Mikheal opened the place in March in the former C&M’s Old Virginia Restaurant location. While the restaurant doesn’t look exactly the same as the original, the menu offers the same kind of classic American food like chicken cordon bleu, buttery seafood and big fat steaks.

Inside this East Coast Brown Derby, you will find the anachronistic charms of similar nostalgia huts. But while the big band music over the loud speakers and the movie-star pictures on the walls may smack of chain-restaurant gimmickry, Mikheal seems sincerely stuck on those long-gone Hollywood days.

“I asked my mom why she didn’t have me [back] then,” he says with a laugh. “She said I’d be dead by now. But I’d have been happy.”

— Wayne