Hot list: Five new or very old spots for Hampton Roads takeout food in December

This is not a list of the best five restaurants in Hampton Roads. Rather, it’s a recurring feature in which we list places we’re most excited about this month — a great new restaurant you should try, a special event at an old favorite, or a hidden gem.

It’s designed to answer a simple question: Where should you go out to eat this week? And as the troubling nationwide surge in coronavirus cases also begins to show up in Hampton Roads, here’s a dedicated takeout list.

Pho Nguyen

2029 Lynnhaven Parkway, Suite 500, Virginia Beach, 757-524-4040, facebook.com/pho.nguyen.vabeach. Lunch and dinner Wednesday to Monday.

This new, well-appointed Virginia Beach Vietnamese spot is named after that country’s famous beef-noodle soup, and their rendition is indeed a delicate, nicely clarified, candy-sweet, southern-Vietnamese-style version. But if you’re looking for decadence in a takeout box, what you actually want is the grilled meat. The com bi suon trung offers up a wonderfully tender slab of lemongrass-crusted pork chop, topped with yet more shredded pork and a fried egg, plus a generous helping of rice to sop it all up. Get that, or the rice-noodle bowls laden with seasoned skewers of grilled pork or beef, and you’ll be in a meat coma all night.

A Taste of Texas

455 S Lynnhaven Road, Virginia Beach, 757-589-0762, atasteoftexasinva.com. Lunch and early dinner Wednesday to Sunday.

After years as a food truck, A Taste of Texas has moved into permanent digs at the edge of a rumbly and nearly unlined parking lot that might as well be a gravel road. All the better to go with the shop’s umpteen signs indicating you’ve left Virginia and entered Texas. A Taste of Texas’s DFW-via-Houston pitmaster favors a sauce-friendly, easterly Texas take on brisket: fork-tender, less of a thick bark and often chopped onto a sandwich. You could quibble about the texture of the birds served here, but the chopped brisket and seasoned pulled pork serve as an excellent ground for some of the most balanced and interesting sauces around, each one a harmony of sweetness, acidity and satisfying afterburn. That goes for a spicy black cherry, a beautifully amped-up vinegar sauce, a jalapeno blackberry or an experimental Dr. Pepper. Each carries a yeehaw’s worth of kick.

Subway Station

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12288 Warwick Blvd., Newport News, 757-599-0167, subwaystationsubs.com. Lunch and dinner daily.

Late at night — and these days, “late night” starts at 5 p.m. — the light-up orange glow of the 43-year-old Subway Station sandwich shop looks like a German train station as designed by the makers of Tron. The Atlantic City Connection sandwich is an equally parallel-universe creation, mixing up the famous capicola-ham-salami-provolone of that city’s White House Subs with the weirdball additions of Swiss cheese and Canadian bacon. Throw on the shop’s Italian-dressing-style “secret sauce” and some hot peppers, and the toasted wraparound sub is an endless journey through delicate crunch, thick meat, drippy fat and heavenly nostalgia.

Los Paisas Locos

11710 Jefferson Ave., Newport News, 757-595-8226, facebook.com/lospaisaslocos

Finding great Latin American food on the Peninsula can be a challenge, but this no-frills Mexican spot is a worthwhile mainstay. Look especially to their Central American specialties such as pupusas and baleadas, their Sunday pozole or menudo soups, and their estimable skills with carnitas and grilled meats. But if you order delivery on one of the apps, I’m sorry: You’re doing it wrong. Get takeout, and actually show up. Because the most important feature at Los Paisas Locos is not on any menu. It’s the salsa bar located about ten feet in front of the door, and slightly to the right. Open the lid, and discover an eight-deep wonderland of spice and flavor. One is the color of violent and terrifying midnight, while the rest come in every color found on a stoplight. Linger too long, and you’ll nearly pass out from the capsaicin fumes.

The French Bakery and Delicatessen

Alamay Getachew, of New York City, eats a pastrami sandwich at French Bakery & Delicatessen on Nov. 16, 2018. (Kristen Zeis)

4108 Granby St., Norfolk, 757-625-4936. Lunch daily.

Who knew it would happen? The French Bakery now does delivery of its justly famous pastrami sandwiches, via Grubhub and Seamless. Sure, maybe part of the experience of this century-old bakeshop is haggling over rose jam, refusing tastes of pastries until you finally give in, and then leaving dazed after shelling out much more than you’d intended. But now if you want one of the best and most distinctive pastrami sandwiches in the region, you can just click on the app, order a small sandwich (not only the cheapest, but the best, on that wonderful round roll) and you’ll have a little piece of heaven: impossibly deep-flavored and peppery beef, brick-baked bread, sliver-thin onions, a snootful of mustard and pickle, and a balance indescribable in its rightness. If you manage to resist also ordering one of the bakery’s perfect orange doughnuts — $2 apiece and worth every penny — you’re a wonderfully strong person, but also foolish.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-226-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com