Eating Through Richmond, VA: The Unabridged Version

When I ate my way through Richmond recently for the Food & Wine Across America series (my piece is in the July issue, on newsstands now), I followed a night of heavy-duty dining (consuming two full dinners) with breakfast the next morning at Café Gutenberg—and the sunny café won me over right away with its clotted cream, a rarity at restaurants that don't specialize in afternoon tea. Since Gutenberg didn't make it into my F&W story for space reasons, I'm delighted to write about it here. The café is unusual for many reasons. Wine, for instance. It not only serves a small list of unexpected choices, like Austrian Welschriesling, but it sells bottles for people to take home. The café also hosts wine tastings, live music performances, foreign language round tables and book readings (a small corner of the café offers new, used and rare books for sale). Even if you skip Gutenberg's attempts at forging community bonds, you can go just to eat well. I had a buttery panino full of meaty applewood-smoked bacon and fluffy scrambled eggs. The menu at night sounds equally delicious, with homey European dishes, like bratwursts and German potato salad or shrimp with chorizo, tomato and sherry over linguini. It’s the kind of soul-soothing food you want to eat after too many challenging restaurant meals.