Brick House Diner: Everything from Scratch
by Orion Hughes 10.2024
Photos by Rebecca D’Angelo
Six things a great diner make: all dishes made from scratch, heaping helpings of the best comfort food, signature dishes, pleasant servers, reasonable prices, and a bright and open dining area with a good diner vibe:the hustling and bustling tht comes with friendly, efficient servers. Brick House Diner has it all in spades.
Brick House Diner, since they first opened their doors on Arthur Ashe Boulevard over a year ago, instantly became one of our favorite go-to restaurants on the Northside. After all, classic diner food, at its best, satisfies even the most discerning palate.
We make sure every breakfast at Brick House begins with an order of piping hot beignets. Perfect beignets, right here in Richmond! Each and every luscious one is made to order, and tastes as if it were somehow magically teleported from a kitchen in the French Quarter. Small pillows of light and airy pastry with a slightly chewy texture encased in a thin golden crust smothered in sugar. And they melt in your mouth just as they should.
On several recent visits, over the course of two months, R and I ate both breakfast and lunch (never on the same day) at Brick House, and we always left happy. One morning, after a round of beignets, R ordered the Crab Benedict, a slight variation on the original that includes a generous portion of blue crab meat, along with spinach and tomatoes, and their house-made Hollandaise sauce. R, who prides herself on her own culinary skills, confessed Brick House’s Hollandaise was better than her own. And R, who owns a house near the mouth of the Potomac, said this: “The crab that sacrificed its life could have been caught off the dock this morning.”
Vic Routsis, one of the co-owners of the diner, told me, shortly after they opened, that he and his three brothers grew up in the restaurant business. One of the things they learned from their parents is that food quality is based on source and preparation. “We serve fresh homemade food that we prepare to order,” he said. “We also grind our own beef. Everything from scratch. We make our own burgers, our own soups, and our meat sauce is made in-house. Our seafood comes fresh from our vendors, and we cut our own fries and our own chips.”
And you can tell Vic learned this lesson well.
As R devoured her Crab Benedict, I dove into a scrambler, one of their many signature dishes, though it’s served in a bowl. It consists of three scrambled eggs with a choice of three mixers—from vegetables to standard breakfast meats—over a thick bed of home fries and topped with cheddar cheese. I selected bacon, green peppers, onions, along with jalapenos to spice it up a bit. Every bite was better than the last with just the right balance of carbs to protein. This is the real stuff. It’s why you go to a diner.
The breakfast menu is quite extensive, and we have sampled at least a half-dozen of the offerings. Their biscuits are as good as any I’ve had in Richmond. R’s particular favorite is the loaded chicken biscuit, which is topped with a fried chicken breast, scrambled eggs, bacon, cheese and a thick sausage gravy. It’s a full meal in and of itself, and you’ll probably be inclined to skip lunch.
From waffles to pancakes to the light and airy omelettes, each item we selected was a testament to a kitchen that prides itself on made-to-order-from-scratch, using only fresh ingredients. And their breakfast combos, which are all served with home fries, grits, or baked apples, can easily sate the heartiest of appetites.
And that’s just the beginning. Lunch at Brick House offers a volume of choices from salads and sandwiches to steak burgers fresh seafood baskets.
On the first official day of autumn we had lunch at the diner, creating a sort of turf and surf meal. I ordered the prime rib melt with a baked potato and R had the oyster basket with fresh-cut fries. Listen: the prime rib was lean and mouth-watering, served with grilled onions and mozzarella on a sub roll. Its accompanying baked potato was perfect.
The oysters R shared with me are the way I love them. I’m guessing they dredge them in buttermilk, and then they are lightly breaded and fried to a golden brown, which creates a thin, crunchy coating. And when your teeth penetrate that thin shell you taste the full body of the oyster as if it was just plucked from the shallows of a coastal river and pried open. It’s Calabash-style at its finest. Wedded on that platter was a generous portion of fries, and these are the real thing—not the frozen sort that masquerade as fresh-cut fries. You can taste the difference with every bite.
There’s so much more, from paninis to classic steak burgers served on brioche buns, and even authentic gyros and what may be the perfect Greek salad.
If you haven’t already visited Brick House, head on over today. You’ll be back for more.
Brick House Diner
Mon.-Sat. 8am-3pm; Sun. 8am-2pm
3336 North Arthur Ashe Boulevard
Richmond, VA 23230
(804)358-0064