Vic's on the River

The Restaurant

Vic's on the River occupies the fourth-floor signature dining room of the 1859 Andrew Low cotton-warehouse building at 26 East Bay Street, between the Old Cotton Exchange and City Hall, with arched-window frontage onto Bay Street and a parallel River Street back-of-house entrance that runs through the historic Coffee Shop cafe at 15 East River Street to the fourth-floor elevator. The dining floor reads as a Historic District riverfront restoration of an 1850s cotton-trade building - original heart-pine flooring throughout, exposed Savannah-grey brick on the eastern party wall (still bearing a Sherman's-March-era charcoal-drawn battle map preserved during the 2003 restoration), white linen on every table, and a wall of east-facing arched windows offering the most photographed Bay Street river view in the Historic District.

The kitchen runs an upscale Southern Lowcountry programme organised around Georgia coast seafood, classical Southern fine-dining technique and a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence list - the signature shrimp and grits with stone-ground grits and andouille, a Lowcountry crab cake with remoulade that has held the menu since the 2003 opening, a Georgia coast Vidalia onion bisque with caviar creme fraiche, a New Orleans BBQ shrimp appetiser with crusty bread, a coastal Bouillabaisse, a hardwood-grilled prime ribeye and the signature crispy whole flounder with crab-meat stuffing and lemon beurre blanc for the centre-of-table format. The cocktail programme runs a serious Savannah-spirits list with a New Orleans accent - Sazeracs and Hurricane variations alongside an in-house bourbon-and-honey Manhattan - and the wine list runs to about three hundred labels with deliberate California, French and Italian depth.

Service runs at the upper edge of Historic District Savannah fine dining: career captains who have walked the room since the early 2000s, a sommelier on the floor every dinner shift and a pace that reads as two hours for a full three-course evening with the Bay Street river view to handle the table-side photograph. The arched-window dining floor catches the after-dinner riverfront light through to ten on summer evenings, which is the architectural advantage that gives the room its competitive position against the inland Historic District fine-dining cluster. For a Savannah business dinner that needs the riverfront architectural credibility rather than the Reynolds Square mansion format, Vic's on the River is the address that has held the East Bay Street fourth floor since the 1859 cotton-warehouse restoration completed.