America has fallen hard for Southern food and drink. First it was New Orleans, then Charleston, now Nashville: Our national love affair with all things grits and greens shows no sign of stopping. In the rush to canonize the citadels of New Southern Cuisine, however, the country has ignored Virginia’s Tidewater, the constellation of seven sister cities—including Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, and Virginia Beach—that spirals out from Chesapeake Bay. And from the shallow waters of this port-city region, where immigrant cuisines thrive and the measure of chefs’ mettle is their prowess with oysters and crab and rockfish and shad, the country’s next great food region is beginning to surface.

I have known the region since boyhood. As a middle schooler, I traveled from my home in Georgia to Williamsburg for primers in colonial history and faux period lunches of sausages and rye bread on pewter platters. But those were bucolic images, rendered in sepia. My introduction to the Technicolor Tidewater began several years ago, when I traveled to Oak Island for an exposition of modern Virginia foodways, hosted by chef Harper Bradshaw of Harper’s Table restaurant. After an evening of Pleasure House oysters slurped naked from the shell, handfuls of sea salt–roasted Virginia peanuts, and conversation with local oystermen, chefs, and farmers—all convinced that the rest of the nation did not appreciate the excellence of the food community then coalescing—I knew I had to return to explore further.

From the shallow waters of this port-city region, the country’s next great food region is beginning to surface.

The Tidewater I glimpse on my return is grittier and more compelling than my childhood memories. Working ports dot the coastline. Cranes tilt skyward. Tugs cut deep furrows in the brackish water. And stacks of shipping containers, painted deep blues and reds, ride piggyback on behemoth ships. Trade and the military made this place—and so did immigrants.

In Virginia Beach, the legacy of Filipino immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s to take jobs at naval ports lives on at Laguna Bakery & Filipino Food, my first stop. Here, Therese Lee, a native of the Philippines’ Bulacan province, channels her heritage with yam porridge and lumpia, those crisp, cigarillo-shaped treats so ubiquitous that some locals refer to them as “Manila french fries.”



The neighboring city of Norfolk, on the other hand, is the province of egg foo yong sandwiches, disk-shaped omelets of eggs and onions and pork on mayonnaise-smeared white bread. Like barbecue joints and fried chicken hutches in the deeper South, restaurants such as Patsy and Haymond Wong’s Sing Wong serve as a portal to the Tidewater’s working-class culture. My sandwich reminds me of how port cities, coursing with people from all lands and latitudes, have long affected the American experiment.

Photo by Tec Petaja Chef Sydney Meers of Stove, the Restaurant

This region is Southern on its own terms.

Great food regions are rich with both low and high diversions. On the higher end of the spectrum sits the $24 flounder and house-ground grits entrée served by Stephen Marsh at LeGrand Kitchen, also in Norfolk. Marsh opened LeGrand Kitchen in the North Colley neighborhood in the summer of 2014. Much of his food, from creamed vegetables capped with a sunny-side-up egg to a deviled-egg schmear with Ritz crackers, is minimalist, the attitude almost punk, like a Momofuku for the Mid-Atlantic. His band, The Great Dismal Swamis, plays stripped-down music, Marsh tells me. “And this is stripped-down food.” Named for LeGrand Records, the Norfolk label that launched the career of rock-and-roller Gary U.S. Bonds, it’s a bunker restaurant with a griddle at its center, staffed by kids who wear black and look bashful.Indie chefs such as Marsh drive dynamic food scenes. In this American moment, when white tablecloth dining has ceded the conversation to everyman restaurants that deliver local provenance without fuss, chefs partner with farmers to revive heirloom vegetables. More important, those chefs validate the foodways of a place by presenting traditional dishes, like that reinvented open-faced pimento cheese sandwich, in novel ways.