For most of two decades, if you lived in Chic's Beach and wanted red sauce and a candlelit corner on a Friday, you went to Zia Marie. The Italian spot at Lookout Road and Seaview Avenue had been there long enough that regulars didn't need a reservation system, just a standing understanding of which night to show up. When it closed, the space sat behind a banner that said nothing except "coming soon" and a QR code.
That QR code is the part of this story most write-ups skip past. Before the new owners picked a menu, a name, or even a paint color, they put a survey in front of the neighborhood and asked what people actually wanted in that building. Founder Drew Monroe lives in the area himself, and the restaurant that eventually opened there, Chic's Laundry, was shaped by that input before it was shaped by a chef's vision. That sequence matters more than it sounds like it should. It means the newest anchor on this stretch of Lookout Road was built to fit a rhythm that already existed rather than to introduce one.
The Corner That Took Its Time
Chic's Laundry opened in March of this year, taking its name as a nod to the building's earlier life as a laundromat. The team behind it is not a stranger to the area or to the region's food scene. Executive Chef Abriel Levantino is a Virginia Beach native with more than two decades of culinary experience, and Food and Beverage Manager Todd Jurich already runs Todd Jurich's Bistro in Norfolk. Pastry Chef Alexys Evans handles the dessert program.
Jurich described the neighborhood he was cooking for in a way that locals will recognize instantly: "if the North End and Ocean View had a baby, it would be Chic's Beach." That's not marketing language. It's a fair read of a place that has beach cottages next to newer builds, a mix of longtime residents and newer transplants, and a dining scene that has never tried too hard to look like anything but itself.
The menu leans into that mix rather than picking a lane. A review in the Virginian-Pilot singled out the kombu-cured salmon, paired with braised greens and a dash of chile pepper vinegar, alongside tallow fries and a sausage-and-pepper pizza baked in a Neapolitan oven. The kitchen cooks with beef tallow and avocado oil instead of seed oils, which is a small detail but the kind of thing regulars start to mention to each other before it shows up in any official description. Dinner runs six days a week starting at 4 p.m., with Tuesday closed.
The Clock That Was Already Running
Here's what the survey-before-you-build approach actually protected against. Chic's Beach did not have an empty dining scene waiting to be filled. It had a working one, and any new restaurant that ignored that structure would have been competing against habits, not just other menus.
Buoy 44 has sat on the bayfront for years running on a policy that tells you everything about how the neighborhood eats: no reservations, a dog-friendly patio, happy hour every day, and brunch on Saturday and Sunday. You show up when you show up. Chick's Oyster Bar has been doing something similar over on the Lynnhaven Inlet since 1998, long enough that the waterfront dining habit there predates most of the newer construction along Shore Drive. Hot Tuna Bar and Grill built its following as part of the Farm-to-Fork movement, running a daily happy hour that starts at 3 p.m. and keeps its bar scene going well past dinner. Shorebreak Pizza and Taphouse has been locally owned since 2003, and its whole identity is built around being the place families default to without a debate.
None of these places are going anywhere, and Chic's Laundry didn't open trying to replace any of them. It opened into the space Zia Marie left behind: a slightly more composed dinner, still close enough to walk to, still built for a neighborhood rather than a destination crowd.
Saturday Morning Is the Actual Anchor
If you want to understand how this neighborhood's food scene really works, skip the dinner reservations and go to the Shore Drive Farm Market instead. It has run every Saturday morning from 9 to noon at Lynnhaven Square Shopping Center since 2016, with vendors like Full Quiver Farms, B&H Produce, Veg Out Gardens and Gateaux's Bakery rotating alongside local seafood producers and artisans, and Lynnhaven Coffee Company pouring the coffee. It's a fair guess that some of what shows up on a seafood-forward dinner menu later that week started at a folding table in that parking lot that same morning. Confirmed supply chain or not, the market is where the neighborhood's food identity gets renewed every week, well before anyone sits down for dinner.
The other detail worth knowing if you're new here involves getting around, and it has a specific origin. The city classifies Chic's Beach as Chesapeake Beach, and it is one of only a handful of Virginia Beach neighborhoods where golf carts are legal on public streets. That wasn't always true. In 2018, after residents petitioned for two and a half years, the City Council voted unanimously to add the neighborhood to the city's golf cart exemption list. One of the organizers, known around the neighborhood as its unofficial mayor, has said the idea took shape over dinner at Buoy 44 with a friend the group called Fireman Roy, when the two decided it wasn't fair that other Virginia Beach neighborhoods got to drive golf carts and theirs didn't. Nearly a decade later, that's why you'll still see carts parked outside the farm market on Saturday mornings and lined up outside the newer restaurants on a Friday night.
What Changes Once the Water Cools
Fall in Chic's Beach shifts the center of gravity from the dinner table to the trail, and there's more to do here now than there was even a year ago. First Landing State Park, just up the road, opened new exhibits at its Bay Lab this spring, giving visitors a closer look at Chesapeake Bay wildlife alongside the park's existing interactive topographic sandbox and terrapin ambassadors. The park itself has 1.5 miles of Chesapeake Bay beachfront and 20 miles of trails, including the Cape Henry Trail for hikers and cyclists and the Bald Cypress Trail's boardwalk loop through the swamp.
Closer to the neighborhood, Pleasure House Point Natural Area offers a roughly two-mile loop across its Meadow and Beach trails, cutting through 118 acres of tidal marsh and maritime forest along Crab Creek. The trailhead sits just off Marlin Bay Drive, and the walk passes the Brock Environmental Center, where the deck stays open to sit on even when the building itself is closed.
Both of these were always part of the neighborhood, but fall is when they actually get used the way they're meant to be. Cooler mornings mean the trails aren't a summer-crowd bottleneck, and the beach at First Landing stays dog-friendly and mostly empty on weekday mornings well into October.
The Real Read
The takeaway here isn't that Chic's Beach got a new restaurant. It's that the neighborhood's food and weekend scene runs on a rotation specific enough that a new business felt compelled to research it before opening into it. Zia Marie's closing after two decades could have been the excuse for someone to import an unrelated concept into that space. Instead, the group behind Chic's Laundry surveyed the exact people who would eat there and built a local seafood menu that slotted into the one open spot in a rotation that already had a Buoy 44, a Chick's Oyster Bar, and a Hot Tuna happy hour running fine without them.
That's a neighborhood with enough of an identity that newcomers have to study it first. Not many corners of Virginia Beach can say that about their own dinner rotation.
If you're weighing what a home near this kind of neighborhood rhythm might be worth, or you're already here and curious what your property looks like in today's market, Robert Ramey can walk you through a free home valuation and local market review built around the block you actually live on, not just the zip code.
