Dot’s Back Inn At 35

by Charles McGuigan 04.2025

This September Dot’s Back Inn celebrates its 35th anniversary.  It’s a family-style restaurant in the heart of Bellevue, but it’s so much more than that. On any given day or night, customers from every conceivable walk of life eat here and drink here, and socialize. There are the regulars, the periodic patrons, and the folks discovering it for the first time. Back in 2008, Guy Fieri showcased Dot’s on Diners, Drive-ins & Dives, and returned for another filming more than a decade later. Watching the staff, from the front of the house to the back of the house, working together as a team, is like witnessing a carefully choreographed routine. And the food here is excellent and consistent, with seafood entrees that are as good as anything you’ll find in Richmond.    

When we first moved to Bellevue in the mid-1990s, MacArthur Avenue had seen better days. It sported a number of vacant storefronts. In terms of restaurants, you could get a pizza or a sub to-go at Zorba’s, and there was a beer joint with blue grass and country music called Ray’s Cock and Bull. But for a real sit-down meal there was only Dot’s Back Inn. When Joany and I found it just a few blocks from our house, you would have sworn we had discovered a vein of solid gold in our backyard. Dot’s was where my daughter,  Catherine, and my son, Charles, ate their first restaurant meals, and both are now regulars there.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking with the woman and the man who have sustained Dot’s for three and a half decades—Cookie Giannini and Jimmy Tsamouras.

Of course it was Cookie who created Dot’s. Cookie, after working as a dental assistant for about 15 years, decided to go into the restaurant business. It seemed like a good choice. After all, her family—the Gianninis and the Chioccas—had been working in the restaurant business for years. Aledio Giannini ran a sandwich shop in the old John Marshall Hotel; her maternal grandfather, Andrew Chiocca, owned Jimmy’s, a restaurant at Laurel and Broad in the lower Fan. That’s where Cookie’s Aunt Dottie (namesake of Dot’s) worked as a waitress.

For years Cookie worked at Poor Richard’s on Cary Street in downtown Richmond, and then she and her former husband opened 3rd Street Diner. Several years later, on a snowy evening in December of 1989, when her marriage was dissolving, Cookie caught a ride home to Northside with a beer distributor, a guy by the name of Scott Poates.

As they were coming up Brook Road, Scott said, “Let’s stop and have a beer, There’s this little beer joint right by you.”

A few minutes later they pulled up in front of a place called Tom-Tom’s, a true beer joint with poker machines that would pay out at the register.

For Cookie it was a sort of love at first sight. The moment the pair walked through the front door, Cookie turned to Scott and said, “I’m gonna buy this place because I can walk to work when it snows.” The first person she saw was Cornbread (Dave McCarthy), who was standing at the end of the bar.

The next day Cookie called her realtor who was selling 3rd Street Diner. “Find out who owns Tom-Tom’s,” she told him. “I want it.”

She closed on the deal in the summer and began a frenetic three-week renovation. Paint. New floors. She removed the acoustic drop ceiling tiles revealing the original tin ceiling, which was perfectly preserved. Replaced the big padded booths. But at the eleventh hour, she still had not come up with a name.

“I knew I wanted to name it after Aunt Dottie,” Cookie tells me.

Ed Paxton, who designed the logo, finally called Cookie one night and said, “What about Dot’s Back Inn?”

“And then, of course, everybody said, ‘Dot’s back in from where?’” Cookie says through one of her signature laughs. “Then it became known as Dyke’s Back Inn because it was a woman-owned restaurant and we had a lot of gay customers.”

Now Cookie was all front of the house, so she needed a cook and someone who knew their way around the kitchen and could create a menu and work in a production space that wasn’t much bigger than a broom closet. She ran a want-ad in the daily newspaper, and one of the people who responded was Jamie Dickerson, one of the most beloved men of the Northside.  

At the time, Jamie was working for Jimmy Whaley at Not Betty’s (now defunct). “I like working for Jimmy, but I’ll never have my own kitchen because he’s a chef,” Jamie told Cookie.

To which Cookie said “Well, you can have this kitchen, cause I don’t want to have anything to do with the back of the house. All I want do is price everything. You tell me what you want to get, and I’ll price it.”

“Sounds great to me,” Jamie said.

And so began a friendship that lasted until Jamie’s untimely death. “Jamie just wanted to cook, and could he ever cook,” says Cookie. “The first day we opened it was packed.”

Cookie holds out a menu from 1999 that Jamie created. She passes it over to Jimmy.  “Ninety-five percent of everything that’s on that menu is still on the menu today,” he says. “We had to drop the New York strip because it’s not economically feasible.”  

Things clicked along. Dot’s became firmly embedded in the community, and a number of Cookie’s employees stuck with her for a long time. “The neighborhood turned out for us,” says Cookie. “And we had a lot of waitresses like Faye and Janet who worked here for years.”

During snowstorms that essentially shut down the neighborhood of Bellevue, the front door to Dot’s was always open, and people flocked there in droves. “I would get one of the customers to pick up the staff,” Cookie says. “Janet always got a pass because she lived out in King William.”

And the servers raked it in. “I was talking to Kim (a former waitress at Dot’s) the other day and she said, ‘You know, Cookie, during those snowstorms we would make five hundred on a shift.’ And that was twenty years ago.”

Back in late January of 2000, about a foot of snow fell and there were drifts up to three feet. “There was this customer of ours who hooked up a jon boat to the back of his truck and took people riding all through the city,” Cookie remembers.

The next year fire struck Dot’s Back Inn. I stepped into it the following day, surveying the damage, and was blown away by the extent of the damage. “The sandwich box caught on fire,” Cookie tells me.

Almost immediately, Cookie and her staff and contractors got to work re-creating Dot’s. “It was three months, an amazing recovery,” says Cookie.  To enlarge the kitchen, they had to move the bathrooms around. “In the old days, women had to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom,” Cookie says. “The kitchen loved that because they got to talk to all the girls.”

The decor of Dot’s in its first era reflected the height of the Second World War. With the renovation, the theme changed to post-war jubilation and prosperity. “When we reopened after the fire I decided to make it after 1945 when colors got much brighter,” Cookie says. “That’s why you see the cherries. Happy days were here again.”

In 2007, Cookie’s mom began slipping into dementia and she realized she was going to have to find more time to help her sister in their mother’s care. “I felt like I needed to take my share of responsibility, “ says Cookie. “I never mastered not being at Dot’s all the time. I never trusted the baby sitter.” So she decided it was time to sell. Which was right around the time that Jimmy Tsamouras was looking to buy a restaurant.

Like Cookie, Jimmy comes from a family of restauranteurs.

“I started in restaurants when I was fifteen years old; my parents bought the College Deli in Williamsburg,” says Jimmy. “I started off in the dish-pit, then went to slicing pickles and lettuce and tomatoes, and then moved up to making pizzas and subs.”

After high school graduation, he took a couple years off, and then his father recommended that he go to school.

“You like to cook, right?” his dad asked.

Jimmy nodded.

“Then let’s get you to culinary school.”

Jimmy was ultimately accepted to the Harvard of cooking schools—the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. “I was completely intimidated by it because I was coming from a pizza place and these are people in chef coats and they’re making chocolate sculptures and pate,” he remembers. But he did well.

“My internship was on the big island of Hawaii, and then in 1990 Desert Storm broke out and I spent the last three months of my internship at the Scottsdale Princess,” he says. “When I graduated in 1992, my first job was at a high-end steak house on Franklin Street in downtown Richmond called Travelers.”

From there, he and a fellow CIA graduate went to work at the Country Club of Virginia. “We had an extensive culinary crew at CCV,” says Jimmy. “We had four guys that were CIA  graduates, we had a couple of guys that were Johnson & Wales graduates.”

Two years later he headed to the sea isles of South Carolina where he worked at Juleps over on Hilton Head. After three years he returned to Richmond and opened a restaurant in the old John Marshall Hotel called Barrister’s Cafe.

Then, in 2001, he bought Southern Culture and three years later, on Saint Patrick’s Day, the restaurant caught fire. A month later he married Daniella, and he decided, after having problems with the landlord at Southern Culture, to try something completely different.

“I got a bad taste in my mouth about restaurants,” Jimmy says. “So I bought a used-car lot and I sold used-cars for a year out in Powhatan. I don’t even remember what it was called.”

It turned out not to be a good fit at all. “I was such a bad used-car salesman,” he says. “A sixteen-year-old kid who saved all his money comes in and wants to buy this car, and I say, ‘That car’s a piece of s**t, you don’t want to buy it.’ And the kid’s parents look at me and leave, and they never come back. I was a terrible used-car salesman.”

In 2005, he got out of the used-car business and returned to restaurants. He helped a good friend of his, Johnny Giavos, open up a couple of restaurants, including 3 Monkeys, and then he happened to be playing darts with Rick, who, as fate would have it, was Cookie’s stepson.

“What are your plans?” Rick asked.

“I’d like to get a restaurant,” said Jimmy.

“Well, Cookie’s thinking about selling Dot’s.”

And that was it. 

He met with Cookie, and they hit it off instantly.

“So I approached Cookie, and I always say I wooed her into selling,” Jimmy tells me. “I gave her more than she wanted, and I got more than I wanted. What we did was we structured a deal where Cookie  financed the building.”

Cookie smiles. “Jimmy gave me a lump sum, and with the lump sum I got for the building and the business, I got a pension plan and long-term healthcare insurance that I never had,” she says. “So I was able to get two things that I would have never had and with the monthly checks he gave me I didn’t have to start taking social security until later. It was definitely my retirement.”

But Cookie couldn’t really stay away from Dot’s. About a year after the sale, Jimmy was talking with Emily, one of his managers, and Cookie happened to be sitting at the bar.

“We really need a bartender to work a couple of lunch shifts,” Jimmy said.

“I’ll do it,” Cookie said, and for the next ten years she tended bar during lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays.

The day after COVID shut the world down, on March 15, 2020,  Jimmy closed Dot’s, but he kept his employees working. They did deep-cleaning and painting, and other odds and ends. That lasted for a full month. “We had no idea we were going to be closed that long, and then the employees said, ‘Let’s open, let’s do the take-out,’” Jimmy says. “And it was successful. Mike Moore had a lot to do with that. He was the kitchen manager at the time. He would do special take-out menus.”

During that time, Jimmy did this remarkable thing. “With all the food we had that we couldn’t utilize we made up bags of food and we would go to random houses in the neighborhood and put it on the porch and ring the bell,” Jimmy says. “As you’re backing up away from the door,and  people are opening the door, and we would say. ‘Hey, there’s a bag of food from Dot’s that we thought you might enjoy.” You would just see people’s faces light up. We did the same thing at Demi’s.”

Then Jimmy says something that encapsulates the very nature of compassion. It has nothing to do with money or any sort of gain. “It was the  right thing to do for people, and people really enjoyed it,” says Jimmy. “And you know what else: it gave me something to do, it saved me as much as it saved anyone else I gave the food to.”

This reminded me of something Cookie used to do with one of her reegulars. He was always the first to arrive in the mornings, sometimes waiting at the door while Cookie fitted the key into the lock. He had a thick middle and a stilted gait and he muttered to himself. He lived in the garden apartments just down the street, right next door to Nutall’s. Turns out he was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was just a college freshman. As soon as the door opened, this man made his way back to the very last booth where he would patiently for the waitress so he could ask for the same breakfast he ate there every day. Here’s the thing: Cookie had a key to this man’s apartment so she could check on him, if things went wrong. “I worry to death if I don’t see him from one day to the next,” Cookie told me years ago.

Cookie now tells me about a family she recently encountered at Dot’s. “I was in there Saturday night and this young man came in with his wife and two children,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Ian, you were coming in here when you were the size of your children.’”

Jimmy nods. “It’s on its third generation now,” he says. “Tim and Margaret. Now their children are coming in with their children.”

There is another generation in the wings now at Dot’s that continues its legacy. They are the co-managers: Sarah Rogan, and Jimmy’s daughter,  McKenzie Bryant. 

So, here’s to another 35 years!