Picture it: It’s a long weekend, and you’ve ended up on a sailboat traversing the Chesapeake Bay. The weather is temperate; the sun dapples the water, making it shimmer like a sheet of scales. You indulge in the luxury of time, drifting from marina bar-restaurant to marina bar-restaurant, sipping fruity cocktails that may have silly names but are undeniably delicious, eating crab every way you like it (it’s the height of the season) alongside a basket of battered fries.
Boil this day down to its essence, and that’s what Chef Brittanny Anderson hopes to deliver with her new seafood restaurant, Bar Buoy.
At its heart, Buoy tells the story of Anderson’s upbringing on the water in the Northern Neck. I meet her in Kinsale, Virginia, on her sailboat — purchased on New Year’s Day 2022, launching what she jokingly calls her “eat, pray, boat” era following a divorce, which she says inspired her to focus on what was most important to her. Next to us sits a wooden sign from her very first restaurant job at a nearby spot that’s no longer in business (it’s set to become part of Buoy’s décor).
As a breeze keeps the bright day’s heat down to a simmer, she explains that her family tree is filled with people who worked on the water, and Buoy is a celebration of the bounty the Chesapeake Bay offers. Menu items already sketch out a uniquely Virginian surf-and-turf spread: ham and biscuits alongside shrimp toast, hushpuppies (or “hush guppies”) with smoked fish dip, pan-roasted fish, and Virginia blue crabs and oysters. Drinks will be what she calls “party time drinks”— high-quality cocktails with a playful twist, like a draft Orange Crush and an Espresso Mar-Tiki with whiskey, Averna, coconut and cold brew.
“It’s inspired by the restaurants I grew up going to on the boat with my dad,” she says, clarifying that those days were spent on motorboats, not sailboats. “There’s a lot of food from here that gets really overlooked — for example, when people think of crabs, a lot of the time they think of Maryland. I really want to highlight the food that comes from here.”
Anderson has long established herself as someone who can make great food. A two-time James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef, she showcased her refined technique in Richmond at German restaurant Metzger Bar & Butchery, the alpine-inspired Brenner Pass— which Bar Buoy will replace, to the sadness of some — and Black Lodge, the bar known for its high-low approach, slinging both caviar and hot dogs, white negronis and Jägermeister.
In 2024, she introduced more of a wildcard with Pink Room, a tiny, hidden-away spot with fewer than 20 seats, a bubblegum-pink interior, cocktails, drag shows, and “no rules,” as she once told Style Weekly. Of all her restaurants, Pink Room was the personality hire (non-derogatory). It revealed more about the chef as an individual, with menu items like a cheeseball based on her mother’s recipe, and decorative photos of Miss Piggy alongside Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie circa “The Simple Life.”
“With Pink Room, I wanted to make something that felt feminine and like me,” she notes. “Buoy is part of that same idea — highlighting the reality of what I like. I just don’t want to do it if it doesn’t bring me joy and make me feel inspired.”
As her first seafood restaurant, Buoy is set to be an even more autobiographical step — a homecoming.
“You know when you’re a kid, you never think the things you have are cool,” she says. “I wanted to make ‘fancy food.’ As I’ve gotten older, the pull of that food isn’t there for me as much. I still love it, but I’ve been through that point of my life, and I want to do something that feels more connected to me. It feels like a waste not to.”
Inside Buoy, you’ll find a family portrait. Much of the space is directly inspired by her great-grandmother Dora’s gas station and general store, a business Dora owned and operated through the Great Depression and beyond, serving deli counter goods to passing motorists.
The green of Dora’s business carries through the restaurant; café curtains are inspired by one of her dresses; custom-made faux goods with vintage branding and tongue-in-cheek names like “Just like Grandma’s Shrimp Flakes” and “Salty Bitch Beer” line Buoy’s walls. Other details are quintessentially nautical, like shiny lacquered wooden tables that evoke the polished exterior of a classic runabout.
Buoy is distinctly pared down compared to predecessor Brenner Pass, and Anderson says the goal is to create a space where people feel comfortable stopping by beyond just special occasions. She envisions Buoy as the kind of place where you can order a tiki drink, eat fried oysters and watch a football game on one of the restaurant’s TVs.
“I’m making a place where I want to hang out, that feels lived in and loved,” she explains. “The kind of restaurant I’m most happy in is a restaurant like this. I want to feel like, and I want other people to feel like, this is a place where you can spend time and feel comfortable wearing shorts and a T-shirt.”
As Anderson gives me Buoy’s big picture and shows me her boat’s cabin under flocks of seagulls and the high noon sun, I’m surprised to learn she didn’t know how to sail until after she bought the boat. Is she the type to get a thrill out of throwing herself into something new? She tells me no — it’s still scary, but she finds being vulnerable is something she never regrets. Another tether to the water that reflects her current outlook: open to new challenges, with no need to impress, just a desire to enjoy herself.
“I think I’m in a period where you realize everything you are and everything you’ve done is worth it, and that people want to be around people who just feel the freedom to do what they want,” she says. “For me that’s rooted in this area, my family, and the people who work out here.”
Bar Buoy is set to have a soft opening in mid-September and is located at 3200 Rockbridge St., #100.
