Weekend Getaway: Oxford, Mississippi
The home to Ole Miss, Oxford's food scene includes terrific Indian food, incredible tacos, great cocktails, and much more.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Weekend Getaway: Oxford, Mississippi is one of our favorite American destinations. Home to Ole Miss, Oxford has a stellar food and drink scene — come along as we spend a few days eating our way through the best restaurants in town.
September’s Featured Field Guide: As a thank you to all the new subscribers who joined us this summer, this newsletter plus September’s Featured Field Guide to Oxford, Mississippi are free to all readers! The guide, a $10 value, features a four-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for where to eat and drink in Oxford.
Weekend Reading: West coast road trips, exploring America by train, small town getaways in the Midwest, and more.
OXFORD, MISS. — Oxford, Mississippi had been on my radar years before I visited. I knew it was home to Ole Miss; Square Books; Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home; and Big Bad Breakfast, John Currence’s breakfast joint. And that was enough for us to plan an overnight stay on a road trip through the South back in 2015 (honestly, we only need one cool thing on our radar to plan a trip somewhere). We’ve been back multiple times since then, including this past March, when we headed down for a week while Ole Miss students were on spring break.
Each time we’ve traveled there, people ask us — why Oxford? The town is a small one after all, with only around 25,000 residents. But its small size means you’re quickly able to settle into the rhythm of the town, connect with locals, and feel like you fit in. We all like to pretend that we’re locals when we travel somewhere, but in Oxford it really does feel that way. Each time we visit, we make more friends, meet more great people. Plus the food is superb. There’s excellent Southern food, of course, and we certainly eat plenty of fried catfish and shrimp and grits. But we also eat smash burgers and Indian chaat. We drink Pimm’s Cups and homegrown gins made with rice and magnolia blossoms, sip bourbon and cheap beers. Life in Oxford is centered on the Square, with restaurants and shops encircling the white-steepled Lafayette County Courthouse. Stay at the Graduate Hotel Oxford, and you’ll be able to walk nearly anywhere you want to go.
That includes Bottletree Bakery, a Square staple since 1995. Cynthia Gerlach’s cafe offers a case teeming with pastries (from turkey-cheddar croissants to honey cream cheese danish). Get a pastry plus a fantastic biscuit sandwich with sausage, egg, and cheese and a cup of their signature air-roasted coffee blend, and you’ll set yourself up well for a day of exploring.
There’s a lot to do on the Square besides eat, so stroll around and stop into stores like Square Books, which has four locations: the main shop, a kids’ bookstore, a rare bookstore, and Off Square Books, which is where you’ll find bargain and used titles along with cookbooks and other food and travel tomes. To learn more about the food of the region, pick up The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by local author John T. Edge (who also hosts True South, our favorite food travel show), and Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey through the Soul of the South, a book by Susan Puckett that we used while exploring the Delta a few years back.
For lunch on the Square, Ajax Diner is a must of ours for Southern fare. Ajax opened in 1997 and serves plate lunches, po’boys, and some darn good jalapeño cornbread. You can get a meat and three, or, my order — a veggie plate filled with sides. I particularly like buttery purple hulled peas and squash casserole.
For cocktails and wine, the best bar in town is Bar Muse, run by Joe Stinchcomb, who does the cocktails, and Ross Hester, who handles the wine. This spot is tiny — it’s tucked within the Lyric theater, with just a few bar seats and tables. Start the evening with a glass of French pet-nat or Franklin Comes Alive!, a Fernet buck that goes down almost too easily. It’s also a good spot to end the night with a sipper like a Martinez.
For dinner, head to Oxford classic City Grocery, John Currence’s first restaurant in town. With brick walls, white tablecloths, and attentive service, this is one of the nicest spots in town for dinner. The kitchen, helmed by chef de cuisine Jon Davis, serves plates that smartly reinterpret Southern flavors. You need to eat the terrific shrimp and grits with mushrooms, garlic, and bacon at least once during your visit, and the Caesar salad here is my all-time favorite version — it has kalamata olives and hard-boiled egg and you can add fried oysters or blackened shrimp. But go beyond the Grocery staples and try rotating seasonal dishes like a grilled rack of lamb with Carolina gold rice tabbouleh, harissa verde, and rose petal za’atar or pork scallopini with eggplant caponata and toum. After dinner, head upstairs to the City Grocery Bar for a nightcap — grab a table on the little balcony that overlooks the Square and drink a pour of bourbon or a gingery Pimm’s Cup (my order), and watch the town settle down for the night.
There’s plenty of great stuff beyond the Square. In the morning, head to Big Bad Breakfast (it’s referred to as BBB around town), a bustling, homey spot. Snag a stool at the counter and order a diner mug of coffee, fluffy black pepper-buttermilk biscuits, breakfast meats (smoked by an Alabama company just to John Currence’s specifications), and skillets loaded with eggs and veggies. Or, get a doughnut. There are two spots in town serving no-frills rounds. At Community Doughnuts, you’ll find kolaches in addition to doughnuts, while Ollie’s Donuts of Oxford (formerly Shipley Do-Nuts) offers an array of classic flavors, made fresh each day. The vanilla iced doughnut with rainbow sprinkles and a ring spread with thick maple icing and topped with walnuts are two favorites. Or, head to Heartbreak Coffee, an airy shop from Ole Miss alum Gretchen Williams with indoor and outdoor seating. Grab an egg and cheese biscuit sandwich or blueberry scone and a cold brew.
For lunch, head to Good Day Cafe, from the team behind Bar Muse. Here, chef Patrick Hudgins serves sandwiches by day and shareable plates by night, like steak frites with a seared bone-in ribeye and red snapper with coconut curry broth. On the lunch menu, split the burger, which has two super-smashed patties topped with American cheese, shredded lettuce, housemade pickles, fried shallots, and garlic-mustard aioli, and the Turk, with layers of turkey, avocado, bacon, and Swiss, plus delicious rosemary aioli and tomato jam. We also like the sandwiches at Panino Veloce, which is a counter inside Tarasque, an Old World-inspired dinner spot. Try the roasted chicken sandwich with Caesar dressing and pea shoots on housemade semolina focaccia with a side of pasta salad.
One of our favorite lunches — and our single favorite meal during our last Oxford visit — was at El Colibri, a taco truck parked at the Napa Auto Parts along Lamar Boulevard. The red food truck is better known around town as “Maria’s,” as the chef is Maria Rodriguez, who previously worked at City Grocery. When we were having drinks at Snackbar one night, we were talking with chef Vishwesh Bhatt about what was new in town, and he told us to go to Maria’s — “It’s not just good for Oxford, it’s good for anywhere,” he said. And he wasn’t kidding. We got a bunch of tacos, including tender carne asada, al pastor with pineapple, and chorizo. They come served on tortillas with cilantro and onion, plus grilled onions, lime, and red and green salsas on the side. They’re the best tacos we’ve had in recent memory. So is the torta. We opted for the carnitas, which are absolutely luscious, and which come layered on thin slices of sesame-studded bread with refried beans, lettuce, tomato, avocado, queso fresco, pickled jalapeños, and mayo. They’re messy but worth the salsa running down your wrists.
Oxford has a lot of good daytime spots to while away an afternoon, like Circle and Square Brewing Company, which is open all day. Order an easygoing Full Ride Kölsch and snack on pretzels with beer cheese sauce or griddled hot dogs with smoked bacon jam, pimento cheese, and crispy fried onions. Funkys Pizza & Daiquiri Bar on the Square is another daytime favorite with New Orleans-style frozen daiquiris. Sit on the patio and sip a Bushwhacker, made with rum, coffee liqueur, coconut, and chocolate. The Blind Pig is a service industry hangout with pool tables and TVs, plus sandwiches and 20 beers on draft — many are from Southern breweries like Urban South Brewery in New Orleans and Wiseacre Brewing Co. in Memphis.
For dinner, we never miss Snackbar, a Currence restaurant where Bhatt serves an ever-changing array of plates, like sweet tea-brined fried chicken, that celebrate the seasonality of the South. Many of Bhatt’s dishes feature Indian ingredients as a nod to his heritage, like Punjabi-style fried catfish and cherry tomato salad with fried paneer. The bar program is one of the city’s best, so pop in during happy hour for $8 classic cocktails or end the night with an old fashioned spiked with chicory liqueur. We also always hit Saint Leo for pizzas, like one with bacon jam and Calabrian chile honey (add on zesty pepperoni), and seasonal small plates like asparagus with herbed ricotta, lemon, and mint.
You should also drive about 10 minutes outside of town to Taylor, where you can have Thursday night cocktails at Wonderbird Spirits, or just snag a bottle of their excellent gin made with Mississippi Delta rice. While in Taylor, grab cocktails and Mississippi catfish hushpuppies with smoked tomato tartar sauce at Grit Restaurant, then have dinner at Taylor Grocery. This rollicking joint has been serving catfish since 1977. You might not think there’s much to it when you drive by — the faded exterior sign is barely legible and there’s a rusting gas pump by the entrance — but the building, a former dry goods shop, has been standing since 1889. Inside, people are packed in at tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths listening to the live country band. Order whatever kind of catfish suits your fancy, crispy fried okra, greens (add a shake of pepper sauce), and grilled shrimp. The latter are well-seasoned with a house spice blend. When you pay your bill at the register, pick up a jar of seasoning to take home. We like all their seasonings, but particularly the All-Purpose, which we use at home on everything from fish to veggies.
What else? It wouldn’t be a trip to Oxford without a visit to the 4 Corners Chevron, a gas station famous for Chicken on a Stick, an approximately foot-long chicken tender that’s threaded onto a skewer, hand-battered in a peppery coating, and fried so it’s juicy with a crisp exterior. I also like the tangy pimento cheese sandwich on fluffy white bread you can pluck out of the case. Likewise The Oxford Creamery for a cone with sweet corn blueberry crisp ice cream. But everything here always feels like a must, and every trip we take here lasts longer. Maybe some time, we won’t even leave at all.
The Trip to Oxford, Mississippi
🚘 4 hour and 30 minute drive from Atlanta, Georgia
🚘 5 hour and 30 minute drive from St. Louis, Missouri
🚘 7 hour and 30 minute drive from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
🚘 9 hour drive from Charlotte, North Carolina
🚘 9 hour drive from Chicago, Illinois
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.
You can download a free copy from our website by using the discount code BUTTERBEANS at checkout — it’s good all month. Ready to upgrade to paid? Paid subscribers receive each featured Field Guide, all newsletters, and 50% off any other Field Guide they’d like. Our Explorers get all that plus free guides and special surprises throughout the year!
You can also download our Field Guide to Oxford by clicking the link below. We recommend saving the Field Guide to Apple Books or Dropbox for the best experience. Google Drive works great, too.
Going Out West
I love a road trip and in my mind there is no better place for them than the West Coast. Megan Spurrell and Garrick Ramirez have put together a wanderlust-inspiring list of 10 West Coast road trips to take in your lifetime. By far my most traveled of these is Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. There’s something about the Pacific Coast Highway that feels like a different world. My advice: Take it slow, make frequent stops on the side of the road, and remember that the drive is the destination.
GREAT PLAINS
A Whistle-Stop Tour of America: Writing for The New York Times, Richard Rubin crosses the Great Plains on a train ride from Chicago to Seattle. Ever tried a Whirla-Whip? Me either.
MIDWEST
Historic Towns That Make for a Perfect Fall Getaway: Writing for St. Louis Magazine, Jen Roberts has some suggestions for picturesque Midwestern downtowns with great food options.
MISSISSIPPI
Jackson’s Mayflower Cafe Begins a New Chapter: Chef Hunter Evans of Elvie’s in Jackson, Mississippi is about to reopen the Mayflower Cafe, an 89-year-old seafood restaurant that has long been an icon of the city. Garden & Gun’s Steve Russell shares more about the rebirth of the first place I ever had Comeback Sauce. (Whip up a batch next time you’re grilling some shrimp or want to spice up a sandwich.)
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
Want more? Chat with us on Substack, download our Field Guides, check out our archives, or follow us on Instagram @americanweekender. We’ll be back next week.
Excellent round-up! I have so many fond memories of Oxford from a near decade run of visiting Oxford each fall for the annual SFA Symposium, and more recently in 2018 and 2019 for LAST CALL. Such a welcoming place and I’m lucky to have become friends with a good number of people there over the years.
I really adore these weekend getaway guides…even when a destination (like today’s!) hadn’t originally been on my travel shortlist, by the end of the newsletter, it *always* is.