“Everything begins and ends with Frank Stitt,” someone declared when asked what to do in Birmingham, Alabama. This sentiment is familiar to those who have stopped through the city over the last two decades. Both locals and travelers insist on reservations at chef Frank Stitt and his wife Pardis’s restaurants, foundational institutions in the course of Birmingham’s food history. On a trip in 2010, after reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig catastrophe off the Louisiana coast, one writer sat in the cozy clamor of Bottega, the Stitts’ classic Italian place, now in its 38th year of operation.
But the writer had not yet had the chance to experience Chez Fonfon, the couple’s classic French bistro.
A Classic Bistro in Five Points South
So, on a first evening in Birmingham in the spring, the writer found themselves in what felt more like Paris or Provence as they sat at the bar of Chez Fonfon. The atmosphere was transported by butter yellow walls, brass rails, and 19th-century French furniture, alongside 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 once connected the suburb of Highland to the city. It is 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.
Frank Stitt’s love of food and restaurants is evident in his memories of traveling with his parents to eat at various establishments across the country. He recalls visiting New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami, but it’s the restaurants of Birmingham’s past that hold a special place in his heart. Stitt fondly remembers Browdy’s Jewish deli, Joy Young’s Chinese restaurant, and The Club, a private supper club with a dance floor and live music. He also shares a photograph of Richard Olney, a notable figure in French cuisine, and recounts sharing wine with Lulu Peyraud, the matriarch of the Domaine Tempier wine estate in Provence.
“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.
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The Magic City and the Steel Industry
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, Frank Stitt and real estate CEO Catherine Sloss Jones established the Market at Pepper Place, a weekly market that has become a major destination, attracting 10,000 visitors every Saturday. The market features local farmers, chefs, and artisans, and is a cornerstone of Birmingham’s thriving food scene. The city’s reputation for dining has been built on the foundation of the Stitts’ vision and mentorship, with five restaurants recently named as James Beard Award semifinalists.
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. 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.
The writer had a fluffy, cheese-crusted Sonoran taco alongside a zippy pomegranate agua fresca that made them feel as if they 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 the writer was there, they 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.