Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

Cast Anchor at Jeffrey Beers’ New Waterside District in Norfolk, Virginia

Jahla Seppanen
By

Waterside District
Photo by Max Touhey
A Titanic on land, Jeffrey Beers International’s newest hospitality design project, Waterside District, brings 55,000-square-feet of dining and drinks to the waterfront in Norfolk, Virginia.

Seven distinct restaurants and bars are strung together with a similar theme of maritime odes, including seashell-white dining furniture, blackened steel, and exposed structural elements that evoke the gritty glory of this area’s former shipyard aesthetic. You can even find a sailboat hanging from the rafters. Sailors and pirates alike are welcome.

Related Videos

These highly intentional design elements have come to be a calling card for Jeffrey Beers and the firm’s other projects, which include Brooklyn’s newest Gotham at The Ashland. This time, the layout invites us to cast anchor for the day at Waterside District and coast into evening, becoming entranced by the wide range of fare and the marriage with architectural charms.

A few of the concepts include Guy Fieri’s Smokehouse, which evokes a dark pirate ship feel (flames included); the crisp Harbor Club (can you say, views); the light and airy Blue Moon Tap House; fresh seafood from Stripers Waterside; the PBR Coors Banquet Bar; the Blue Moon Taphouse; and — wait for it — a Fudgery featuring handmade, traditional sweets. The craft beers are also inspired by the city of Norfolk, which is home to a longstanding Naval base, several warship museums, and leagues of other seafaring history.

Waterside District not only reminds us how hungry we are, but of the potential for hospitality architecture to evoke a feeling in its visitors and a common ground for connection. For instance, the Waterside District garage space hosts family movie nights (catch Hocus Pocus on October 24), so bring your chair for the promenade, grab a beer, and enjoy the East Coast fall.

Created for The Cordish Companies, who recently enlisted Jeffrey Beers for their Atlanta sports bar complex, Live! At the Battery, Waterside is similarly social but embodies the spirit of a very different setting. Nautical knots and a view that washes in the salty air creates a home away from home.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Meet EatOkra, an App Highlighting Black-Owned Restaurants
Janique and Anthony Edwards of EatOkra with son on a couch.

For husband and wife team Anthony and Janique Edwards, their creation of the EatOkra app was a combination of both passion and timing. A Harlem native, Janique moved to Brooklyn in 2016. Excited and intent on exploring the borough, both Janique and Anthony were eager to seek out and support Black-owned businesses in the area. However, they quickly realized that finding those Black-owned businesses proved harder than expected.
"We were really seeking out Black-owned businesses to support during that time. And Anthony was also was really trying to level up his skills as a developer, wanting to build an app but just really not sure what he wanted to build," said Janique. "And because we were having this issue of finding businesses -- it wasn't something that was super convenient, I kind of made this suggestion out of frustration that he build an app that would make it super simple to find these businesses."

After a series of trials and errors, Janique and Anthony grew this seed of inspiration into EatOkra, an app that highlights Black-owned restaurants. While the app uses modern technology, EatOkra is also a social justice mission, keen on the idea that promoting Black-owned businesses is critical for the community. Since launching in 2016, EatOkra has grown exponentially and now proudly features more than 11,000 black-owned eateries, providing a platform for users to discover some truly delicious and unique local restaurants.
EatOkra

Read more
Chef Roy Choi Discusses the New Season of Broken Bread
Poster of Second Season of Roy Choi's Broken Bread.

In episode two of the new season of Broken Bread, host Roy Choi and Los Angeles food writer Javier Cabral dissect an interesting question -- why are some foods deemed intrinsically cheap? To highlight this, Cabral ponders the price of the Korean-inspired short rib taco in front of them. Ironically, if the dish had been presented with only the short rib, the price point would be higher. But when that same short rib is paired underneath a tortilla, the dish becomes a taco, something that's seen in mainstream America as fundamentally a "cheap eat."

Photo Credit Audrey Ma.

Read more
TikTok ‘Ghost Kitchens’ Featuring Viral Foods to Open in March
TikTok Kitchen meals from Virtual Dining Concepts.

Who can say "no" to KitKat cheesecake? Apparently not too many people, based upon the several million views and several hundred thousand loves the November TikTok creation received.

 

Read more