Spend an evening at a Birmingham dinner table and it becomes obvious why the city keeps turning up on national dining lists. A recent mid-week dinner before a show made the case all over again: marinated crab claws, octopus, grouper cheeks, whole lionfish, roasted vegetables, and poached swordfish, each plate arriving with the kind of flavor that stops the conversation. The restaurant was Automatic Seafood and Oysters, and the meal was, in a word, fantastic.
Birmingham’s rise as a dining destination did not happen overnight, and it did not happen by accident. It is the product of chefs who trained elsewhere and came home, a farmers’ market culture that supplies them, and a restaurant scene that has learned to celebrate its own.
Automatic Seafood: A Gulf Coast Kitchen in the Heart of Alabama
Automatic Seafood and Oysters sits in a convertedautomotive garage in the Lakeview district, and its story is a Gulf Coast story. Chef Adam Evans, the restaurant’s founder, grew up around seafood and built his career in some of New York’s most demanding kitchens before returning to Alabama to open his own place. The restaurant was an immediate hit with critics and locals alike, and in 2020 it won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant, one of the highest honors in American dining.
The menu changes daily based on the seafood available, which is part of the charm. You will not get the same meal twice. What you will get is impeccable service, a casual-but-elegant room, a soundtrack that might dip into the 1980s, and seafood handled with a precision that justifies the drive from anywhere in the state.
The Foundation Frank Stitt Built
None of Birmingham’s current momentum would exist without Frank Stitt. His Highlands Bar & Grill, opened in 1982, spent years as a James Beard finalist before winning the award for Outstanding Restaurant in 2018, the Oscar-equivalent of the food world. Stitt’s insistence on Southern ingredients treated with French technique proved that Alabama could hold its own with any dining city in America, and an entire generation of chefs, including Evans, learned in his kitchens or in his shadow.
Highlands, Bottega, Chez Fonfon and the rest of the Stitt family of restaurants turned Southside and Highland Park into a dining district, and the city has been expanding outward ever since. What began as one exceptional room is now a full ecosystem: chef-driven neighborhood spots, serious cocktail bars, bakeries worth planning a morning around, and oyster bars that give the coast a run for its money.
Worth the Trip
For Gulf Coast residents, Birmingham remains an underused getaway. The drive is a little over four hours, the concert calendar at venues like the BJCC’s theaters is strong, and the dinner options justify building the whole evening around a table. Pair a show with an early seating and you have a near-perfect Alabama night out.
The state’s food scene is often described as having two capitals: the coast for seafood and Birmingham for everything else. A dinner like the one at Automatic Seafood makes a persuasive case that the line between them is blurrier than it used to be. The flavors are incredible, the welcome is warm, and the city that Frank Stitt put on the map keeps getting better.
Birmingham is worth the trip. The only real question is which restaurant you will try first.