Hot and new can steal the spotlight, but what about longstanding local favorites? Over the months to come, we’ll visit Richmond-area restaurants that have been in business 15 years or longer.
Dot's Back Inn (Photo by Jay Paul)
Neighborhood hangouts are essential. Cozy, casual places where people know your name and your standing order. Open since 1990, Bellevue charmer Dot’s Back Inn is among those local gems. The old-school, unfussy diner at 4030 MacArthur Ave. was founded by Cookie Giannini and named after her Aunt Dot, a server who waited tables for nearly 50 years.
In 2007, Jimmy Tsamouras became owner. A longtime friend of Cookie’s son, he got wind that the business was going to be sold and saw an opportunity. When he was growing up, his parents operated the College Delly, a mom-and-pop mainstay in Williamsburg. It was there he got his first job washing dishes. He later went on to culinary school and worked in kitchens in Hawaii, New York, Arizona and South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island.
“What Dot’s meant to me was like, what I was raised on, ... where I started from,” Tsamouras says. “Dot’s is where every person can go and enjoy themselves and have a good time.”
A year after Tsamouras took over, Dot’s reached destination status following a visit from Guy Fieri of the Food Network show “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.” It has since attracted visitors from as far as Alaska in search of its black bean corn cakes, bountiful burgers, and mean biscuits and gravy.
“There’s people in there serving almost as long as I’ve owned it,” says Tsamouras, who also operates Demi’s, down the block. “The whole Dot’s experience for me has been a wonderful part of my life.”
