Restaurants in Richmond

Riverbound Café's friendly owner, Michael Cohan, dishes up made-from-scratch diner eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner amidst his restaurant's casual maritime décor. From their post on the wall, paintings of beach life look longingly down upon crab cakes and other seafood shipped in fresh daily, and model sailboats and lighthouses surround eggs, burgers, and hand-cut steaks cooked to order. Boardwalk fries accompany all sandwiches, wraps, and melts, and homemade desserts entice sweet teeth with their siren song. Catering and box-lunch options feed off-site diners at gatherings of all occasions, including business luncheons, birthday parties, and meetings of the Box-Lunch Appreciation Club.

The owner and chef of the recently renovated Royal India Express was born in Punjab—an Indian region famed for its tandoori cuisine. Now under new management, the restaurant re-creates the tastes of that region, with a particular specialization in biryani. The chef roasts marinated shrimp in a clay tandoor oven, stuffs naan with garlic, and simmers tender goat meat in creamy curry sauce. Diners can also order from the Indo-China portion of the menu, which includes entrees such as chili-spiced paneer cheese with onions and peppers. An on-site sweets shop allows customers to taste traditional Indian desserts such as doughy gulab jamun or kheer.

Moore Street Café’s signature teal awnings can be spotted within steps of the Richmond baseball diamond; its brick façade shrouds a diverse clientele of regulars who have lunched in the same spot for decades. As Richmond Times Dispatch reporter Lisa Antonelli Bacon reports, the joint is a quintessential American diner, with “a quiet location just off a main thoroughfare. . . a steady, friendly clientele, [and] a staff that loves coming to work.” The owners—Tom Stutzman and his mother Alice—bought the established café in 1999, fulfilling their lifelong dream of owning a restaurant and ordering industrial-size tubs of ketchup. The pair packs its menu with hearty egg and omelet breakfasts, specialty sandwiches, and hand-pressed burgers. Their soup and dessert selections are homemade daily.

As a 20-year veteran firefighter, Shawn Gregory saw his share of action and understood how draining a day on the job can be. So when Shawn and his wife decided to open Halligan Bar & Grill––named after a common tool used by firemen––they wanted to pay homage to the brave individuals in the fire service. “I built this place kinda to be a clubhouse for me and my firefighter friends to kick back after a long hard day on the job,” Shawn describes on his website.

Alongside firefighter-themed gear decorating the walls, including helmet-covered lights and uniforms pinned to the wall, the original eatery’s pride and joy is a 1973 Seagrave fire engine donated by the Mangohick Volunteer Fire Department. The engine, cut in half, sits behind the bar and portions out libations from its pump panel-turned-beer taps. Fully operational lights dance across the bar, and sirens blare every time someone says the word “refill.” At Halligan’s second location in Glen Allen, bar stools flank an entire fire truck in the massive dining room, and the roof holds tables reserved for VIP seating.

Behind a quirkily colored bright-yellow brick façade, Bonvenu Restaurant & Bar charms visitors with brunch spreads of smoked gouda and ham omelets and sweet-potato waffles, and dinners of lamb roulade or bacon-topped mac 'n' cheese. The eatery projects its commitment to blending disparate cultural influences through its very name, which means "welcome" in Esperanto⎯a constructed universal tongue that draws from Latin, Ukranian, and the secret language that twins speak to each other. The interior adds a whimsical edge to Eisenhower-era diner decor, with two-toned crimson and cream walls dotted with modern art, and oblong globules cast warm light onto a bar top equipped with Belgian ales and flavored martinis. The recipes on the menu take taste buds on globetrotting voyages, with flavors as exotic as Filipino adobo sauce, or as familiar as local foraged mushrooms.

The team behind Positive Vibe Café cooks toward a better tomorrow in more ways than one. Not only does the organization train aspiring chefs with disabilities for jobs in the food-service industry, but it also helps to clean up customers' lifestyles with healthy, flavorful fare. The crew—which includes professional chefs, volunteers, and trainees—steams and grills local, organic produce and meats, which go on to star in gourmet baguette sandwiches, nutritious salads, and refined dinner entrees of buffalo meatloaf and balsamic-kissed salmon with prosciutto, served after 5 p.m.

Formerly the Get Lost MD Foundation, the nonprofit Positive Vibe Foundation preserves Get Lost's mission to help those with developmental and physical disabilities achieve the satisfaction of gainful employment. Helmed by Garth and Max Larcen, who shared a vision to operate a full-service restaurant that would provide both education and employment opportunities for its graduates, the foundation has patient and knowledgeable instructors who have trained more than 400 students in the skills of basic food service, cleaning, food safety, and commercial dishwashing. The instructors further each graduate's employability through lessons on communication in the workplace, interviewing, and proper job-searching techniques.