Dinner by Candlelight in the Taverns

Williamsburg's historic area runs four operating taverns on their original sites, candlelit rooms serving the eighteenth century's table nightly, game pies and peanut soup, syllabub and spoon bread, with costumed balladeers working the rooms and the wine arriving in period glass, and dinner at them is not a theme experience bolted onto the museum but the museum continuing through the meal, the recipes researched, the rooms authentic, the toasts, when the balladeer proposes them, cheerfully mandatory. As an eating town, the restored capital is unique in America, it serves its subject.

The four houses divide the canon by temperament. The chophouse tavern runs the red-meat and game end, venison and colonial-style chops in its paneled rooms, the seafood tavern by the capitol keeps the tidewater table, crab and oyster pie per the bay's bounty, the famous casual house serves its brunswick stew and barbecue to the day crowd with ale and skittles in the garden, and the genteel tavern near the palace runs the elegant register, the syllabub and the toasts at their most polished. The correct trip books two dinners across different houses, per the standing rules, since the festive weeks claim tables first of anything in town.

The meals complete the town's immersion, per its pieces in these pages, the walk to dinner through the lantern-lit streets functioning as the first course, the balladeers carrying the taverns' repertoire table to table, and the garden seatings in the warm months adding the fireflies the eighteenth century also enjoyed. The modern town outside the historic area holds its own tables for the balance of a stay.

Book the tavern dinners with the lodging, request the early candlelit seating in winter and the garden in summer, and order the syllabub without researching it first, which is the correct approach to syllabub. Join the toasts. The town interprets its century all day in trades and speeches, and at dinner it simply serves it, hot, by candle, with a fiddle in the next room, which may be the interpretation that convinces people most.