Restaurants

Hampton Roads is in the South, but food wise it is far from a Southern city. Sure, if you search, you can find plenty of places dishing up grits and red-eye gravy, but that’s not what we’re noted for. Here, seafood is king. And why not? The Chesapeake Bay is the world’s greatest estuary, a sanctuary and incubator for just about anything that swims. And when those fry mature, they head right out to the nearby Atlantic, where the parallel conveyor belts of the warm Gulf Stream and the cold Labrador Current ensure there’s always lots to eat and no real reason for fish to migrate out of the reach of our watermen.

Overview

Not a fish eater? Don’t despair. You can enjoy our many barbecue joints; in fact, you can pick between two local styles: Virginia barbecue sauce is red, rich, and tangy, while North Carolina makes its version nearly clear and heavy on vinegar and pepper flakes. Both states insist that barbecue means pork, slow roasted in smoky ovens over real hardwood. You can barbecue beef, they say, but that’s why you buy a backyard grill.

There’s also a diversity of dining few other Southern cities can boast. It comes from hundreds of years of military forces rotating in and out to local bases and bringing their local appetites and demand for the foods they left behind. So you’ll find Philly cheesesteaks served on authentic Amoroso rolls trucked in from the Philadelphia bakery. The better Italian restaurants get their supplies directly from New York City’s Little Italy.

Love Filipino food? There’s a huge community here, thanks to the Navy. The same with Thai and other ethnic specialties.

Bottom line: if you hanker for some type of food, there’s probably a place here that makes it, and makes it well. And if there’s a national chain, you can bet it has outlets here. I won’t spend lots of time on those, since you’re probably familiar with their offerings. Instead, what follows are the local gems that keep us coming back.

In each listing you’ll see a $ code. It’s the Insider guide to relative pricing based on the cost of an average dinner for two, minus desert or alcoholic beverages. Of course, it should go without saying that things change. The restaurant business is very volatile. Chefs bounce between eateries, changing items or even entire menus. Places, even landmarks, close or change hands. So be sure to call before driving across the region.

So enough with the preliminaries. Here are the best, broken down into neighborhoods and then genres.