Restaurants - Regional Cuisine And Restaurants

Williamsburg has been feeding visitors for several hundred years. The original public establishments here were the taverns you now will find in the city’s Historic Area.

Since then, the variety of cuisines offered locally has expanded quite a bit so that you can now get fine Vietnamese food, down-home Southern cooking, and everything in-between. You can order grits at a pancake house, but you’ll also see them at the most expensive restaurants in town—often served with shrimp.

Arguably the best thing to happen on the Williamsburg restaurant scene has nothing to do with the food. In 2009, a new state law went into effect prohibiting smoking in restaurants that did not have a separate ventilation system for their smoking areas. As a result, nearly every restaurant in Virginia, a state that relied on tobacco as its primary cash crop and economic bulwark for hundreds of years, is now nonsmoking.

Two beverage notes: Iced tea is the drink of choice to accompany all southern meals, but it is served sweetened. Those folks in Boston may have thrown their tea into the harbor, but southern colonials and their progeny maintain that sugar, not salt water, is the best companion. Ask for your tea unsweetened if that is your preference.

If you are looking for places that serve or sell adult beverages, the designation is “ABC,” short for the Commonwealth’s Alcoholic Beverage Control, the agency that regulates the sale of beer, wine, or spirits. Beer and wine are sold in supermarkets, but liquor is sold by the state in ABC stores.

We start off this chapter on restaurants for the uninitiated and the adventurous—those who travel and want to know, “what can I get to eat here that’s unique to the place?” The regional specialties in Williamsburg evolved from the early bounty of Virginia’s fields and rivers; many are still heartily consumed in the Historic Triangle today. After that we move on to a general listing of restaurants in alphabetical order.