Long Driving to Virginia Beach....Eats on the way?

BF and I are taking a long drive to Virginia Beach during Labor Day weekend so we're looking for places to stop and nosh along the way, as well as places in/around Virginia Beach and Norfolk, VA.

Surely a fellow LTHer will have some suggestions for us hungry travelers!

We're not allergic to any specific food, but we are definitely looking for bargains and regional food that shouldn't be missed while out on the East Coast.

So whaddya suggest??
(PS - thank you in advance! )

I just took that drive, and have a few suggestions. First, take the scenic route, which means skip Ohio, PA, Maryland etc. and pack in as much Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia as possible. That means jump on I64 in Louisville or wherever. I have taken the other route with the turnpikes, big cities and construction too many times to count. If you do opt for the Great Lakes route, see my posts on Toledo and Pittsburgh and Mike G's excellent recent log of his family trip to DC. Certainly you have seen this.

As for the Mountain Route, I would suggest Frankfort KY and the surrounding area as a stop for the bourbon distilleries and horse farms. Lovely stuff, though there is no bourbon to be had in the mostly dry distillery counties.

Huntington WV is a nice college town on the western edge of WV. It has a distinct and peculiar hot dog and root beer stand culture (chili and slaw predominate), a rusty but revived downtown and a big university (Marshall). Do eat at Frostop, which is only a few miles off the interstate. This is a classic drive-in with very good root beer and pretty good food. Cool place.

Driving through WV, you will see many highway signs with the typical fast food -- plus the intriguing local chain Tudor's Biscuit World. Trust me when I say get the Mountaineer -- a BIG scratch biscuit with country ham, a fried egg, cheese, and a McDonald's style hashbrown on top. (I see this as deep south meets Western PA/Eastern OH with the spud-on sandwich motif.) It might be worth getting off to look at the New River and/or the Greenbrier if you haven't seen either before. The former is a white water river at the bottom of an impossibly deep ravine and the latter is like an American Windsor Castle.

Charlottesville and Williamsburg are worthy stops with the sort of cutesy college-town food that, IMO, is never as good as people claim. But both hyper-historical and handsome places are well worth stops. Reid's, an old-fashioned local grocery in C'Ville has a large selection of country hams at absurdly low prices. I got one in my gaze right here.

In Norfolk, you must seek out Doumar's, another old drive-in. They claim to have invented the ice cream cone. I said "I thought that happened at the St. Louis World's fair." Well, yeah, but it was Mr. Doumar of Norfolk who introduced it there. The original machine is still in use 100 years later. The food here is very, very good. Pulled pork and house-ground burgers with double cheese are about as good as it gets. Also, the limeade with fresh limes is nearly identical to the Vietnamese drink (that's good). Ironically, the ice cream is not so great.

I intended to do a full-on report with pictures, which I will do at some point. But I wanted you to have my current as-of-last-week info.

Bon voyage.

Two suggestions for southeastern Virginia:

1) Pierce's Pitt Bar-B-Que
447 E. Rochambeau Dr.
Lightfoot, VA
off of Highway 64
757-565-2955
(near Williamsburg)

This is very good tomato-based barbeque. Whiile I wouldn't quite rate it as highly as the very best BBQ I've tasted, it is very good, and if you are heading to Norfork on US64 it is very much worth a visit. If memory serves, the restaurant is rather rustic and is in a suitably rustic environment.

2) Calvin L. Adams Country Store
114 Church Avenue, SW
Waverly, VA
540-342-4825

You can recognize this old country store by the large plywood peanut sign out front. This is not really a restaurant, but a great place to get peanuts - boiled, roasted, and every whichway. Also a great place to buy Virginia country ham, including in a sandwich. And in Virginia country ham and peanuts is where it is at.

Dittos on the recommendations for Doumar's in Norfolk. Gotta go there, and the same with Frostop in Huntington, but there are an amazing number of hot dog joints to good italian dining in this town. If you're going through WV gotta have some pepperoni rolls. That is the WV regional food.

Hampton Roads area has some outstanding seafood. I will only touch the surface. VA Beach on Shore Rd is the Dockside Inn, my favorite, and on the other side of Shore Rd is the Lynnhaven Fish House which claims to be one of the top seafood places in the country. Both sit right on Chesapeake Bay and the boats pull right up to the restaurant. Dockside more casual, LFH a bit more upscale but still casual.

In the touristy area of VA Beach, on Pacific Ave, is a great seafood place called Tautog's (named after a fish).
Just around the corner from Tautog's, south on Pacific, is a great breakfast place that serves homemade corned beef hash.

In Portsmouth, in OldeTowne, right on the water, nice little place called The Deck. Excellent seafood and steaks and right on the water and nice atmosphere.

GAF wrote:Pierce's Pitt Bar-B-Que ... If memory serves, the restaurant is rather rustic and is in a suitably rustic environment.

Made many trips to Pierce's as a William & Mary undergrad in the mid-1980s. I will be back there later this year when Mrs. JiLS and I make a little trip through Richmond and Hampton Roads the week following Labor Day, and will consider it a highlight of the trip (although not for purely culinary reasons, of course). Pierce's has been in Lightfoot since about 1960, for a while in the 1980s expanded into a couple of larger markets including the Waterfront in Norfolk, but I think has more recently retreated to just the original spot. It was a yellow-painted, fluorescent-lighted, concrete-floored shack when I used to go there, and I doubt they've had much motivation to change that formula, but am curious to see how they are holding out. FYI, Lightfoot is just a few miles north of Williamsburg, and you can see Pierce's from I-64; as I recall, it was pretty hard to miss on a dark and otherwise undeveloped stretch of road off the Interstate, but who knows, that may've changed, too.