For years, Linkhorn residents ran two separate versions of "going out." One trip meant walking or driving the short stretch to Linkhorn Shoppes for groceries, a prescription, maybe a quick bite at Bay Local Eatery before work. The other trip meant getting in the car, crossing Linkhorn Bay, and driving to Hilltop for anything that counted as an actual evening out. Two errands, two mental categories, one road connecting them that nobody walked.
That second assumption is the one worth checking. The road between those two ends of Laskin Road looks different than it did a few years ago, and what's sitting at each end has changed enough that treating them as separate trips no longer makes sense.
Two errands, one road
Linkhorn Shoppes, the strip at 958 through 984 Laskin Road, has long been described in commercial listings as the shopping hub serving Linkhorn, Birdneck Point, North End, Bay Colony and Old Beach. That's not marketing language stretched thin. The center holds a Sentara primary care and therapy office, Eurasia Cafe, Welton's Seafood Market, and Bay Local Eatery, all within a few storefronts of each other. It's a real cluster, not a placeholder for "there's a CVS."
Hilltop, roughly a mile west along the same road, has spent decades as the place Virginia Beach residents drive to for dinner, whether that means Cobalt Grille's dining room or the newer coffee shop everyone's been posting about. The two ends have operated on separate logic: Linkhorn Shoppes for daily life, Hilltop for the occasion.
What the bridge actually changed
The infrastructure reason those two ends stayed separate wasn't really distance. It was the crossing. The Laskin Road bridge over Linkhorn Bay dated to 1938, widened once in 1956, and by the time VDOT started its Laskin Road Bridge Replacement and Widening Project in September 2019, it was rated in only fair condition with none of the pedestrian or bike accommodation the rest of the corridor eventually got.
That $83.2 million project, which ran from Republic Road through the First Colonial Road intersection, wrapped in May 2025. The new bridge carries five travel lanes with sidewalks on both sides, built with room to expand to six lanes later. The wider roadway sections include a 10-foot sidewalk on the north side, a 5-foot sidewalk on the south side, and a 14-foot outside lane in each direction sized to accommodate bikes alongside cars. The bridge itself sits about a mile east of First Colonial Road, which puts Hilltop's core retail right around where that mile ends.
Here's what that means in practice for someone starting at Linkhorn Shoppes:
| Mode | Approx. time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Driving | 5 to 10 minutes | Includes lights, parking, the usual Hilltop lot search |
| Biking | 6 to 8 minutes | Now has a dedicated lane the width of a full traffic lane |
| Walking | About 20 minutes | Continuous sidewalk the entire way, including the bridge crossing |
None of those numbers were available as a real choice before the bridge work finished. A 20-minute walk with a sidewalk that didn't fully exist and a bridge crossing with no pedestrian lane wasn't a walk most people would take twice.
The end of Laskin Road you already have
The mistake in treating Linkhorn Shoppes as the lesser end of the corridor is assuming it's only useful for errands. Bay Local Eatery, tucked into the same shopping center, runs a breakfast and brunch service built on locally sourced ingredients, open early enough to catch the crowd headed to work rather than the crowd headed out for the evening. A few doors down, Eurasia Cafe serves tapas from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, with a happy hour built around half-price small plates, the kind of place that works for a Tuesday dinner without requiring a special occasion. Welton's Seafood Market sits in the same stretch for anyone who'd rather cook the catch themselves.
Add the Sentara primary care and therapy office in the same center, and Linkhorn Shoppes starts to look less like a stop on the way to somewhere else and more like a functioning small commercial district that happens to sit at the quiet end of the road.
The end of Laskin Road that keeps changing
Hilltop's advantage has never been that it has more restaurants. It's that the mix keeps turning over while a handful of anchors hold steady. Cobalt Grille, run by executive chef and owner Alvin W. Williams at 1624 Laskin Road, has built a following around its Tuesday burger night and a rotating cocktail list that landed the Bramble Smash a spot in a Coastal Virginia Magazine summer roundup.
The newer name on the corridor is Sleepy Cowgirl Coffee, which started in 2025 as a pink horse trailer parked around the city before opening its first sit-down location in January 2026 at La Promenade in the Hilltop district. The espresso beans come from Frothy Monkey in Nashville, and the space has already picked up the kind of local following that shows up in long lines on weekend mornings.
That's not a replacement for Roast Rider Coffee and Tea, the longer-running shop at 1554 Laskin Road that's evolved well past a basic coffee counter. It now doubles as a small music venue with live jazz on Thursdays, runs a cocktail lab that turns out espresso martinis alongside the usual drip and cold brew, and pulls food from a rotating list of local kitchens including Prosperity Kitchen and Azar's Mediterranean Foods. One regular summed up the feel as an "urban beach vibe" in a neighborhood review, which tracks with a shop that's part coffee counter, part living room, part stage.
Both coffee shops sit inside the same Hilltop cluster, one new enough to still have a line out the door, one old enough to have regulars whose orders the staff already knows. That's not overlap. That's a corridor with room for both.
A Saturday that doesn't touch the car
Put the two ends together and a full day starts to make sense without a single trip to the parking lot. Breakfast at Bay Local Eatery, since it closes by early afternoon and works on Linkhorn Shoppes' schedule rather than Hilltop's. A walk down the new sidewalk, across the rebuilt bridge, coffee at either Roast Rider or Sleepy Cowgirl depending on whether the plan involves lingering with a book or grabbing something to go. Dinner back at Cobalt Grille on a Tuesday for the burger, then the same sidewalk back, this time with the bay lit up instead of the fog off the water in the morning.
None of that was a realistic loop when the bridge had no pedestrian lane and Linkhorn Shoppes read as a strip mall instead of a place with its own breakfast spot and tapas bar. The corridor didn't get busier. It got connected, and that's a different kind of change, one that shows up in how residents actually spend a Saturday rather than in any listing or market report.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Virginia Beach, or you already call Linkhorn home and want a read on what's shifting nearby, Robert Ramey has spent decades tracking this corridor block by block. Request a free home valuation and local market review to talk through what's actually happening on your stretch of Laskin Road.
