Oxford, MS

The Square's anchor restaurant since 1992, in a building with exposed brick walls, heart-pine floors, and candlelit white tablecloths that somehow feel both formal and deeply relaxed at the same time. The menu rotates with the seasons around Southern ingredients — shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes with remoulade, gulf fish — and has earned Michelin recognition in the first South guide. The upstairs bar is a beloved Oxford institution in its own right, good for a drink before or after dinner.

A no-frills lunch counter and diner on the Square that has been voted Oxford's best plate lunch since it opened, and Mississippi Magazine readers have named it the best plate lunch in the state multiple times. The menu is unreconstructed Mississippi comfort food — chicken and dumplings, meatloaf, sweet potato casserole, turnip greens, fried catfish — served in a room that feels like the town's informal city hall. Southern Living called it one of the South's most legendary restaurants.

The City Grocery Restaurant Group's more casual Square sibling, occupying a former drugstore with a long bar, exposed brick, and a menu that bridges Creole and Southern comfort cooking — jambalaya, crawfish egg rolls, shrimp and grits, and a Pickle Martini that has become part of Oxford bar mythology. The upstairs balcony is the largest on the Square and fills up on warm evenings. A good middle option between Ajax's diner prices and City Grocery's white-tablecloth register.

A James Beard-nominated wood-fired Italian spot a half-block south of the Square, with thin-crust pizzas and handmade pasta coming out of a live-fire oven in a room that is warm and deliberately unhurried. The focus on seasonal ingredients and Southern-inflected versions of Roman and Neapolitan dishes sets it apart from what Italian food means in most Mississippi towns. This is a place for a full evening rather than a quick bite.

The North Lamar brasserie that calls itself 'Bubba Brasserie' — a genuine marriage of French bistro technique with North Mississippi ingredients, best understood through the raw oyster bar, the house charcuterie, and dishes like steak frites that taste right in both idioms. Part of the City Grocery restaurant group; the room is low-lit and relaxed, without the Square crowds. Also Michelin-recognized in the inaugural South guide.

A North Lamar breakfast spot from the City Grocery restaurant group that does exactly what the name implies — big, serious Southern breakfast, with house-cured bacon cured in Tabasco and brown sugar, biscuits made from scratch, shrimp and grits, and a full egg menu. The wait on weekends is real and unashamed; locals bring patience and newspapers. The biscuits and the bacon are the specific things everyone mentions.

A well-established Oxford bakery on Van Buren Avenue with a cult following for sourdough loaves, focaccia, and morning pastries, plus sandwiches and soups that anchor the lunch crowd. The vibe is a neighborhood bakery rather than a polished coffee shop, and thirty-plus years of local loyalty show in the regulars who treat it as a second kitchen. Good for provisions before a long drive or a slow breakfast before the Square opens up.

A Southern-American dinner restaurant on Van Buren Avenue that balances dressed-up cooking with a room warm enough to feel like a celebration without requiring one. The menu runs from pan-seared scallops and Chilean sea bass to steaks, and the staff has a reputation for attentiveness that holds up even on busy nights. For Oxford, it fills a niche somewhere between Boure and City Grocery — elevated but not stiff.

Oxford's most reliable Thai option, on North Lamar, serving traditional Thai and Vietnamese plates — curries, pad thai, basil rice, pho-adjacent noodle bowls — with a flexible spice level and genuinely fresh ingredients prepared to order. In a town where the dominant culinary idiom is Southern, this is the place locals reach for when they need a reset. Small room, fast service, unpretentious.

A legendary catfish house twelve kilometers south of Oxford in the crossroads village of Taylor, operating out of a clapboard building that looks exactly like a place where the best fried catfish in Mississippi would be served — because it is. The whole catfish, the hush puppies, and the slaw are the standard order, and no reservations are taken, so the porch waiting scene is as much a part of the experience as the food. Michelin-recognized in the inaugural South guide.

A South Lamar institution that operates as a full-service restaurant by day and one of Oxford's best live music venues by night, with shows running most nights of the week across genres. The food — wood-fired pizzas, sandwiches, jambalaya — is serious enough to draw people who are not coming for the music, and the room's funky decor and unpretentious energy make it feel like the informal backstage of Oxford social life.

A casual taco and burrito shop on Van Buren Avenue a block from the Square, with generous portions and a menu of fish tacos, custom burritos, bowls, and nachos that draws a loyal lunch crowd of students and downtown workers. It is not a destination restaurant but it is the kind of place every neighborhood needs — fast, honest, and reliably satisfying in a town where Mexican options are thin.

Oxford's most serious local coffee roastery, with a cafe on North Lamar roasting its own beans and producing espresso drinks, pour-overs, and affogatos alongside fresh-baked pastries and cinnamon rolls. The atmosphere is community-minded and the staff are regulars unto themselves — the kind of place that feels like it was here before you arrived and will be here long after. A good choice for a slow morning before heading to the Square.

A sports bar and seafood spot on South Lamar that has found a genuine niche since opening — the kind of place with craft daiquiris, fresh Gulf gumbo, and enough screens for game day without feeling like a chain sports bar. The Gulf seafood orientation means the shrimp, the crab, and the gumbo are taken seriously. A good fallback for a casual dinner or a long afternoon watching a game with locals.

A short national recreation trail of just under two kilometers through the old-growth hardwood forest connecting the University of Mississippi Museum to Rowan Oak, threading between oaks, hickories, and sweetgums over exposed roots and wooden steps. The woods feel genuinely removed from town despite sitting inside it, and the trail is the best way to arrive at Rowan Oak on foot — which is the way Faulkner himself would have walked it. Easy enough for all fitness levels; bring mosquito repellent in summer.

Oxford's longest trail, nearly ten kilometers of mostly flat gravel rail-bed running south through shaded pine and hardwood forest from the edge of the Ole Miss campus — with more than twenty kilometers of singletrack mountain bike paths branching off through the same woods. The wide main corridor is a community resource used by runners, cyclists, dog walkers, and families, with deer, turkeys, and Ole Miss students all sharing the trees. The trailhead is near the south end of Chucky Mullins Drive.

A short wooded loop in a residential neighborhood park on the north side of Oxford, winding through a stand of mature hardwoods and cedar trees that provides surprising quiet for a neighborhood setting. The terrain is gentle with minimal elevation change, making it appropriate for families, dog walkers, and anyone who needs twenty minutes of trees. A local Eagle Scout project cleared and improved the trail — it is now well-maintained and pleasantly signed.

Oxford's premier live music venue in a building that originally opened as a silent-movie theater in 1913, extensively renovated into a bi-level club that holds up to a thousand standing or five hundred seated. The acoustics hold up to its reputation — reviewers consistently call them among the best in the region — and the booking ranges from national touring acts to local Mississippi talent. It sits on Van Buren Avenue, half a block from the Square.

The University of Mississippi's 1,200-seat performing arts hall on University Avenue, hosting a full season of nationally touring Broadway shows, classical music, dance, and comedy that would be difficult to see anywhere else in north Mississippi. The room is comfortable and the acoustics praised consistently across decades of use. Ticket prices are reasonable by regional standards, and the pre-show lobby fills with a cross-section of Oxford that the Square bars rarely produce.

A 1928 brick power station converted into Oxford's community arts space by the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, with eight rotating exhibitions a year that feature Mississippi artists and Southern-themed work, plus a 140-seat performance room for theater, spoken word, and chamber music. Admission to the gallery is free. The building's industrial bones — tall ceilings, exposed brick, big windows — give even modest shows room to breathe. A good rainy-afternoon destination that most first-time visitors overlook.

A craft cocktail bar with a couple dozen seats tucked inside The Lyric's ground floor on Van Buren Avenue, with a rotating menu of serious cocktails by a James Beard-nominated bartender and a wine list selected with equal care. The intimacy is the point — it does not feel like a bar inside a music venue so much as a small room where people who care about drinks happen to be gathered. Five nights a week, and the kind of spot that fills on a Tuesday.

An independent record store above the Square in the historic Duvall's building, with an extensive stock of new and used vinyl spanning blues, soul, gospel, country, jazz, and rock — and the institutional knowledge to match. USA Today listed it among the ten great record stores in the country, and its ranking as the friendliest small business in Mississippi is backed up by the staff who treat a first-time browser the same as a longtime regular. The blues section alone makes the climb up the stairs worthwhile.

A live radio variety show recorded before an audience at Square Books on fall and spring Thursday evenings, featuring a rotating lineup of regional authors reading from new work alongside Mississippi and Southern musicians performing between readings. It airs on Mississippi Public Radio and has run for decades, making it one of the longest-standing live literary radio programs in the South. Attendance is free and standing-room-only crowds are the norm for popular guests.

William Faulkner's home from 1930 until his death, a cedar-allee Greek Revival house set on four wooded acres at the edge of Bailey's Woods, owned and preserved by the University of Mississippi. The unaltered interior still holds his typewriter, personal library, and the outline of a novel penciled directly onto the plaster wall of his study. Walking the grounds — live oaks, magnolias, pine needles underfoot — it is easy to understand where the dense atmosphere of his fiction came from.

The 1872 red-brick courthouse at the center of Oxford's town Square anchors one of the most walkable and celebrated small-town squares in the American South. The surrounding block of restaurants, bookstores, bars, and independent shops wraps around a tree-shaded lawn, and the whole scene functions as the living room of Oxford social life. It is where locals and visitors collapse into the same orbit, especially on Friday evenings when the Square fills up.

An independent bookstore across three buildings on the historic Square, with a reputation that stretches well beyond Mississippi — Publisher's Weekly named it the best bookstore in the country, and it consistently ranks among the finest literary independents in the South. The main store's second-floor cafe and balcony overlooking the Square is among the best perches in town. The selection leans heavily Southern fiction, but the remainder tables and staff picks reward any browser.

Oxford's only museum dedicated to African American history, housed in a former African Methodist Episcopal church that dates to the post-Reconstruction era, just east of the Square. Professionally designed exhibits trace the arc from slavery through the Civil Rights movement in Lafayette County, grounding the national story in local detail that most visitors will not have encountered. The building itself — brick belfry, tall windows, quiet interior — adds weight to everything displayed inside.

The largest academic museum collection in Mississippi, on the Ole Miss campus at the edge of downtown, holding Southern folk paintings by Theora Hamblett, Greek and Roman antiquities, nineteenth-century scientific instruments, and works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Man Ray — an eclectic range that rewards visitors who show up without any particular agenda. Admission is free for most exhibits, and the scale is intimate enough to cover in a comfortable two hours. The Hamblett folk-art rooms alone justify the detour.

A ten-acre cathedral of live oaks and magnolias at the center of the Ole Miss campus, famous as the setting for what many football fans consider the finest tailgate tradition in college sports and worth visiting on any fall Saturday to witness the scale of it. On non-game days the Grove is a genuinely beautiful shaded lawn where students read, families picnic, and the tree canopy makes the Mississippi heat manageable. The Lyceum, Ole Miss's oldest building, frames the north end.