Cocktails and Comfort Food at Oxford's Bar Muse & Good Day Café
Two spots from Ross Hester and Joe Stinchcomb add to a thriving dining scene in Mississippi Hill Country.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: With Bar Muse and Good Day Café, Ross Hester and Joe Stinchcomb have added two great spots to the Oxford, Mississippi restaurant scene.
The Order: At Minneapolis’ Owamni, chef Sean Sherman’s sweet potato with maple chile crisp is the bite of the fall.
September’s Featured Field Guide: As a thank you to all the new subscribers who joined us this summer, September’s Featured Field Guide to Oxford, Mississippi is free to all readers! The downloadable guide features a four-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for your trip to Oxford.
Weekend Reading:
takes a dive into restaurant signs, heads to Michigan, previews an upcoming Chicago restaurant, and more.
In Oxford, Ole Meets New
OXFORD, MISS. — Post up for a cocktail at Bar Muse in downtown Oxford and you’ll meet the whole town. Over the course of our three visits to the bar this spring, we met local chefs and business owners, folks in the arts and professors on spring break from Ole Miss. We learned what makes this town tick over Fernet bucks and amaro sours, jerk-spiced rum drinks and Spanish chardonnays. With just a couple dozen seats, Bar Muse is tiny, but its influence on Oxford’s drinking scene is huge, with folks filling those seats five nights a week for cocktails created by Joe Stinchcomb and wines selected by Ross Hester.
The two met in 2016 when they were both on the opening staff at Saint Leo, a great Italian spot downtown (the restaurant was a 2017 James Beard Best New Restaurant semifinalist, and it’s on our Oxford “must” list when we’re in town). Stinchcomb was the bar manager and Hester worked his way up from server to operations manager. But after five years, the friends felt ready to do their own thing. “As much as we enjoyed our time [at Saint Leo], we thought it was time for a change,” Hester says. “We had the opportunity to start Bar Muse and we leapt at it.” That opportunity came from Lyric owners Bradley Bishop and Lindsay Dillon-Maginnis, who offered them the space, which they opened as Bar Muse in October 2021.
You enter Bar Muse through the theater or a side door with a tiled entry-way. There’s a little barroom up front, which leads into a back room with a handful of tables. The vibe is cozy and dark, so it’s a good place to end the day with a nightcap. But it’s also a great place to start your evening — happy hour begins at 4pm Wednesday to Saturday and 3pm on Sundays, so you can swing through for a glass of bubbly or a Japanese highball before dinner at City Grocery or another notable spot on the Square.
“We knew it would be a cocktail-driven program, because while I enjoy wine, cocktails are what I love to focus on,” Stinchcomb says. “It’s beautiful to tell a story through a liquid medium.” The stories he’s telling here are ones of Mississippi seasons and producers — I had a strawberry-infused gin cocktail in March, months before I was able to eat a local strawberry at home in Chicago. But the menu is also anchored in the world of classic cocktails. His drinks are clever and creative, whether that’s in drinks like the Whisky Business with Toki Japanese whisky, rice orgeat, lemon, and a Peychaud’s and rum float, which tastes like Japan meets the tropics, or the Avon Calling, with hibiscus-infused tequila, Aperol, Campari, and lemon bitters.
The “signatures” list changes regularly and adheres to a theme, like Arrested Development or ’80s/’90s hip hop. Stinchcomb has told me about his drink philosophies over our visits — his goal is to capture a moment in time. Occasionally, a cocktail will earn itself staying power on the list of house cocktails (that’s where you’ll find the Whisky Business and Avon Calling). But the themed signature drinks are a way to enter Stinchcomb’s mind at that moment. And he makes sure that in doing so, he’s meeting drinkers where they are.
“Sometimes people can feel intimidated, so we make the names punny and fun and that takes the intimidation factor down,” Stinchcomb says. That philosophy is clear in drinks like Enter the Wu Tang. The drink is complex — “it has a split base of rye whiskey and amaro with five-spice syrup, Sichuan peppercorn bitters, and an arak rinse,” Stinchomb says — but because of the fun name, “people might order things they might otherwise not.”
Hester, who first got into wine while at Saint Leo, aims to put together a list that offers something different for Oxford. “I didn’t have to worry about food costs so I could take some risks and pour something at a price point that makes sense,” he says. “I want to have fun with things unique to Oxford and be the only place in town that offers something by the glass.”
Like the cocktail list, the wine offerings are approachable but still high quality. A favorite of his — and mine — is Carboniste’s sparkling albariño extra brut from California. The list also includes a South African chenin blanc and Italian frizzante. “Now that we have a liquor license at Good Day, I’m buying some fun wines,” Hester says. “Txakoli has always been one of my favorite wines and it's going on the menu there.”
The duo started Good Day Café with chef-partner Patrick Hudgins (also a Saint Leo alum) in September 2022 as a take-out window in the alley next to the Lyric. That’s where we visited for lunch earlier this year; days before they closed the window to move the restaurant to a new, standalone space on Lamar Boulevard. Good Day’s lunch menu at the new location is familiar to regulars — we loved sandwiches like the Turk, with turkey, avocado, bacon, and Swiss amped up with herby rosemary aioli and sweet tomato jam. Also a standout: the smash burger with two patties, American cheese, shredded lettuce, housemade pickles, fried shallots, and garlic-mustard aioli.
For dinner, which launched recently, the menu is “more small plates and larger entrées to share family style,” Hester says. “Some people want to do an individual thing, and there’s no right or wrong way to dine with us. But when Joe, Patrick, and I go out to eat, we get everything on the menu and all have a bite or two. The menu is designed that way.” The dinner menu includes jalapeño hushpuppies with bonito flake aioli, roasted chicken with charred onion salsa verde, and red snapper with a coconut curry broth and chile-herb salad. “Our food is traditional food done really well,” Hester says. “You’ll have a thousand hamburgers in your life but you’re probably going to remember ours. You’ve going to remember the Turk because of the tomato jam and rosemary aioli. I think the roasted chicken is something special.”
They recently obtained a liquor license for Good Day and are starting with beer and wine. “I’ve been seeing a bottle on every table,” Hester says. “It’s been fun getting to pair wines with food and teach staff about wine. We try to keep it fresh and interesting, and rotating by the glass lets us introduce a lot of new wines.” Mixed drinks are on the way, too, and Stinchcomb is planning a menu that will incorporate batched drinks, like clarified and kegged cocktails. “We don’t have a traditional bar set up,” he says. “Hopefully we’ll put in a frozen drink machine since we have a lot of outdoor space and you can sit outside nine months out of the year.”
The move has been a successful one for the Good Day team. “I knew we had a good product with Good Day in the alley, but the location was a detriment,” Stinchcomb says. “When we were in the alley we were more college student-driven, but now that we’re in a standalone space, we’re seeing more locals come in. We didn’t know the city really needed something like this. It’s fun to be on the ground floor of creating a mainstay in Oxford.”
Bar Muse 1006 Van Buren Ave, Oxford, MS 38655 | @barmuse_oxford
Good Day Café 766 N Lamar Blvd, Oxford, MS 38655 | @good_day_oxford
Download all our Oxford Recommendations!
Ready to plan your trip to Oxford? Our full list of favorites is available in our Field Guide to Oxford — free this month to all readers! This 44-page dining guide includes a curated four-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks plus souvenirs to bring home. It’s downloadable for offline reading, includes Google Maps and Instagram links, and is formatted for your phone — perfect for easy reference on your next trip.
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Owamni’s Sweet Potato with Maple Chile Crisp
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. — Sean Sherman’s indigenous restaurant Owamni is a must-visit when in Minneapolis, and while all the food is delicious, it’s the roasted sweet potato with chile crisp that I think about most.
Owamni’s menu uses only indigenous ingredients, and for this dish, Sherman roasts then sears sweet potatoes and drizzles them with chile crisp made with a mix of different dried chiles, maple sugar, garlic, and scallions. It’s finished with fresh sliced scallions for an allium pop, and the whole dish nails that sweet-spicy flavor profile we all love.
I’ve previously written about internationally inspired chile crisps and have had Mexican, Indian, and Korean takes in addition to the OG Chinese versions. Add this to the list for a truly home-grown take.
420 S 1st St, Minneapolis, MN 55401 | @owamni
Sign of the Times
America is filled with iconic restaurant signs. I’m thinking of places like St. Elmo Steak House in Indianapolis, The Peppermill in Las Vegas, and Louie’s Backyard in Key West. If you’ve been, you can see them in your mind. They trigger memories and prompt visitors to stop and take a photo before heading in through the doors. A few weeks back,
— also a signage lover — wrote about the signs at his own Charleston restaurants for his newsletter, . The backstory of the hand-painted sign outside Leon’s is particularly good, but I’ll let Reitz tell it.MICHIGAN
recently headed up to the northern tip of Michigan for some relaxation. For his newsletter, , he put together a list of his favorite places in the greater Traverse City area. We keep meaning to visit Traverse City every summer, but until we do we’ll live vicariously through Sorge.ILLINOIS
Chef Joe Flamm is Going Roman: Subscribers to
’s newsletter, Something Glorious, saw his interview with Joe Flamm, where the chef talked about his upcoming restaurant, Il Carciofo. “This place is going to be very authentic classic Roman cuisine,” said the Top Chef alum. “Artichokes; carbonara; amatriciana with guanciale, tomatoes, and pecorino; suppli (balls of rice) with ragu; cacio e pepe; pizza alla teglia.” Sign us up.— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
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Sounds like such a charming quality place! If I make it to Oxford, I’ll have to check it out. And thanks for the shout out to my Flamm interview!
One Dealer’s Choice, please. Have a great weekend!