Long before there was a bar built into a tree, the building at 400 2nd Ave E was a Pan Am gas station and general store. That was 1929. Over the years that followed, the same address did time as a mosquito control center and, for reasons nobody wrote down, a piggy bank factory, before it went back to being a general store again. None of that history is visible today. What people notice now is the Treehouse, the multi-level bar perched in a historic oak out front, strung with lights and full most nights of the week.

The gas station became a restaurant in 1946, when Earl Norwood bought the building and opened Norwood's Seafood Restaurant. It changed hands twice more over the next few decades, first to the Bulchunis family in 1953, then to Marvin Age in 1972, before Don Simmons joined the management team in 1985 and eventually took the restaurant's standards in hand for good. Simmons wasn't a stranger to the building. He'd worked in the kitchen years earlier as a Daytona Beach Community College student, left for Florida State, and came back after graduation to run the place he'd once worked in as a student.

The Treehouse itself came out of something much smaller. In 2014, Don and Pamela Simmons got in the habit of sitting out front in the evenings with a glass of wine, next to the oak tree in front of the restaurant, the same tree that would later become the Treehouse. What started as an idea for a simple viewing platform kept growing, and by 2015 it had become a full multi-level bar built into the tree itself, open to guests and unlike anything else in New Smyrna Beach. Regional coverage from Fox 13 and Only In Your State has picked up on the same thing since: it's one of the only restaurants around where the tree is the main attraction, not scenery. Roots Bar followed in 2019, tucked underneath the Treehouse as a more low-key companion space.

Don and Pamela still own Norwoods. Their daughter, Rebecca Zerrusen, is general manager and managing partner, and Dennis Dolbow, head chef and managing partner, runs the kitchen. Both have held up the from-scratch standards Don and Pamela set: house-made sauces and dressings, hand-cut aged steaks, local fish and vegetables when they can get them.

It's worth remembering next time you're up in the branches with a cocktail: the building has been a gas station, a mosquito control center, and a piggy bank factory. The version that stuck was the one nobody planned for either, a viewing platform that turned into the reason people find this place at all.

Norwoods is open for dinner nightly and brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. Make a reservation, browse the full menu, or read more about our history and the people running the kitchen today.