It’s no secret: Birmingham takes food very seriously. Fancy or simple, it must be great to pass muster in the Magic City. Several food festivals this spring reflect the metro area’s longstanding cultural and religious diversity. Two events in April are held by a local Maronite Catholic congregation that dates back more than a century, and the Levite Jewish Community center (Birmingham’s earliest synagogues date to 1889, 1903, and 1907). The Birmingham Taco Fest honors what is arguably one of Birmingham’s favorite casual foods. Mexican-style taquerias, Tex-Mex restaurants, and even suburban adaptations have proliferated with the growth of the Mexican-American population across Alabama in recent decades. Sample the best of Birmingham’s restaurants, or chow down on chili for a cause. Work your way down this list in March, April, and May and gain a greater appreciation for the melting pot that feeds metro Birmingham.

When spring is sprung, getting outside and enjoying a beer or some wine tops many weekend checklists. So, it’s no surprise a few wine and beer festivals are on tap across Alabama this spring. The season foams up with two ultimate signs of spring, beer and the blooming plants and trees at Bellengrath Gardens in the Theodore community in Mobile County. Here are the ABCs on Alabama’s spring wine and beer festivals, including events in Albertville, Birmingham, and Calera.

From collard greens to poke salat, several spring festivals in Alabama are showcases for an iconic food, often one that’s emblematic of its home. Sausages introduced by immigrants who founded Elberta in the early 1900s are celebrated there with the German Sausage Festival in late March. A 140-year-old mill in Childersburg builds its late-April fun around the corn grits it produces.  From chocolate in Mobile to chicken wings in Vestavia Hills, food has a prominent place in festivals across the state in March, April, and May. 

Ricky Albright is cooking up a career on Instagram, one grill at a time. He has amassed more than 65,000 followers, regularly sharing mouthwatering reels with recipes for dishes he cooks on a variety of grills. Albright also recently started a Facebook page and You Tube channel, all as Iron Fire Cooking.

Food lovers around the country know Alabama for its diverse types of barbecue, great Gulf seafood, and sweet Chilton County peaches. Now it’s time to add breakfast to that menu. In February, the Southern-focused national magazine, Garden and Gun, named Fife’s Restaurant in Birmingham to its list of “7 of the South’s Tastiest Breakfast Joints.”  “The homey restaurant shifts to cafeteria service for lunch, but scrambles eggs and flips pancakes to order,” Hanna Raskin writes about the 64-year-old institution. “Devotees are divided on sides: Some favor thick-skinned smoked sausage, while others are partial to sweet country ham.” But Fife’s is far from the only Alabama breakfast joint gaining attention from regional and national media.

With Black History Month drawing to a close, two Alabama bars are partnering to celebrate the contributions Black bartenders have made to the art of mixology throughout history. On Sunday, February 26 from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., one of Birmingham’s newest cocktail bars, Continental Drift, will host a pop-up event in collaboration with Session Cocktails of Tuscaloosa. The event will feature a menu of five limited-edition cocktails, three inspired by Black mixologists from the past and another two created by mixologists Eric Bennett of Continental Drift and Qadeem Hassan of Session Cocktails. 

Head down University Boulevard in Tuscaloosa and you’ll find all the familiar Southern college town staples. There’s a brewpub, a barbecue joint, and a campus apparel shop selling just about any article of clothing you could want emblazoned with the University of Alabama’s elephant mascot. But as of August 2022, T-town’s also sporting a bit of West Coast flair. Yazmyn Rozier’s Veganish Market is a breath of fresh air for a stretch of downtown populated with dark bars and greasy late-night food joints. Let the window-hung pastel streamers and cheetah print table umbrellas beckon you inside a light and bright space that’s outfitted with palm print wallpaper, surfboard motifs, and rattan furniture. 

New Orleans may be considered the Mardi Gras capital of the world, but did you know that the first Mardi Gras celebration actually happened right here in Alabama? In 1703, French pioneers at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff, the first settlement of Mobile, threw the first official Carnival celebration. The Azalea City has been rocking and rolling with weeklong Mardi Gras celebrations ever since. If you can’t make it down for the parades and parties this year, don’t fret. Local businesses and restaurants all over the state let the good times roll all month long. Here are seven places in Alabama to visit when you’re ready for a little Cajun revelry. 

There’s something soul-satisfying about gumbo at this time of the year. Maybe it’s the nourishing warmth a steaming bowl provides in winter’s chill. Or an appreciation for the effort required to make great gumbo from scratch. Being Mardi Gras season doesn’t hurt. It’s all of those—and more. 

Valentine’s Day is one of my least-favorite evenings to dine out. Restaurants everywhere are overwhelmed. Often, we get stuck with like-it-or-lump-it fixed menus that lack courses for vegetarians—like my wife. Instead, we prefer to stay home. For Valentine’s, we’ve become quite fond of fondue.

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, which means it’s time to start planning something special for the lucky guy or gal in your life. This year, skip the tired old dinner reservation and surprise your sweetie with a completely unique date idea. Here are 10 great Alabama date ideas guaranteed to sweep your partner off their feet. 

Coffee lovers know the best cup is made with recently roasted beans—the fresher the better. Buying from a local roastery, especially one in the neighborhood, guarantees that freshness.  Although Birmingham’s regional giants Royal Cup and Red Diamond are more than a century old, today’s modern coffee culture traces to 1993 when O’Henry’s Coffee opened in Homewood selling beans that were roasted in-house. Today, dozens of small-batch producers can be found throughout the metro area. Their coffee beans are available in groceries and upscale markets, served in restaurants, sold online, and stocked in the roasteries’ own cafes.

It’s an unusually cold night in downtown Birmingham, but the chilly temperatures haven’t deterred the small groups of people trickling into Hi-Wire Brewing. The city’s newest brewery has only been open for a couple months, but it’s already built a reputation for itself thanks to its excellent craft beer selection, expansive space, and fun selection of games. Tonight happens to be a biweekly puzzle night, and the turnout is impressive. Small groups huddle around 500-piece jigsaw puzzles. Dogs laze around on the floor, and folks mill up to the bar to grab a pint every couple of minutes. 

Biscuits are a way of life in the South. From fast food favorites to family heirloom recipes, there’s not a meal that can’t be made better by a hot, buttery biscuit. In December, Birmingham added another biscuit purveyor with the opening of Nashville-based, family-run breakfast and lunch spot Biscuit Love.

Anthony Ricciardone charted his current entrepreneurial course as a gardener. Today, he’s a farmer. Oysters are his crop, boutique bivalves that he and partner Chris Head grow in water off Fort Morgan where the salty Gulf of Mexico meets more subtly brackish Bon Secour Bay.

As the Chinese New Year arrives on January 22, families are gathered to enjoy a homecoming, honor their ancestors, and— above all—eat. It’s the new year on the lunar calendar, which uses moon phases to segment the year. In China and other countries that traditionally follow it, the new year starts on the second new moon after the Winter Solstice‚between January 21 and February 20 on solar-based Western calendars.

You won’t need to ride a “White Limozeen” all the way to Nashville to celebrate Dolly Parton’s birthday this month. One is cruising to downtown Birmingham on January 19 to mark the big day with a pop-up at Adios Bar.

Auburn University’s new Rane Center is cooking up an exclusive, food-focused getaway called the Epicurean Experience, bringing in guest chefs and sommeliers, and capping the weekend with a special nine-course dinner at the center’s 1856 Restaurant.

When Jose Medina Camacho was growing up, the last thing he wanted to do was work in the hospitality industry. After immigrating from Michoacán, Mexico with his mother and brother at the age of 3, he spent many of his adolescent years working in his uncles’ restaurants in Tuscaloosa, Jasper, and beyond. “My grandfather was a dishwasher at the restaurant,” he says. “All my uncles were cooks. It was kind of like a family affair.”

Chefs across central Alabama will make sure no one is hungry when 2022 ends, with special New Year’s Eve menus at some of the region’s finest restaurants. There will be multi-course menus in Montgomery, at Lake Martin, and in Auburn. Nibble on mini lobster rolls and enjoy oysters on the half-shell at a jazz lounge. In Tuscaloosa, an evening of food drink and music culminates in a midnight toast. Here are some places to celebrate the great meals of 2022, and set the stage for more to come in 2023.

Baking cookies is an integral part of the holiday season, don’t you think? Cookies for Santa, cookie swap parties, cookie boxes for neighbors and friends; the list of reasons to bake cookies during the holidays goes on and on. I, personally, reach for cookie recipes no matter what season it is, simply because I love to bake cookies. Like most human beings, I too have swooned, drooled, and marveled over the chewy, sometimes gooey, flavorful bliss of a cookie fresh from the oven, but in all honesty, it’s the simple, familiar, and comforting process of baking cookies that really does it for me. Baking cookies, particularly during the holiday season, is comfort in its purest form; and I believe it’s a comfort we should share.