Things to do / Travel Guide
Lick your chops at a round of pork chops, cram in the crab cakes, or dab the corners of your mouth at an upscale, waterfront bistro. Eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland's varied and delightful dining scene will have you showing up to the table early at every meal.
Dining on the Delmarva Peninsula
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware boasts over 100 gourmet restaurants and casual dining spots; many restaurants have beautiful ocean views and offer either a solid steak-and-potato meal or fresh-catch seafood. Ocean City, Maryland proudly touts more than 22,000 restaurant seats (fast-food restaurants excluded) at over 200 restaurants. Ocean City's menus offer typical international cuisine such as Chinese, French, Italian, and Mexican, but their main claims to fame are crab cake- and seafood-shacks.
Usually made from a mix of an egg, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, crumbled crackers, a little bit of fresh parsley, and a lot of fresh crab meat, Delmarva Peninsula crab cakes are in such demand that hundreds of area companies even go as far as to ship them out to hungry customers worldwide. Along the Delmarva Peninsula, raw bars and crab houses are a dime a dozen. Just about anywhere in the area you can enjoy fresh sea delicacies shucked right before your eyes and crab cakes made from the day's catch of Chesapeake blue crab or Jumbo Lump crab. Nearly every crab cake- and seafood-shack (no matter how informal or fancy) claims to make the area's best and tastiest - just pick a place, have a seat, and dig in.
Dining in Eastern Virginia
The dining scene in eastern Virginia is quite cosmopolitan. Richmond's trendy Carytown, Church Hill, and Shockoe Slip neighborhoods offer a range of ethnofusion bistros, as well as Latin American, Mediterranean, and Japanese cuisine. Norfolk's Granby Street (the 200 block) has been crowned “Restaurant Row” for its Japanese, Cuban, Caribbean, Southwestern, and Southern cuisine, and just about everything in between. Waterside Festival Marketplace area is also a popular Norfolk dining destination, with many typical chain restaurants and less expensive eateries in the area. Oceanfront dining is sure bet in Virginia Beach, where you and your family can enjoy breathtaking views and great seafood in the summer. Many of the waterside locales close during the winter months, but you can count on the eateries in Lynnhaven Inlet, along Shore Drive, for year-round fare.
Eating in Williamsburg is a special treat. Many restaurants in Colonial Williamsburg are perfectly recreated replicas of their 18th-century versions. The town has four “ordinaries” (taverns) with period furniture and décor, complete with flutists and balladeers for authentic ambience, and George Washington himself dined about a dozen times at Christiana Campbell's Tavern. If you are looking for something more conventional (and modern), head to the colonial-style Merchant's Square, in particular the area around Duke of Gloucester Street. This is the place to find delis, gourmet restaurants, seafood, and decadent dessert cafés (the New York Times recommends Marcel Desaulnier's Trellis Restaurant for their Death by Chocolate cake).
Dining on the North Carolina Shore
Predictably, up and down the North Carolina shore and the Outer Banks you will find that seafood is the dominant cuisine trend. Generally speaking, you can find most of the eateries lining the seashore or just a couple of blocks from the waterfront. Edenton offers a mixture of home-spun restaurants and national chain establishments along North Broad Street and South Broad Street. In Beaufort, the Front Street waterfront is home to the town's best-loved restaurants and Morehead City's favorite eateries are along the Bogue Sound, on Evans Street. Wilmington also offers a wide array of restaurants along the beaches as well as some upscale eateries along the banks of the Cape Fear River. In the Outer Banks you will find a handful of oceanfront, gourmet seafood restaurants in the more upscale resort towns on Bodie Island, in Nags Head, Kills Devils Hills, Duck, and on Ocracoke Island.
Seafood in Eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland
With literally thousands of miles of coastline, in every community in eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland you can order up a seafood feast fit for a king. You want shrimp? Try the region's shrimp salad, fried shrimp, shrimp and grits, or macadamia-coated shrimp. Craving crab? Crab shacks throughout the region offer deviled crabs, crab cakes, Cajun-coated crab, king crabs legs, or even crab enchiladas. Oyster- and raw-bars produce plates full of their raw, steamed, and shucked delights swimming in butter or battered in tempura. Fresh lobster arrives on your table in its full-shelled glory, floating in creamy bisque, or packed tightly in ravioli pockets. Clams come as fritters or in the famous broth-based Hatteras-style clam chowder. Fried, broiled, blackened, seared, or plain-and-simple, down-home, gourmet, and gussied-up - you can order just about any fish or seafood variety to the tune of your taste buds.
Chincoteague Island and Assoteague Island offer the kind of meals that seamen crave - fresh, delectable oysters from September-March and flounder year-round. If you find yourself in eastern Virginia, make your way to the tiny town of Willis Wharf, near Exmore (on the Delmarva Peninsula), which got the attention of the New York Times for their clam fritters. Virginia Beach has a wide range of summer eateries offering gourmet seafood dishes as well as “raw bars” with dozens of fresh oyster varieties, and on the North Carolina shore just about every town specializes in seafood delicacies. Wilmington, for instance, offers more than 30 seafood restaurants within a mile of the beach.
Southern Cuisine in Eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland
While seafood dominates the offerings in eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, you will still see (and taste and smell) hints of the old, typical Southern cuisine. Crunchy catfish, pork chops, down-home Virginia ham, skillet-fried chicken, spoonbread, biscuits, grits, cured country bacon, pickled beets, squash fritters, greens, coleslaw, and homemade pies are just a few of the local delights that occasionally show up on gourmet restaurants' menus, particularly in Richmond, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach. Barbecue joints are also scattered throughout the region, as they are in other parts of the South. On the North Carolina shore, the base of barbecue sauce is vinegar, not tomato, and you can get a good smoked sampling of this Southern coastal cuisine in the Outer Banks town of Kitty Hawk on Bodie Island.
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