Tallahassee, FL Outdoor Cooking: Smoker Rules (2026)

Section 13-34(a) lists 25 activities that are unlawful in a city park or recreational facility unless a permit or director authorization applies. Item (11) bars cooking foodstuffs except where the city has provided facilities for that preparation, or where the director has otherwise authorized cooking; item (12) separately bars setting or stoking a fire except where appropriate facilities are provided. Read together, that limits open-flame cooking and campfires in parks to designated grill pads, fire rings, or pavilions the city has built for that purpose, or to an event that the director has specifically cleared to cook on site.

Both clauses sit in the same numbered list as the park's camping and shelter-building bans, so a smoker or fire pit set up outside a designated cooking area is treated the same as any other unauthorized park activity. The subsection's closing sentence supplies the single consequence for the whole list: violation is cause for immediate ejection from the park, issuance of a trespass warning by a law enforcement officer, or both, rather than a fine schedule tied specifically to cooking. Because this provision is written into the parks and recreation chapter, it does not reach outdoor smokers, grills, or fire pits on private residential property; the city's general code does not contain a separate citywide backyard-cooking or open-burning standard in this chapter, so anyone smoking meat or grilling at home in Tallahassee is outside the reach of § 13-34.