This year marked a rare occurrence. No metro Birmingham chef or restaurant made the finalist list for a James Beard Award, the most prestigious plaudits in the American food-service industry.

Local chefs and eateries have earned nominations or won outright in 22 of the past 27 Beard Awards, led by legendary Birmingham chef Frank Stitt and his flagship restaurant, Highlands Bar and Grill.

The most recent winner is Adam Evans, co-owner of the Southside restaurant Automatic Seafood and Oysters, who was named Best Chef: South in 2022. Birmingham Beard nominees and winners also include bars, wine shops and media.

Picked by industry peers, Beard Award-winning restaurants and chefs are a local point of pride. They also draw savvy travelers and the food obsessed, along with positive media attention.

Birmingham’s restaurant scene is helping change outside perceptions. Once dismissively nicknamed “Bombingham” for its deadly violence during the Civil Rights Movement, today’s city officials brand Birmingham as “the dining destination of the South.” Food is a calling card.

“We’re starting to combat the narrative that we’re stuck in 1963,” said Cornell Wesley, head of the city’s Department of Innovation and Economic Opportunity. “The two things that contribute the most to the rest of the country taking notice is sports and entertainment, and our food scene. There is a direct correlation not only to tourism but also business attraction and expansion.”

The Food + Culture festival, a four-day celebration built around chefs and mixologists that began Thursday, spotlights the role Birmingham’s restaurants play not only in local life but also in the city’s $2.5 billion tourism industry. Last year, the area drew nearly 4 million overnight visitors, according to the Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau. The inaugural edition of Food + Culture last year attracted people from 18 states and Canada, and USA Today named it the nation’s third-best new fest.

Locally-owned independent restaurants, many run by immigrants and their children, have been dear to Birmingham diners from the city’s earliest days. And while national chains started moving into city and suburban areas in the 1970s, Birmingham’s taste for hometown cooking still simmered on a back burner.

Stitt ushered in Birmingham’s modern restaurant era when he opened Highlands in 1982. Another influential city restaurateur, Nick Pihakis, co-founded Jim ‘N Nick’s barbecue in 1985. Chris Hastings, who had worked for Stitt at Highlands and Bottega restaurants, premiered his own Hot and Hot Fish Club in 1995.

Birmingham’s run of Beard nominations started the next year. The city has garnered multiple chef or restaurant nominations for each of the past 16 awards. The 2021 Beards were canceled before nominations could be announced.

The local food scene is thriving today, after three brutal years during the pandemic and its aftermath. Restaurant openings greatly outpace closings, and sales are strong, observers say. People are filling dining rooms. Finding a prime reservation is difficult.

“I think that Birmingham’s dining scene is on fire right now,” said five-time Beard Award semifinalist Rob McDaniel, who worked for Hastings and Pihakis, then ran SpringHouse at Lake Martin before opening his current downtown steak house, Helen, in 2020. “The growth of the dining scene is drawing a lot of attention.”

Since the pandemic hit, people have gone out of their way to support favorite establishments that are struggling through temporary closures and business model shifts, spacing limitations upon reopening and post-pandemic supply-chain problems compounded by inflation and labor shortages.

Still, COVID-19 permanently shuttered several beloved local restaurants, and the toll lingers. For months after closing Highlands Bar and Grill during the earliest days of the pandemic, Stitt operated under the assumption it would reopen – perhaps the bar side first and the dining room side later.

Now, Stitt said recently, it’s unlikely Highlands as we knew it will ever return.

“In many ways, my identity is linked to that restaurant,” he said. “I love that place and that room, the feel and the food and the menu and that oyster bar – everything. I just don’t know if we can or should try to recreate a legend.”

The last thing Stitt wants is for a resuscitated Highlands to not measure up with people’s memories. “I don’t think anybody wants that,” he said.

Frank and Pardis Stitt still apply that same commitment to quality, excellence and service at their other three establishments, Bottega’s fine-dining room, open since 1988, Bottega Café, since 1990, and Chez Fonfon, since 2000.

But the loss of Highlands, the establishment that put Birmingham on the culinary map, symbolizes a generational passing of the restaurant torch.

Choosing Birmingham

Evans, who opened Automatic Seafood and Oysters in 2019, is one of the few lauded local chefs who did not train under Stitt, Hastings or Pihakis.

The Muscle Shoals native and Auburn University grad already was on the national radar after spending more than a decade working for well-known chefs or opening kitchens in Fairhope, New Orleans, Atlanta and Los Angeles. But when he and his future wife, Arab native Suzanne Humphries, considered where to open their first restaurant, they chose Birmingham.

“I love the feel of the city,” the chef said. “There’s an energy. It’s got a great vibe that we wanted to be part of.”

Just as Stitt brought national attention to Birmingham starting in the 1980s, joined by Hastings starting in the 1990s, Evans now plays that role.

Automatic was a Beard finalist nationally for Best New Restaurant in 2020, although the award ceremony was cancelled due to COVID weeks before winners were to be announced. Evans followed up with the regional best-chef Beard award.

Evans and Automatic have been quoted or mentioned in Saveur, Food and Wine, Esquire, The New York Times and Southern Living. Current Charcoal Grill, a new restaurant in the Parkside district that Evans opened in April with operating partner Luke Joseph and Raymond Harbert Jr., already has been featured in Food and Wine.

The buzz, validated by the Beards, draws business. “We saw a tremendous uptick in people coming in, not only locals but people passing through Birmingham,” Evans said.

Even when the 2020 Beard Awards ceremony was called off – which Evans described as “heartbreaking” and “deflating” for his staff and himself – people flocked to the restaurant, which had then pivoted temporarily to outdoor dining.

“We still see people coming in saying, ‘I read you won a James Beard Award,’” Evans said. “People that had never been here came because of that.”

The Beard effect echoes throughout the metro area.

Five Birmingham chefs or restaurants have won awards outright, Stitt (Best Chef: Southeast 2001; Who’s Who in Food and Beverage in America 2011); Hastings (Best Chef: South 2012); Highlands Bar and Grill (Outstanding Restaurant 2018); Dolester Miles (Outstanding Pastry Chef 2018) and Evans (Best Chef: South 2022).

Demonstrating sustained excellence, Highlands (10), Hastings (6), Stitt (5) and Miles (5) also were multi-year nominees when they took the top honor.

Five more local restaurateurs have been semifinalists or finalists for regional best-chef awards — Chris Dupont, Chris Newsome, James Lewis, Tim Hontzas and McDaniel.

Five popular Birmingham-area restaurants have been finalists or semifinalists for national Beard awards — Ollie Irene, Johnny’s, Chez Fonfon, Bottega and Pizza Grace. In 2010 The Bright Star, open in Bessemer since 1907, was honored as an American Classic by the Beard Foundation.

On the sweet side of the Birmingham Beards menu, Miles’ string of national nominations began in 2014. Chanah Willis, founder of Last Call Baking, was a 2024 semifinalist in the Emerging Chef category.

“I think people are surprised when they come here and eat at all the different restaurants,” Evans said. “Birmingham has a great reputation outside the city.”

A Flavorful Evolution

Asked how dining in the city has evolved over the past 40-plus years, Stitt recalled his family’s recent celebratory dinner at the Southside restaurant Blueprint on 3^rd.

Dean Robb, Blueprint’s co-owner and front-of-the-house face, had worked some 15 years for Stitt. Ditto the head chef, Huck Huckaby.

“The menu is very much Huck but very much, as he says, inspired by his time working with us at Highlands, Bottega and Fonfon,” Stitt said. “With Dean’s hospitality, no one is a stranger.”

Those qualities are replicated by protegees throughout the city. That makes Frank and Pardis Stitt proud.

“There are a lot of ‘children’ of the Stitt Restaurant Group that have taken our core philosophy and gone out to create places of personality and character,” he said. “They are not a copy at all of what we are doing but were influenced in a positive way.”

Stitt’s, Hastings’ and Pihakis’ adult children now have leadership roles in the respective companies, another evolutionary marker.

While most of the city’s best-known chefs list Stitt and/or Hastings as kitchen mentors, many also cite Pihakis as a business mentor.

Pihakis started working for local Greek restaurateurs in the late 1970s before launching Jim ‘N Nick’s with his father. After building it into a multi-state empire, he sold the company in 2017.

Today, Pihakis runs the Birmingham-based Pihakis Restaurant Group. He is a six-time Beard semifinalist for the national Outstanding Restaurateur award.

Over the years, Pihakis has played an outsized role in sustaining and expanding Birmingham’s local food scene.

As a result of his partnership with the Beard-winning South Carolina-based pitmaster, two of Rodney Scott’s five whole-hog barbecue restaurants are in greater Birmingham. Pihakis persuaded Beard Award-winning chefs John Currence of Mississippi and Sean Brock of South Carolina and Tennessee to open establishments here.

But his greatest contribution may be in developing local talent. Through PRG, Pihakis has partnered with Wil Drake to expand his Hero doughnut shops into four states. The company also manages the new Birmingham seafood restaurant Magnolia Point. PRG offers its own diverse portfolio – Little Donkey is barbecue  meets Mexican, Tasty Town is Greek and Luca Lagotto, Italian.

“There’s two sides to the business,” Pihakis said. “You’ve got to have great food. But you also have to understand how to manage the business. There’s only 100 pennies to the dollar and they go pretty quick. The culinary side is why people come to the restaurant, but learning how to operate and run it, that’s how you stay in business. That’s how you grow.”

Pihakis described what he calls the “food pyramid of customers.” About 10%, the base, mainly care about value. Another 10% at the tip demand an ethereal experience.

“We try to stay somewhere in the middle because that’s where the masses live,” he said. “People who are willing to have a great experience but want a great value. We’ve got a saying, ‘We’d rather feed the masses and live like the classes than feed the classes and live like the masses.’”

Multicultural Eateries

Beyond metro Birmingham’s attention-drawing dining establishments is a rich array of small family-run eateries and food trucks specializing in dishes from around the world.

They serve Mexican street food; the piquant dishes of India, Pakistan and Nepal; and regional Chinese cuisine. Others offer delicacies from Ethiopia and Kenya in Eastern Africa, throughout the Middle East, Europe, across Southeast Asia and up and down the Americas.

Wesley, the city’s innovation czar, pointed to the diversity of students and professors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He drew a direct line from the university to the area’s international restaurants and markets.

“Marry that with the Greek families and the Italian families that have been part of Birmingham’s history,” he said. “It’s truly a perfect storm, an influx of people and history converging and creating this amazing food scene.”

Stitt recalled how while he was growing up in Cullman, his family would trek to downtown Birmingham for “some of the best Cantonese food in the country” at Joy Young’s restaurant. He has fond memories of the Mexican tamales his father would bring home from Bruno Mancha’s street cart in Birmingham.

“The food cultures from Central America, South America and Mexico are becoming more and more an important part of the culinary scene,” Stitt said, citing modern taquerias such as Gordo’s in Homewood and El Barrio restaurant in downtown Birmingham. “There is this wonderful richness.”

Not Just Southside Anymore

By any metric, Birmingham’s restaurant scene continues to grow.

Jobs in the hospitality industry across the metro area are up 4% versus last year, according to the Census Bureau. Led by eateries, the hospitality sector is Birmingham’s third-largest private employer.

The city’s restaurant districts are expanding. In the 1980s and 1990s, Five Points South was the center of Birmingham’s dining universe, led by Stitt’s places, Hot and Hot, which since has moved, and the restaurant that now houses Galley and Garden.

Since then, offerings in Lakeview have Increased. Filling former gaps to the north are Automatic and spots at Pepper Place such as Hot and Hot’s current location, Hastings’ OvenBird, Blueprint on 3^rd and Lewis’ Bettola.

Newer restaurant clusters in Birmingham’s city limits include Parkside, Avondale, Midtown, Forest Park, downtown’s Second Avenue North corridor and the First Avenue North corridor.

Food trucks have become an integral part of the culinary scene in both the city and suburbs. Rare is the local event without one or two trucks present. They are an amenity at City Walk BHAM and participate in the twice-yearly Birmingham Restaurant Week.

More restaurants are coming, Wesley said, including The Armour House and a new Japanese steakhouse, both on Second Avenue North. Pihakis, who already had opened a few metro eateries in the past year, recently partnered with Brock and launched a local outpost of his Nashville, Tennessee, restaurant Joyland.

Once mostly confined to Birmingham’s city boundaries, local chefs are expanding or opening their flagships in the suburbs. In Hoover, Stitt- and Greystone Country Club-trained Brian Mooney co-owns Tre Luna Bar and Kitchen at Brock’s Gap, and Hastings alum Sedesh Boodram runs The Anvil Pub and Grill off U.S. 280. In 2025, Pihakis plans to open four of his group’s restaurants in a development farther out U.S. 280, near Chelsea.

Mountain Brook has consistently attracted top culinary talent, but the recent redevelopment of its Lane Parke district has brought Sol y Luna, Post Office Pies, The Rougaroux and other popular chef-driven establishments. Homewood is a hotspot. Cahaba Heights overflows with popular local restaurants.

Trussville also is booming, anchored by a relatively new entertainment district. Its growth also is drawing Birmingham-based eateries including Hero and Mr. West’s Asian Kitchen, a concept from the folks behind downtown favorite EastWest.

“Success begets success in many ways,” Wesley said. “We’re fully embracing it.”