Richmond, Round One: Where I Ate, Wandered, and Decided to Stay a While

Before I owned a single square foot of Richmond, I spent a summer eating my way through it and telling myself it was research. It was, technically. You cannot understand a rental market without understanding what people do on a Friday night, and in Richmond that answer involves a lot of genuinely good food.

If you find yourself here, start at Stella’s on Lafayette Street. It is a Greek restaurant that somehow feels like your most stylish aunt’s dining room, and the lamb will ruin other lamb for you. For something with a little more swagger, Lillie Pearl and Fall Line Kitchen & Bar will not let you down. Coffee people should go to Afterglow Coffee Cooperative, Richmond’s first worker-owned shop and one of the friendliest rooms in the city.

Between meals, I did the things every Richmond guide tells you to do, and they were worth doing anyway. Maymont is one hundred acres of Gilded Age mansion, gardens, and a small farm’s worth of rescued animals, and it costs nothing to walk through. The James River Park System runs right through downtown, which still strikes me as slightly absurd, in the best way, that you can watch actual rapids from a city sidewalk. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is free and enormous, and Tredegar Iron Works will teach you more Civil War history in an hour than four years of high school did.

None of this tells you whether Richmond is a good place to own a short-term rental. That took longer, and a lot more spreadsheets, and I will get into that soon. But if you are thinking about buying here, do the eating and the wandering first. You make better decisions about a neighborhood once you know what it feels like to actually stand in it, not just what the listing photos and Zillow estimate tell you.

Next up: how I picked a real estate partner I trusted with my own money, and why the answer probably is not your cousin who dabbles.