Start from 29 curated places around Oxford, MS, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
City Grocery
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.
Ajax Diner
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.
Trails & outdoors
Bailey's Woods Trail
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.
South Campus Rail Trail
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.
Things to do
The Lyric Oxford
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.
Ford Center for the Performing Arts
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.
Landmarks & sights
Rowan Oak
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.
Lafayette County Courthouse
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.