In addition to L’Opossum, Style Magazine’s State of the Plate 2016 also showed some love to 821 Cafe.

For me, my favorite neighborhood unsung hero is 821 Café, where the vibe is lively, the food is solid and no matter the day, I can get breakfast, lunch or dinner with a smile, a reasonable price and a killer soundtrack. 821caferva.com.

In this week’s issue, Style Magazine has declared Oregon Hill restaurant L’Opossum their ‘2016 Restaurant of the Year’.

“Shannon’s sense of humor can’t undermine his profoundly serious approach to food. A graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, former Inn at Little Washington sous chef, the man who brought the grilled Caesar salad to Richmond in the early 2000s at his old restaurant, Dogwood Grille & Spirits, Shannon recently was named a semifinalist as 2016 Best Chef Mid-Atlantic by the James Beard Foundation.

It’s a good time to mention that exactly a decade ago, Style’s team of food writers and restaurant reviewers named Shannon’s Dogwood Grill & Spirits as our first Restaurant of the Year. They cited it as the city’s ideal dining experience, with warm service and charm, a restaurant that took risks that were balanced with a very-Richmond tone and restraint.

Shannon’s success is clearly no one-hit wonder. And the rest of the country has noticed. “L’Opossum has garnered the national spotlight as well, with recommendations from Condé Nast Traveler and Southern Living magazines,” reviewer Matthew Freeman notes. “Altogether the creativity and quality contribute to the growing prominence of the food scene in our city.”