Tiki Cove at Venetian Bay Is Open in New Smyrna Beach

"People want their pool back."

That's what Vince Siravo told a local reporter when he explained why he'd spent months rebuilding a pool most of Venetian Bay had written off. For two and a half years, the resort-style pool at the heart of this New Smyrna Beach community sat closed, a private amenity nobody could access, in a neighborhood people had specifically chosen because of what that pool used to offer. Siravo, who already ran Beachin' Burritos on Canal Street, took it over with his friend and contractor Doug Miller. What they built instead of a straightforward reopening is the part worth understanding if you live anywhere near Venetian Bay: the pool that failed as a private perk came back to life by becoming public.

The Amenity Nobody Could Use

Venetian Bay's pool wasn't some forgotten corner of the community. It sat in the Town Center off Luna Bella Lane, the same stretch where the neighborhood's shops and services cluster, built as a lagoon-style pool with a hot tub, not the rectangular slab most subdivisions settle for. But it was strictly membership-only, tied to HOA access, and when it stopped functioning as an amenity, it just stayed shut. Two and a half years is long enough for a pool to go from "the reason we moved here" to a line item nobody mentions anymore.

That's the part of the story that matters more than the reopening date. An HOA-gated pool depends entirely on enough dues-paying households caring enough, at the same time, to keep it staffed and maintained. When that math stops working, there's no obvious fix from inside the same structure. Reopening it exactly as it was would have meant betting on the same dynamics that let it close in the first place.

The Fix Was Opening the Gate, Not Fixing the Old One

Siravo and Miller didn't just reopen a pool. They split it into two businesses running on the same property. The tiki bar, the 160-seat restaurant, and the entertainment side are open to the public, no membership required, walk in like any other restaurant in town. The pool itself still requires either a membership or a day pass, but that's a much smaller ask than the old all-or-nothing HOA structure ever was.

"Before this was a membership only area," Siravo said. "We are trying to embrace the community and listen to what they liked and didn't like from before." That's a meaningful shift for anyone who assumed, reasonably, that a former HOA pool stayed off-limits to non-residents. It doesn't. The food and the bar and the trivia nights are for everyone in New Smyrna Beach, not just the streets inside Venetian Bay's gates.

What's Actually There If You Walk In

The restaurant runs the same menu as Beachin' Burritos, tacos, burritos, nachos, taco salads, and a Crunchwrap riff, all built around the green chile Siravo imports from Hatch, New Mexico and roasts into a stew he smothers on nearly everything. Regulars point to the wings specifically: ghost pepper, peach habanero, barbecue, and parmesan, ordered often enough that they've become the thing people mention first.

The physical layout matters too. The tiki bar sits at the center of the property, poolside, with the restaurant wrapped around it. The north side of the property became a dedicated entertainment area, anchored by a 30-foot projection screen used for movie nights. That's not a detail from the opening press release either. Reviews posted as recently as July 2026 describe the same layout still running, still busy, with named staff who've become part of the draw. Bartenders Elaina and Kylie show up by name in more than one review. So does Nixon, a bartender from Hawaii, who one regular credited with setting the tone for the whole bar.

What Getting In the Water Actually Costs

At its September 2025 launch, Tiki Cove structured pool access three ways. A day pass ran $20 per person, free for children under two. Venetian Bay residents could join for $800 a year or $75 a month, covering a family of up to five. Non-residents paid a bit more, $950 a year or $90 a month for the same family coverage.

The gap between resident and non-resident pricing is modest, about $150 a year, which tells you the pool was never meant to function as a gate against outsiders. It's a nod to the fact that Venetian Bay residents already fund the community through HOA dues, not a wall keeping the rest of New Smyrna Beach out. If you're weighing whether it's worth joining versus just showing up for day passes, the break-even lands somewhere around forty visits a year for a family, which is a lot fewer trips than most people assume once summer actually gets underway.

Pricing this specific is worth double-checking before you show up expecting it exactly as published, since it's been more than a year since that structure was first announced. But the model itself, public restaurant and bar layered over a smaller membership-gated pool, is the same one reviewers were describing as recently as this past July.

What's Actually Happening This Fall

Tiki Cove is heading into its second fall season, and the pattern from year one gives a decent sense of what to expect. Siravo brought on someone who lives in the community specifically to run programming, and by the time the doors opened there was already a full calendar in place: trivia nights, karaoke, cigar and bourbon evenings, and NFL Sunday Ticket viewing for the football season. Movie nights on that 30-foot screen were built into the plan from day one, not added later once the crowds showed up.

Fall and Halloween programming were part of that original calendar too, which matters if you're the kind of resident who plans a season around what's actually on the books rather than guessing. One reviewer from earlier this year noted that there's almost always something going on, which lines up with a venue that was designed around a packed calendar rather than an occasional special event.

Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Live Nearby

The easy version of this story is "New Smyrna Beach got a new bar." The more useful version is that a community amenity everyone assumed was gated actually isn't, not for the food, the drinks, or most of the entertainment. If you've driven past Venetian Bay's Town Center and figured the pool and bar were off-limits unless you lived on one of those streets, that assumption is a year out of date. The gate only applies to the water itself, and even that comes with a day-pass option that doesn't require signing anything long-term.

For a neighborhood built around the idea of walkable amenities and golf-cart distances, that's a real shift in what's actually available to the rest of town, not just to the people who live inside it.

If you're curious about what else is changing across New Smyrna Beach's neighborhoods, from Venetian Bay to the beachside districts, Allyson Wise-Bird keeps a close eye on the details that make this stretch of Volusia County worth paying attention to. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening here.