How one Shockoe Slip spot tells Richmond's restaurant story

Flashback: In the mid-90s, Shockoe Slip was the dining destination neighborhood for Richmonders.

• Locals had been flocking to the strip since the '80s, following the wave of renovations of former warehouses and the opening of high-profile restaurants like The Tobacco Company, Sam Miller's and The Frog and the Redneck.
• That was one of the reasons The Richmond Restaurant Group — the folks behind The Daily, East Coast Provisions and The Hard Shell — opened Europa, Richmond's first tapas restaurant, in the space in 1998.

Of note: Stony Point Fashion Park and Short Pump Town Center — two suburban-friendly, high-end malls with a big focus on restaurants — opened within weeks of each other in 2003.

• Shockoe restaurant owners told me at the time that the effect those malls had on their sales was immediate.

Zoom in: Europa had a stellar 16-year run in the space before it closed in 2014.

• Torero Tapas Bar & Grill, a tapas restaurant from the folks behind Cha Cha's Cantina, moved in and soon after added Ibiza Nightclub inside the space, both running until around 2017.
• Billy Jack's, Jack Brown's burger's sister concept, seemed promising for the space when it opened in 2018. But it was one of the first restaurant closures that came with the pandemic in spring 2020.
• The space was vacant until Papi's opened two years later.