TAP

bottles and cans, as Virginia customers abandoned bars and restaurants.

“At the beginning of COVID,” he said, “they stopped putting anything in kegs.”

Even his food procurement was a bit hamstrung until recently, Herring said. And like every restaurant during Phase 3, he’ll be opening at reduced capacity. The Brass Tap technically has room for 100 inside, with 50 people on the patio. But he expects to only seat half that.

He’ll bring with him some longtime experience in franchising: In Mississippi, he said, his father was one of the first McDonald’s franchisees.

“He was an original franchise owner, way back when nobody knew what McDonald’s was,” Herring said. “It’s all in the family: That’s what you did as a kid, and then all through high school. Even when I went off to college I managed a McDonald’s.”

During his 11-year stint in the Army, he said he worked on Chinook helicopters. He then spent years as a contractor, traveling everywhere from Honduras to

Afghanistan to Iraq. But while working for Boeing in South Korea, he realized it was time to come home — and to go back to his first life as a franchisee.

What first impressed him about The Brass Tap wasn’t the beer. It was the food. While in talks with company management, he visited one of their locations and they asked him, “What beer do you want?”

“I said, ‘Give me your fish tacos and chicken sliders. I want to see how you’re cooking the shrimp. The beer will change, and liquor is liquor.’ I wanted to try the food.”

The menu is a mishmash of American standbys and corporate food fusion: burgers, cheese-curd poutine, Baja chicken flatbread pizza, sirloin tacos, and an “L.A. Kogi dog” inspired by Korean-Californian chef Roy Choi.

Herring liked what he tasted, he said, and also the fact that the food is cooked to order. He said he remembered doing the same in the very early days of McDonald’s, right down to cutting his own french fries.

“It’s different now,” he said. “Back then you actually cooked.”

Herring is still hiring about half his staff, but he’s optimistic he’s already brought in enough people to get the doors open.

“I’m getting my food and beer in this week, and hopefully it will show up,” he said. “We’re doing taste testing this week and next week, and then hopefully we’ll open.”