1126 WELL: Birmingham

“Everything begins and ends with Frank Stitt,” someone declared when I asked what I should do in Birmingham, Alabama. I'd heard this sentiment before, having stopped through the city a handful of times over the last 20 years. Unfailingly, the advice from both locals and fellow travelers insisted on reservations at chef Frank Stitt and his wife Pardis's restaurants, foundational not just in the course of Birmingham's food history but the country's. On my first trip, in 2010, after a fever-dream stint reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig catastrophe off the Louisiana coast, I sat in the cozy clamor of Bottega, the Stitts' classic Italian place, now 38 years in operation. On another trip, accompanying my husband, who was in town for work, I tucked into a feast of luxurious Southern and French food at the now shuttered Highlands Bar & Grill, including a delicately battered soft-shell crab I still dream about paired with a glass of cold Chablis. But I had not yet had the chance to experience Chez Fonfon, the couple's classic French bistro.

So, on my first evening in Birmingham this past spring, I found myself in what felt more like Paris or Provence as I sat at the bar of Chez Fonfon. I was transported by butter yellow walls, brass rails, 19th-century French furniture, a glass of Crémant du Jura, and a dish of boeuf bourguignon. Chez Fonfon sits at the crux of Five Points South, a neighborhood named for five streets that converge in a star shape where streetcars connecting the then suburb of Highland to the city once rumbled. It's legendary in American restaurant lore, one line of DNA related to the expat troupe of Americans—Richard Olney (with whom Stitt worked), Julia Child, Kermit Lynch, James Baldwin—who took up in France to translate its spirit into cookbooks, poetry, literature, and art. Stitt points out a photograph of Olney in a hallway near the bathroom, while recalling sharing wine with Lulu Peyraud, the beloved matriarch of the Domaine Tempier wine estate in Provence, among a collage of other French memories.

Stitt, who grew up in Cullman, an hour north, the son of a country doctor, reminisces about traveling to eat with his parents—to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami. But it is the memory of Birmingham's restaurants of another era that tether him: There was Browdy's Jewish deli for bagels and pastrami; Joy Young, a white-tablecloth Chinese restaurant, for Cantonese; and The Club, a private supper club with a dance floor and a live swing band at the crest of Red Mountain that is still going strong. “Birmingham was [one of] the first major cities north of the Gulf Coast and became a magnet for all the best Gulf Coast seafood with Greek and Italian restaurants, Sicilian, Jewish, and Lebanese communities,” he said. He described the geography as a center of natural abundance, which is really an origin story for Birmingham itself.

This north-central Alabama city was born in 1871, springing up after the Civil War as the South sought to rebuild a leveled economy with an industrial lifeline. Birmingham came to be called the Magic City for its near-overnight appearance, its growth accelerated by its central location to massive deposits of the three main ingredients used in steel: iron ore threaded through Red Mountain, a ridge that zigzags through the city; limestone from a plethora of nearby quarries; and coal from the Cahaba, Coosa, Plateau, and Warrior fields. This natural history is reflected in the city's grand cloak of Art Deco, neoclassical, and Romanesque architecture, the buildings' façades swathed in stone and iron detailing and girded by skeletons of steel. This is a city full of glittering theater marquees and mint midcentury signage, and ringed with rail yards and the scars of an industrial center remade for human scale. Food has played a central role in its rebirth.

Twenty-five years ago Stitt, alongside real estate CEO Catherine Sloss Jones, helped establish the Market at Pepper Place in what was previously the Dr. Pepper syrup factory and the adjacent Market Biscuit Building. Today it's a major destination, with 10,000 visitors passing through each Saturday. The afternoon I was there, a crowd of farmers, chefs, and shoppers braided through the rehabilitated complex, lined with permanent businesses like The Son of a Butcher, where local meats shimmer behind a pristine counter, and Back Forty Beer Company, a massive brewery with plenty of outdoor space. The market is one cornerstone of a larger scene that has built an outsized reputation for dining on the foundation of the Stitts' vision and mentorship. This year five restaurants were named James Beard Award semifinalists, a feat for a city of around 196,000.

At one of those restaurants, Pizza Grace, located in a downtown cobblestoned arcade, executive chef and co-owner Ryan O'Hara explained, over a perfectly charred fennel and mushroom pie, how he and his wife, Geri-Martha, pastry chef and co-owner, met while working at Bottega. The O'Haras also own locally beloved ice cream joint Big Spoon Creamery, which serves dreamy seasonal flavors like salted honey blackberry and strawberry rhubarb cobbler. Up the street and over a few blocks is Salud Taqueria, from Jesús Méndez and Christina Tellez, which uses fresh-ground masa as a base for its Mexican menu. I had a fluffy, cheese-crusted Sonoran taco alongside a zippy pomegranate agua fresca that made me feel as if I had escaped to a shady spot in the subtropics. At Helen, also downtown in a 1920s-era building, chef Rob McDaniel serves a menu almost entirely cooked over a grill that's inspired by his grandmother's open-fire cooking. The evening I was there, I had satin-soft angel biscuits with whipped cane syrup butter, Benton's ham, roasted winter beets, and Carolina gold middlins, a broken-rice dish with mushrooms and a poached egg. Next door, his restaurant Bayonet serves pristine raw bar dishes in a sleek white-box room; McDaniel was also nominated this year for a James Beard Award.

As much as Birmingham has become known for its culinary scene, it's also a crossroads for Southern and international art. At one time the city contained more than 70 theaters, three of which—the Lyric, the Carver, and the Alabama—remain and have been restored with proper grandeur. Its roots in Southern music run deep and broad; big band leader Erskine Hawkins, composer and musician Sun Ra, country legend Emmylou Harris, and trap pioneer Gucci Mane were born here. Today a myriad of arts organizations champion wildly diverse missions. Ground Floor Contemporary is an artist-run collective with studios in a building owned by art-scene stalwart Sara Garden Armstrong. At the Old Bailey Gallery, curator Dan Bailey hosts visiting artists to build the city's relationship with outside talent, while Studio by the Tracks has forged a grassroots space for artists with autism. InToto, a creative arts forum, provides programming for people experiencing economic hardship, and at his African Village in America, an ongoing art installation, Joe Minter brings the living memory of the Black experience into central focus.

On a broader level, this spring the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) hosted the show “French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950,” which has traveled internationally over the past six years. Thanks to the BMA's extensive and exquisite collection of European pieces, the show was doubled in size with paintings by Dégas, Renoir, Rodin, Cassatt, and more. At the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, curator John Fields has built a renowned space for visual art, attracting a kaleidoscope of artists and shows over the course of his 12-year tenure.

“We are a tight-knit community, and very supportive of one another,” said Garden Armstrong, a Birmingham native who lived in New York from 1981 to 2017 before moving back full-time to live and work at Ground Floor, now a center for art in a downtown building Armstrong bought in 1979 for $50,000. At that time it was abandoned and cluttered with equipment and debris left behind by a prior tenant. Even 15 years ago it was unthinkable that downtown Birmingham would have the density of businesses present today. Despite the city's stunning bones and central urban spine, old theaters and majestic buildings sat empty for decades, the wind whistling through broken windows and down empty streets. But over the course of the past decade, an influx of entrepreneurs plus a comprehensive plan led by the city and REV Birmingham, a nonprofit focused on revitalization and economic development, has brought the center back to life.

At Grounds, a queer- and Black-owned neighborhood café, retail, and community space, the collective of owners feature only vendors and creators whose practices are equitable and fair-trade, including local Cala Coffee Roasters and the American zero-waste fashion designer Alabama Chanin. It's one of the businesses that makes Birmingham feel vital, current, pivotal even. “People look at Alabama as if we're a radically red state, and that we're closed-minded and that we have no elements of progress,” said Grounds cofounder Tyler Hatcher. “It's a [place] with a dark and hard history, but if you come to downtown Birmingham, we are full of energy. I would say we're the driving force of the good in Alabama, and you get a taste of all that right downtown.”

One afternoon, just on the other side of downtown, I wandered around the remains of Sloss Furnaces, a massive campus of ghostly rust red industrial buildings that house two 400-ton blast furnaces, casting sheds, boilers, and engine rooms that operated from 1882 to 1971, during which time it became one of the largest producers of pig iron in the world. In 1981 Sloss Furnaces was designated a National Historic Landmark, preserved so that guests might experience the history of Birmingham's industrial largesse with tours and metalworking classes but also so that they might understand the foundation upon which the South's economic engine was built. At one point over two thirds of Sloss's entry-level workforce was composed of Black labor, which was socially and hierarchically segregated and, up until 1928, often sourced from nearby prisons. Despite the fact that slavery had been abolished, it was transmuted into a different form, one that America continued to exploit to expand its wealth and industry.

In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. declared the city the most segregated in the United States. Here, in May of 1963, he led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) alongside Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth into one of the most storied nonviolent protests in modern history, which would result in the eventual desegregation of the city's public institutions. Since those moments Birmingham has occupied a central space in the physical and spiritual lineage of America's Civil Rights Movement.

At the Civil Rights Institute, visitors can walk through galleries that simulate the experience of living in a city whose schools, libraries, and businesses were divided by race and what it was like to live through the Birmingham Campaign, a movement pivotal in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just across 16th Street North is Kelly Ingram Park, an assembly site for the SCLC in 1963 now filled with sculptures that preserve the memory of protesters and its leaders. Kitty-corner from the park is 16th Street Baptist Church, the city's first Black congregation, housed in a thick tan brick building of Romanesque-Byzantine design, which became a center for civil rights meetings. In September of 1963, two weeks after King's “I Have a Dream” speech, a bomb killed four little girls attending Sunday school, amplifying the city's racial reckoning. Today the church is a vital site of memory, its famous stained-glass windows, a gift from the people of Wales, filtering the golden sun through its wistful blue and violet spectrum.

On my final morning in Birmingham, I sat in musician Chandler Jones's apartment in the Phoenix Lofts, a building populated with creative residents. We drank coffee while looking out over the city through steamy factory glass windows as his menagerie of society finches chirped and chatted. Jones has become known for hosting some of the biggest names in Southern art, including Tara Stallworth Lee, Daniel José Carr, Renee Hanan Plata, and William Dooley, at Room 412, his tiny gallery space at the front of his apartment. He told me about the spiritual quality of Birmingham, its spaciousness, the magic that lies in the soil, the concentration of people who choose to be here, and the myth of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire who, from atop a 124-foot sandstone pedestal dreamed up by the Works Progress Administration on Red Mountain, overlooks the city. At 56 feet tall and over 120,000 pounds, it's the largest cast-iron statue in the world. According to local lore, Vulcan has been conducting a love affair with Electra, the bronze Divinity of Light statue gilding the Alabama Power building for the better part of a century, the pair meeting each other for moonlight trysts along their sight line of 18th Street.

All at once it began to snow outside, a sweeping whip of fluffy flakes cloaking the city in white, a wild reversal from the sunny, 75-degree spring weather only 24 hours before. As Jones concluded his story about the romance of Vulcan and Electra, my mind wandered to a memory of the warm bustle of Bottega's café from nearly 20 years ago, and I wished I'd had the time to bookend my visit here with a final moment at that institution of the Stitts (the city's other mythic couple). I wouldn't make it this time, but I knew when I returned to Birmingham, it would be the first place I'd go.

Where to stay

Tucked into the charming center of Mountain Brook, a suburb a few minutes' drive from downtown, Hotel Wildemont, Autograph Collection, has the feel of a warm, woodsy lodge. Elyton Hotel, now a Marriott property, occupies the stunning landmark Beaux Arts Empire Building, which was the tallest building in Alabama when it was built in 1909.

Where to eat

Frank and Pardis Stitt's legendary French and Italian restaurants Chez Fonfon and Bottega are true cornerstones of the Birmingham community, with beautifully appointed dining rooms, soulful food, and deeply thoughtful hospitality. Helen, Rob and Emily McDaniel's wood-fire-and-coal-cooking restaurant, is a cozy downtown spot that serves up chicken thighs, angel biscuits, and tomato pie. Last Call Baking is a must-visit for any lover of laminated dough, giant brownie bricks, or chunky cookie energy. Just next door its sibling coffee shop serves perfect cappuccinos and seasonal matcha potions. At Pizza Grace sourdough pies are served with a natural-wine-heavy list in a quaint arcade in the middle of downtown. Don't skip desserts from pastry chef and co-owner Geri-Martha O'Hara, the mind behind beloved ice cream shop Big Spoon Creamery. An institution by any measure, Johnny's Restaurant is part of a family tree of Southern and Greek joints whose jovial cafeteria-style lunches use local ingredients for dishes like spanakopita and fried green tomatoes. Shu Shop, dark and inviting, is an izakaya and ramen spot with a tight list of gyoza, sashimi, and soups, and aromatic, low-ABV drinks. Automatic Seafood & Oysters is an altar to Gulf seafood from the accomplished chef Adam Evans and designer Suzanne Humphries. Its sibling restaurant, Current Charcoal Grill, spotlights Asian and Southern flavors.

Where to drink

With two locations, the Golden Age Wine Garden downtown and Golden Age Wine Shop and Bar in the Mountain Brook area, this group has one of the great libraries of natural wine in the US, with bottles that range from obscure to highly collectible. High Dive HiFi Lounge, an all-day vinyl lounge that feels like sitting in someone's Big Sur living room, serves sharply honed drinks, bites in collaboration with renowned Southern chef Sean Brock, and guest-DJ sets; beverage nerds and dilettantes are equally welcome. Birmingham's first serious cocktail spot, The Collins Bar, was a foundational business in the downtown 2nd Avenue corridor when it opened in 2013; with only the bartenders to guide (no drink menu) and solid tots and hot dogs, it's more an excellent neighborhood bar than a highbrow lounge. Adiõs, from Jesús Méndez (owner of the tasty Salud Taqueria) and José Medina Camacho, is an ode to Mexico City with agave-forward drinks, a living ofrenda meant for the community, and doors thrown open to make it seem like a street party every night. Once a farrier's shop, Bygones Cocktail Bar, centered on a horseshoe bar, has romantic lighting, cocktails executed with joy and delight, and a laissez-faire atmosphere. It's the spot for a low-key date night or even early Sunday evening drinks.

This article appeared in the November 2026 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.