Seven restaurants make the first-ever Ordinary Awards New Restaurant of the Year slate
VRLTA's 2026 Ordinary Awards added a category for newly opened restaurants. The nominees span Hopewell to Tysons, and the list says something about where Virginia's growth is.
The Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association added a New Restaurant of the Year category to the 2026 Ordinary Awards, and the inaugural nominee list is out.
The nominees
- Good Ship Brewery & Eatery, Hopewell
- iNoodle, Midlothian
- Kobop Korean Street Fusion, Richmond
- Proof Kitchen + Bar, Manassas
- The Lion’s Den 1837, Mineral
- The Naisho Room at The Watermark Hotel, Tysons
- Thompson Street Tavern, Ashland
Public voting closed August 16, 2026.
What the list shows
Two things stand out.
First, the geography. Only one nominee is in the city of Richmond proper and only one is in Tysons. The rest are in Hopewell, Midlothian, Manassas, Mineral and Ashland: second-ring suburbs and small towns. It tracks with what operators have been saying for a couple of years about where rent math still works.
Second, the formats. A brewery-restaurant hybrid, two Asian concepts, a hotel restaurant, and two tavern-format rooms. No fine-dining tasting menu on the list at all. New capital in Virginia hospitality is going into approachable-price, high-turn formats.
Why a new category matters
Restaurant-of-the-year awards structurally favor incumbents; a room needs a few years to build the reputation and the voting base. Carving out a category for new openings gives a first- or second-year operator something to compete for, and gives the association a reason to go look at rooms that opened last year rather than the ones everyone already knows.
Whether it holds up depends on how the voting is structured going forward. Public-vote categories reward reach as much as quality, and a hotel restaurant in Tysons has a very different audience size than a tavern in Mineral.
