cemetery for the right hour of the day.
Savannah has the rare quality, among American cities, of having been planned with deep intention by someone who understood what a city should feel like to walk through. James Oglethorpe's 1733 grid — twenty-two open squares, each with its own character, connected by a network of one-block streets shaded by 250-year-old live oaks dripping with Spanish moss — is among the finest pieces of urban design produced in the Western world. The Historic District is essentially that plan, lightly aged.
The visitor industry has grown up around the squares but, in fits and starts, has mostly failed to ruin them. The Historic District is still a place where most of the buildings are 19th-century, most of the residents live there full-time, and most of the activity happens on foot. Spend a weekend inside this footprint and you will find yourself — without quite meaning to — slowing down. The city is built for it.
This is a guide to one weekend done correctly: where to sleep, where to eat (the answer is a tale of two restaurants), how to walk the squares without forcing it, and how to spend dusk at the cemetery the rest of the world saw in a movie.
Where to stay
The single most important Savannah lodging decision is geographic, not aesthetic: stay inside the Historic District. The riverfront tourist hotels on River Street and the chain properties on Bay Street are too far from the squares to walk easily and too close to the bachelorette-party noise to sleep through. Both picks below are in the right zip code.
The Mansion on Forsyth Park
A Victorian mansion hotel facing the most beautiful park in Savannah from a position of considerable architectural splendor. The 700-piece contemporary art collection is woven through every corridor, public space, and guest room — a curatorial commitment that turns walking to the elevator into a small museum visit. The spa, built into the historic carriage house, is among the finest in the Georgia Lowcountry. To stay at the Mansion is to experience Savannah as it has always imagined itself: gracious, beautiful, and entirely unhurried.
Check AvailabilityThe Brice Hotel
A beautifully converted 1888 carriage factory in the heart of the Historic District — a boutique property with genuine industrial character, a lush central courtyard with a small pool, and a location placing guests within walking distance of every major square, restaurant, and cultural attraction. The Pacci Italian Kitchen handles dinner; Artillery, the cocktail bar in the building's preserved carriage house, handles the rest of the evening. For travelers who want walkable Savannah without paying for the Mansion's marble, The Brice is the better answer.
Check AvailabilityWhere to eat
Savannah is a tale of two restaurants, and you should eat at both — not because they are similar, but because the contrast between them is the experience.
For the splurge dinner
The Grey. Mashama Bailey's restaurant — housed in a magnificently restored 1938 Greyhound bus terminal — is the most important restaurant in Savannah and one of the most celebrated in the American South. A James Beard Award winner whose cooking weaves together her personal history, the Gullah Geechee food traditions of the coastal Lowcountry, and the technical vocabulary of fine dining. The pimento cheese with pepper jelly that begins every meal is, plausibly, the most discussed amuse-bouche in American restaurants. Reserve at least three weeks ahead. Dress with care; the room expects it.
For the meal you'll actually remember
Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room. A lunch-only Southern boarding-house institution operating in the Historic District since 1943. Strangers share communal tables. Platters of fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread, candied yams, and approximately fifteen other dishes circulate. The line begins forming before the 11 a.m. opening; the line is part of the experience. Closed weekends; closed evenings; open Monday through Friday for lunch only. The food is extraordinary, and eating it with strangers who become briefly family is extraordinary in an entirely different way. Cash only, until recently.
For coffee and the slow hour
The Coffee Fox on Broughton Street is the local favorite — a serious single-origin program in a beautifully designed space the city's design and arts community treats as a second living room. Foxy Loxy Café in the Starland District (a 10-minute drive south) is the other side of the same coffee culture, with a back garden and Southern pastries that are worth the small expedition.
What to do
The most important rule of a Savannah weekend: walk slowly, on foot, through the squares. The second most important rule: time at least one walk through Bonaventure for late afternoon. Everything else is supporting cast.
The walk that organizes the weekend
The Historic District Square Walk. Twenty-two squares, half a mile across, two to four hours at a slow pace, free. Each square has its own character: Chippewa Square where Forrest Gump's bench scenes were filmed (the bench is in a museum now; the square is unchanged), Monterey Square anchored by the Mercer Williams House, Lafayette Square with its Irish-American heritage, Madison Square with its 19th-century literary echoes. Start near Forsyth Park, work north toward the river, sit in three or four squares for the simple pleasure of doing so. The squares are not stops on a tour; they are the city.
The dusk hour at Bonaventure
Bonaventure Cemetery. Three miles east of the Historic District, on a bluff above the Wilmington River, sit the graves of Savannah's founding families — beneath live oaks draped in Spanish moss in a configuration that no description quite prepares the visitor for. Arrive about ninety minutes before sunset. Walk slowly. Pay attention to the angle of the light through the moss; it is the visual signature of the city. Many private historian-led tours include Bonaventure at dusk for the same reason: it's the experience the rest of the city has been quietly preparing you for. If you're a fan of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the book's locations — the Mercer Williams House, the Hamilton-Turner Inn — sit elsewhere in the Historic District, and a private tour can connect them.
If you have a third afternoon
The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters. One of the finest examples of English Regency architecture in America, with one of the most intact and intelligently interpreted urban slave quarters in the South — a tour that takes the moral weight of the place seriously rather than walking around it. Telfair Museums. Three buildings, including the Jepson Center designed by Moshe Safdie. SCAD's design programs have permanently changed the city's character; the SCAD Museum of Art is worth an hour. Tybee Island, twenty miles east, is the local beach option for travelers who want a half-day on the Atlantic.
Where to drink
Savannah's drinking culture has matured considerably in the last decade. Two picks anchor the modern version of it.
Artillery at The Brice. Savannah's finest cocktail destination — a warm, brick-walled room in a beautifully preserved section of the 1888 carriage factory, with a program that takes Georgia's emerging spirits industry seriously. Southern Prohibition Distillery, Thirteenth Colony, and James Oglethorpe Distillery all appear prominently on a menu that handles the state's growing craft scene with the same intentionality the city's best restaurants apply to local produce. Quiet enough for conversation; serious enough for craft.
Moon River Brewing Company. An 1821 building on Bay Street that is simultaneously one of Savannah's most historically significant structures, one of its most allegedly haunted, and the home of some of the best craft beer in Georgia. The Swamp Fox IPA and Southern Pecan Brown Ale are well-suited to Savannah's warm climate. The atmosphere is the kind of evocative that gets engineered into modern bars and only sometimes earned; here, it's earned.
What to skip
A few honest notes:
River Street. The cobblestone strip along the Savannah River is a tourist trap. The candy shops, the t-shirt shops, the chain restaurants — none of it is what Savannah is. Walk down once, take a photograph of the river, leave. The genuine waterfront experience requires getting on the water (a private sailing charter or a small dinner cruise); the genuine drinking experience is two streets back.
Most "ghost tours." Savannah's reputation for haunting is real, but most ghost tours are scripted theater. If the supernatural genuinely interests you, a serious historian-led private tour will fold the city's spectral history into actual history; if it doesn't, skip the genre entirely. Bonaventure at dusk does the work that no costume shop can.
Paula Deen's restaurant. The food is mediocre, the line is long, and you'll spend the meal regretting that you didn't go to Mrs. Wilkes' instead.
The horse-drawn carriages. Less because they're a tourist cliché (they are) than because the city is so easy to walk that taking a carriage means missing the actual experience of walking through it. Squares reveal themselves slowly to people on foot.
The practical details
Savannah logistics
- Getting thereSavannah/Hilton Head International (SAV) takes a steady stream of direct flights from East Coast hubs. The drive from the airport to the Historic District is about 20 minutes; rideshare is the easiest option.
- Getting aroundThe Historic District is genuinely walkable end-to-end (about 1.5 miles north-to-south). A car is helpful for Bonaventure and Tybee Island; otherwise unnecessary.
- When to visitMid-March to early May, and mid-October through November. Spring delivers azaleas and dogwoods; fall delivers cooler evenings and the start of season at the Telfair. Avoid July and August (humidity is genuinely punishing).
- St. Patrick's DaySavannah hosts the second-largest St. Patrick's Day parade in America (after New York). Either come specifically for it (book a year ahead) or avoid the surrounding week entirely.
- ReservationsThe Grey requires three weeks. Mrs. Wilkes' takes no reservations and starts queueing before 11 a.m.; arrive by 10:45.
- CashUseful at small shops and tipping carriage drivers if you ignored our advice. Cards everywhere else.
The honest take
Savannah rewards travelers who let it set the pace. There is no version of the weekend that benefits from rushing; there is no famous attraction that pays better than two hours sitting on a bench in Forsyth Park. The single most luxurious thing the city offers is the chance to walk slowly through extremely beautiful blocks, in extremely good light, between meals you'll think about for years.
Stay walkable. Eat at The Grey on Friday and Mrs. Wilkes' on Saturday and you will have understood Savannah as well as a weekend can. Skip the riverfront. Go to Bonaventure at five. The South does not always live up to its press; here, it does.