First & Sixth, Roanoke

At First & Sixth, inside the historic Patrick Henry building, chefs take a fusion approach to their food. Strip steaks, blackened catfish, and crab cakes are dressed up with southern flourishes such as cheese grits, tasso gravy, and collard greens. The chefs also design southern-style Dr. Pepper glazes for pork, bourbon marinades for steak, and a corn-liquor barbecue glaze for salmon.

Servers ferry these dishes to tables and booths nestled beside cream-colored walls hung with decorative branches. In the Penny Deux Lounge, patrons at the bar, a replica of the Patrick Henry Hotel front desk, sip cocktails while bobbing their heads to live music on weekends. Both the restaurant and the lounge take their names from local history: the restaurant gets its moniker from Patrick Henry, the first and sixth post-Colonial governor of Virginia. The lounge gets its name from Henry’s famous court case, the Two Penny Act, which stipulated that businesses must always give two pennies as change and never four ha’pennies.