Food & Drink in Portsmouth

With hundreds of cake flavors and designs, the options are nearly endless at Pinky Sweets Cupcakes and Confections. A rotating selection of cupcakes delights taste buds with flavors such as chocolate salted caramel, chocolate turtle, lemon coconut, and red velvet. Pinky's bakers also design specialty cakes and cupcakes for weddings, and they can arrange cupcakes on custom displays.

Pinky's birthday-party packages, which have themes ranging from spa party to tea party to tax-filing party, allow kids to take on the cupcake-decorating responsibilities while munching on snacks. They often feature a professional photographer.

Wall sconces cast warm light across the exposed brick walls at Monastery Restaurant, where guests dine on European cuisine at small, candle-lit tables. Owners Anna and Adolf Jerabek first opened a restaurant in New York City after leaving their native Czechoslovakia in 1967, and later journeyed to Virginia to open their Old World eatery at the current downtown Norfolk locale. There, they serve breaded port cutlet with Lyonnaise potatoes and steamed broccoli, and veal-stuffed cabbage with dumplings. A painting of a portly monk with a half-finished beer hangs behind the bar, where visitors can enjoy selections from the drink list—wine, beer, champagne, and cocktails—or jump up on the wall to act like the portly monk.

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Lumpia House’s namesake delicacy––lumpia––lures taste buds with its thin, fried-to-order crepe stuffed with savory meat fillings such as pork, chicken, and beef. Lumpia is one of the many beloved gems of Filipino cuisine that the restaurant proudly showcases in its cheerful dining room swathed in red, yellow, and orange hues. Lumpia House’s chefs dedicates a portion of the menu’s spotlight to pork, preparing it more than a dozen ways for aromatic dishes such as pork tocino, which plates sweetened, cured, and shredded pieces of the flavorful meat. After guests fill up on hearty entrees and fried rice, they can burn off recently earned calories by climbing onto the karaoke stage to sing their favorite songs and remind fellow diners to chew 27 times before swallowing. Lumpia House also honors the brave members of the US Armed Forces with an active-duty-military discount.

Serving up self-described cuisine that's all-American (and a little Greek), the chefs at The Norfolk Grille turn out a menu of ultra-fresh dishes during breakfast and lunch, every day. Stop in for freshly cracked egg sandwiches tucked into buttermilk biscuits with sausage, or three-egg greek omelets lined with feta, spinach, and tomato. During lunch, chefs assemble caesar chicken wraps and lean ground beef patty burgers.

The restaurant goes beyond breakfast and lunch, though. The Norfolk Grille caters for weddings, baptisms, and parties, with options like building your own hot buffet or ready-to-serve food such as chicken pot pie and meatloaf. Children's tea parties are also held, offering more kid-friendly food such as chicken tenders, hot dogs, and apple juice.

Julie Fabing Burleson and Suzy Vinson Nettles feel that the kitchen is just another place for kids to flex their creativity. They opened Young Chefs Academy to provide kids aged 3–18 with cooking programs targeted to preschoolers and kindergarteners, elementary schoolers, and older kids ready for trickier techniques and intricate recipes. Regardless of a student’s age, he or she is always taught the pillars of home cooking, including how to be safe in the kitchen, how to properly handle and prepare food, how to bake, and how to talk down an oven that constantly overheats. While participating in the entertaining cooking lessons, kids may not even realize that each class also allows them to practice their math, reading-comprehension, and communication skills.

Since opening in 1974, The Jewish Mother Backstage has hosted the likes of Dave Matthews, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Ice Cube. But despite its famous visitors and the media frenzy surrounding Ice Cube's melting accident, the New York–style deli still maintains a neighborhood atmosphere. Local and regional music acts fill the stage with groovy tunes, and the menu of hearty comfort fare is rooted in tradition, inspired by the owner's own Jewish mother. More than a dozen delicatessen sandwiches boast family names such as the Mother's Son reuben and the Mother's Sailor Friend, a split knockwurst with gooey swiss cheese and pastrami. Aromas of meatloaf fill the eatery at dinner, and breakfast service sates guests' early-morning hunger and desire to crow onstage.