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, or a new reason to visit an old favorite.
It’s designed to answer a simple question: Where should you go out to eat this week? With the pandemic not quite in the rear view, we make sure to highlight takeout and delivery options.
Gus’s Hot Dog King
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10725 Jefferson Ave., Newport News, 757-595-1630, gushotdogking.com. Takeout, dine-in, delivery via apps.
Some of the old hot dog greats have fallen in recent years (R.I.P. Tony’s). But as spring shows its buds, hot dogs spring to mind. In particular, a foot-long dog at the 49-year-old Hot Dog King feels like falling through a Whovian time vortex. The meat sauce is unabashedly salty and lightly spiced. The onions come caramelized and chopped to a fine dusting, and maybe a little greasy from the grill. The buns are steamed, as buns should be.
But really what you’re buying at Gus’s isn’t a hot dog. It’s a piece of American cultural memory. With a single bite, you’ll find that the flavor had already been tattooed to your soul, even if this is the first time you’ve tasted a dog here. Elvis is dead: Long live the King.
Syd’s FishPig Cafe
210 E. Main St., Norfolk, 757.904.3680 fishpigcafe.com. Dine-in and “patio” inside the arcade, reservations recommended.
Sydney Meers teased, and he teased, and then sneakily just opened his doors. One of the region’s most famed chefs, known most recently for his 12 years at Stove in Portsmouth, is back in action in Norfolk’s Selden Market in a space with quirky decor and very personal Mid-Atlantic cooking.
We haven’t been by just yet to tell you how it is — as of press time, it wasn’t yet open 30 days — but reading the menu is already a weekend’s worth of fun. Stop in, if you’d like, and you’ll find a “real Deep South southern gumbo with changing stuff I put into it, we’ll let you know,” your choice of pork-o-ramas both grande and petite, or a “mushroom melange of visiting mushrooms.” Though, you may want to call ahead for a reservation. People have been waiting for this little place to open for a while.
Amiraj
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204 Monticello Ave., Williamsburg, 757-565-3200, amiraj.com. Takeout, delivery apps, and indoor dining.
In Williamsburg, Amiraj is an exercise in high-end Indian dining and delicate flavors, and its devotion to subtlety and a broad range of regional cuisines make it a singular addition to Indian dining locally.
Where it’s excelled most is distinctly Chesapeakean, however: the seafood. Two of the best-executed scallop dishes I’ve eaten recently have come from Amiraj. One was part of a brunchtime seafood medley doused in a lightly sweet curry from Portuguese-influenced Goa, on India’s southwestern coast. But my favorite was a dish inspired by the Nilgiri region of India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, with generous lumps of crab mixed with U10 scallops that yielded like butter to a curious fork.
Come at brunch, for takeout or dine-in, and take advantage of lower prices on multi-course meals.
Aunt Dorian’s Southern Cuisine
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Let's Eat
300 Monticello Ave. (third floor of MacArthur Center), Norfolk, 757-904-5625, instagram.com/auntdorian. Takeout, dining at the mall, delivery via apps.
The Apple Store will close. And the city of Norfolk is floating plans to possibly scrap MacArthur Center in its entirety, maybe by 2030. But in the meantime, revel in the unlikelihood of getting some dang nice soul food in the mall’s food court. Aunt Dorian’s opened this year, in the space previously held by also-good La Hacienda, whose MacArthur location didn’t survive 2020.
From its unlikely third-floor perch, Dorian’s is a welcome addition to a downtown Norfolk food scene that’s changing rapidly in the pandemic’s wake. After running myriad restaurants in Hampton Roads over the years, “Aunt” Dorian Flood is back serving tender and rich and porkless collard greens, yams spiced like Christmas and her locally renowned honey barbecue wings, crispy breaded and surprisingly complex in their flavors. The dessert menu, meanwhile, spans a whole Southern cookbook: peach cobbler, banana pudding, upside down cake.
The Rustic Spoon
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1658 Pleasure House Road, Virginia Beach, 757-937-8930, www.facebook.com/therusticspoonvb. Takeout, dine-in.
The Scotch egg is both a marvel of architecture and a particularly Anglo-Celtic way to balance flavors: egg within sausage within fried breading, a three-layer cake of great tastes and clogged arteries.
The Rustic Spoon’s comes with a particularly Virginia touch: It happens to be wrapped in the historic sausage of Edwards Virginia Smokehouse. When my colleague Judy Cowling stopped in for the egg at the Spoon in February, she found it to be a “thing of wonder,” a “a hearty meal all on its own and good reason enough for our return.”
Matthew Korfhage, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com, 757-446-2318