January/February 2008

HRM Forks It Over

Presenting the 2007/2008 Hampton Roads Magazine Platinum Plate Awards. These 50 restaurant picks are on the top of our list.

By Patrick Evans-Hylton

Food is a very personal thing.

We all have favorite foods—perhaps dishes with special meanings from our childhood, or something that is associated with an important event, such as a wedding, birth or anniversary. We also have favorite restaurants, from old standbys that we continue to patronize again and again out of consistency, tradition or habit, to eateries that served as a backdrop for a special moment.

Because food is so personal to people, folks usually are pretty protective of a favorite dish or style of cuisine—the go-to eatery that always pleases, and the restaurant where we are convinced we had the best (fill in the blank) ... ever!

Culinary professionals are no different. Food critics have favorites as well, and this is the sixth year that we’ve asked some of our area’s most eminent foodies to share their top choices. We take their suggestions, tally them up, and that is what makes up our Platinum Plate Awards.

The list is widely varying, including restaurants that spread across the thousands of square miles that constitute Hampton Roads. Here, you will find food from Williamsburg and the Peninsula to Norfolk’s Granby Street Restaurant Row and Virginia Beach’s burgeoning Town Center, with a smattering here and there on the Eastern Shore, in Chesapeake and Suffolk, and elsewhere in our region.

The Platinum Plate list also includes restaurants representing all types of cuisines. You will find places to make carnivores cry out in delight, locovores loco with regional food choices, and vegetarians very, very happy. We have restaurants specializing in the flavors of Asia, the Mediterranean, Latin America, the South and more.

It also incorporates eateries that range from casual to upscale—something for every style of dress, and every bank account.

There are some 2,000 restaurants in our region, save the fast food variety, and all of them are different. All of them have unique offerings, and all of them have a base of folks that love to eat there.

You may find your favorite on our 2008 Platinum Plate list, or you may find a new favorite. Regardless, we wish you good eats.

For the rest of this article, including the list of Platinum Plate Award winners, see the January issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.