Where to Go in 2026: Three Hours From Nashville, the South’s Next Great Food Capital Is Waiting

This month on Unpacked, we’re diving into Afar’s just-released Where to Go list—but this year’s picks are different. In 2026, we want to lessen the burden on overtouristed destinations and expand visitation to other parts of the world. Our editors carefully selected 24 emerging regions and overlooked locales that will inspire your next great adventure.

For Birmingham, that means discovering what Alabama’s second-largest city really offers—especially its quietly stellar food scene that’s been racking up James Beard nominations.

In this episode, host Aislyn Greene talks with Jenny Adams, a travel writer and Birmingham native now based in New Orleans. Jenny shares why this “big fish in a small pond” city deserves a second look—from its fourth-largest concentration of barbecue restaurants in America to Alabama white sauce, a downtown transformed by Railroad Park, and vintage shopping that rivals anywhere in the South. She also makes a case for an Alabama road trip, from Muscle Shoals to the Gulf Coast beaches.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks the world’s most interesting destinations and the deeper stories behind travel. This month, we’re diving into Afa’s annual Where to Go list, and this year’s list is a little different because in 2026, we want to lessen the burden on overtouristed destinations and help expand visitation to other parts of the world. And that’s why our editors carefully selected 24 emerging regions and overlooked cities that, I promise, will inspire you to start planning your next great adventure. We released the full list on December 4th, and on Unpacked over the next two months, we’re going to be exploring 15 of those destinations by talking with the writers who traveled to and shared our favorite new places.

Writers like Jenny Adams, who is my guest today. Jenny is here to talk about Birmingham, Alabama, a city she knows very well. She grew up in Birmingham and moved away, but still spends a lot of time there. So we’re going to benefit from that knowledge today and working in travel. I’ve heard rumblings about Birmingham’s food scene for years.

In our conversation, Jenny pretty much convinced me that I need to visit in 2026 for the food alone because Birmingham has classic food like old world bakeries and barbecue. I mean, wait till you hear about the pulled pork and Alabama white sauce. Wow. And it has a crop of new places, like a Mexican bar that was a finalist in the James Beard Awards, and a crop of new restaurants that are upping the fine dining game. But as Jenny shares, there are so many other reasons to go to Birmingham. There is great hiking because this northern Alabama city is quite hilly and there’s beautiful greenery. Plus, there’s some really cool vintage shopping to be had, historic hotels to spend a few nights in. Essentially so many reasons to set our sights on Alabama this year, although maybe not in the summer.

Jenny, welcome to Unpacked. It’s so nice to finally meet you.

Jenny Adams: Thank you. It’s great to meet you, too.

Aislyn: And we were just talking about this before we officially hit record. But you’re based in New Orleans.

Jenny: I am, 6 years now.

Aislyn: Wow. Do you love living there?

Jenny: I do. We moved here thinking we’d be here for 6 months to see if we liked it. And we bought a house about 12 months ago. So we are committed now.

Aislyn: It seems like, based on what I’ve read in your website, that you really have felt a kinship with New Orleans for a long time.

Jenny: Yeah, it’s been a place in my life for a minute now. I wrote 2 books on the city a long time ago, and I lived in Mississippi about 3 hours away at one point, went to grad school up at Ole Miss. So I was down here a lot. Always thought I’d move here. So after living in Manhattan for eleven years, it was time to go somewhere more affordable and we ended up here.

Aislyn: In armoire land. Well, so what took you to Birmingham? Because that’s actually the city that we’re here to talk about today. And do you know it well? Like, have you explored the South more that you’ve kind of lived in that region?

Jenny: Yeah. Well, I’m from Birmingham.

Aislyn: Oh, I didn’t realize that.

Jenny: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I grew up there. I was born in 1980 and I was there until 1998 when I went to college. And then I came back for two years in probably ‘06, ‘07, and bought a little house there and lived in a great neighborhood called Forest Park, and really reconnected with my city and then went up to New York for what was supposed to be six months and ended up staying in New York. So Birmingham, I’m back there. I don’t know, I’d say every three months I’m going back in November for a wedding. So we’re there all the time.

Aislyn: So how has it changed? What was it like to grow up there and what is it like now? What have you noticed?

Jenny: Birmingham in the 80s and 90s? I would say downtown was rougher. We had some really old areas that were old railroad tracks, and we of course have Sloss Furnace. We were a steel iron ore city. So our downtown has really cool terracotta facade buildings and like really beautiful historic buildings. But it also was a place of like massive industry with railways, old warehouses, the Sloss Furnaces, which were making iron ore, pig iron. And today they’ve built a huge linear park called Railroad Park. They got rid of all that blighted track land.

We’ve got a baseball stadium downtown now in the heart of downtown, we have two restored historic theaters. Actually 3. The Alabama has always been there, but we restored the carver and the lyric. So we have like a big theater district. It’s just really cool downtown now. It’s a great place to be. And then the suburbs have always been pretty good, especially for food, different parts of the city. You can get out of the downtown corridor and go up. We’re very mountainous, so it’s kind of fun. You drive up through these like crazy hills. I mean, it’s just such a good town. Now I go downtown and I don’t recognize sometimes where I am because so much has happened.

Aislyn: Do you feel like that’s been like a net positive for the city?

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. We had some bad government too in the ‘90s. And so I think now we’ve got a really great mayor. He’s been mayor for a minute. Woodfin and we love him. I feel like I say we like I still live there, but it’s just like my heart, you know? I love promoting my hometown.

Aislyn: I’m glad I made it to “Where to Go.” And it’s interesting because your story is very food focused. And that’s how I feel like I’ve been hearing these little murmurs about Birmingham for years, all tied to food. And you have this really great quote that I want to read because it’s so funny. It was from the co-director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Melissa Booth Hall. She said, I wouldn’t say the cat’s out of the bag, but there’s a paw.

Jenny: There’s a paw out of the bag.

Aislyn: How would you characterize the culinary moment and what’s happening now?

Jenny: It’s so crazy. Birmingham’s always had good food. I look back at my childhood and like there were such good places to go and eat. And of course, I probably didn’t appreciate it then because I was a kid and I didn’t have any frame of reference. But those places are still there.

You have places like Continental Bakery, which is in a little place called English Village near my parents house, and my mom used to let us walk to the Continental Bakery, and she would let us go at like 10 years old. I ate the same strawberry and cream cheese croissant that I go back every time I hit the city. I’m like, we got to go to Continental. I don’t care what time of day it is. And it’s old world European pastries we have the garages is where you go for a sandwich. And that’s an old 1920s collection of garages. The cars were smaller, so now it’s too small for them to be car garages. So now they serve sandwiches and they have a bar.

I did read that we have the fourth largest concentration of barbecue restaurants in one city in America, so it definitely smells like pork fat. If the wind’s blowing and it’s great. And then now, you know, the last 10 years, when I was even in New York, Birmingham was contending very heavily on the James Beard Awards. It was not one nomination, it was 5. And we have some globally respected chefs. Frank Stitt is one. He has been an incubator for all these other amazing people. And then I think people come to town, they eat, chefs come here and they think you can really be a big fish in a smaller pond in a place like Birmingham.

Aislyn: And shape the culture. There’s this opportunity to create something new, which is interesting. Well, so going back to barbecue for a second. How would you describe Birmingham Barbecue?

Jenny: Yeah, we feel very passionately in the South. I don’t know where you’re from, but, um.

Aislyn: Seattle.

Jenny: Okay. Well we fight a lot about barbecue? I would say Birmingham is known for pulled pork. We really like pulled pork, whereas you’d have, like, whole hog in Tennessee. We don’t generally do a whole hog. We have a few places, but we do a lot of smoked chicken and we have ribs.

So we are classified by two sources. You have sweet vinegary red sauce. It’s really thin in Alabama. And then you have Alabama white sauce, which is like a mayo based crazy sauce that was invented by a guy in Decatur, Alabama. And now you could probably find it in a barbecue place in Seattle, and we put that on everything.

Aislyn: What does it taste like?

Jenny: It’s like mayo with pepper and lemon and vinegar. It’s not like a ranch at all. It’s more like a tart.

Aislyn: Like an aioli. Kind of.

Jenny: Kind of, but thinner.

Aislyn: Would you do both sources together, or is that like. No.

Jenny: No, no, no, that would be very weird. No. We put the white sauce on like a chicken sandwich.

Aislyn: I see. Okay.

Jenny: But you could also dip your potato chips in it if you were feeling kind of frisky.

Aislyn: I would do that for sure.

Jenny: No one’s gonna judge you.

Aislyn: Do you have a barbecue place that you have to go to every time you’re in town?

Jenny: Yeah, I have a few. I really like Saws, and I really like Jim and Nick’s. Jim and Nick’s is old school. It’s been around forever. And they’ve got a couple of James Beard awards, I think, or nominations at least.

Aislyn: Well, in terms of the chefs who are coming in and some of the places that you’ve talked about in your story, where would you say the food scene might go from here? Like, do you think it’s changing?

Jenny: I think it’s changing. I’m seeing a lot of Gulf seafood, oysters, that sort of thing. We had a place that just opened Bayonet and it’s by chef Rob McDaniel, and he’s out of Frank Stitt’s kitchen. So he opened a place called Helen that was heavily like steak and sides. And next door now is Bayonet. And it just opened its oysters. We have automatic seafood is also seafood.

So trending lately. In the last 5 years I’ve seen a lot of raw bar seafood takes, which is interesting because we have the gulf in the bottom of Alabama, but we are very much northern Alabama, where the bottom of the mountain chain we’ve always been really good at, like meat and three and barbecue. If you want to go like no frills, low down, get your hands dirty type of paper towel restaurant. And then we’ve always had really good fine dining for the last forty years. And I’m seeing now we’re getting more of that middle to upper that you want to go on a date, but you don’t want to go to Le Bernadette.

Aislyn: Yeah. You don’t want to like, propose to somebody.

Jenny: No, no no, no, you’re not trying to break the bank. Still really nice though. Still silverware and white tablecloth, but not expensive.

Aislyn: Do you feel like it’s like a city where people dress up to go out?

Jenny: It’s hard to say that for me, coming from New York and New Orleans, two places where we go absolutely crazy. In terms of judging it by New Orleans, no, but I think people get dressed up for the nice occasions. Sure, I would say Birmingham.

To me, it’s much more conservative than you’d find in Nashville or New Orleans or even Atlanta. It’s a smaller city that hasn’t seen as much tourism yet. People grow up there and they stay there and they get married and have kids, and it’s such a beautiful place to live. There’s so many nice areas. It’s still affordable. You can still be a big fish in a small pond in your career, but I would not say that you’re ever going to see bachelorette parties. You’re never going to see like, I mean, I could tell you some places to go get wild, but I don’t think that it’s a place like New Orleans where we might wear a bow tie or a pocket square.

Aislyn: Yeah. So, like a little bit traditional, but still a little more casual. It sounds like.

Jenny: You’re not going to be drinking on a Sunday till after noon because there’s no more alcohol. People go to church. And people know each other. You know your neighbors.

Aislyn: Yeah. All right. So be on your best behavior.

Jenny: We’d like to say that anywhere.

Aislyn: Yeah. It’s true. What about, like, drinking culture?

Jenny: There are some good bars. Birmingham’s got some good bars. If you wanted fancy cocktails, I’d send you to Adios. It’s a really cool Mexican bar. They were on the semifinalist for the James Beards for 2025. There’s a lot of good cocktail bars now downtown, sort of in the Morris Avenue area, which is a cool cobblestone street. If you wanted to get down and dirty and have domestics and listen to like crazy live grunge bands, I would send you to The Knick, which is one of those bucket list experiences that you should do in your life. Just go to the neck. It’s like CBGB, but it still remains. We always laugh like you park your car in the parking lot of the neck and you go inside and you’re like, am I ever coming out again? Like, the ceiling is very low. It’s very grungy. The bands are super loud. There’s a great couple of pool tables in there. The garages that I mentioned before is beautiful back courtyard with all this blooming wisteria, and you sit out there and everything is for sale in the courtyard. So you can, like, buy the table that you’re sitting at, which is such a cool. Yeah. The guy was a real collector. He’s since passed on, but he was kind of a, I don’t want to say hoarder.

Aislyn: Birmingham collector. A collector.

Jenny: He was a collector. And everything has a price in there. You could go in and buy any of the wrought iron seating that you’re sitting on or the stone fountains. It’s just a mishmash, like Haversham type of place.

Aislyn: Would you say that like a first time traveler should base themselves out of downtown?

Jenny: If you want to be in the thick of it and you want to go out every night and you want to go to these places for dinner, I think downtown is great. We have a hotel called The Elyton down there that’s very historic. We also have a new one called The Painted Lady. That’s supposed to be really cool. I haven’t been yet, but you could also stay in the suburbs in spring and summer and fall. Birmingham is one of the most shockingly pretty cities. A lot of greenery, a lot of parks that sort of interconnect. The Highland Avenue area is stunning. It’s right on top of downtown. You could stay in Mountain Brook Village or Crestline Village. Those are very family oriented. There’s parks, there’s cute cafes, and the hiking is actually there’s some really close to downtown. It’s really mountainous too. People are shocked by it. I don’t think that they realize driving a stick shift there is intense.

Aislyn: I did not realize it’s hilly there. So does that mean that it stays cooler in the summer?

Jenny: No. The summers are hot as hell.

Aislyn: Yeah.

Jenny: You’re in Alabama. You’re gonna be hot. I was just chatting with my parents who were there, and they were saying, the mornings are getting quite nippy now, whereas in New Orleans we’re still swimming.

Aislyn: Nippy sounds so good. Yeah.

Jenny: And then the winters can be very wet and kind of gray. My dad is always complaining about November because all the leaves come off the trees. We have a lot of elm and oak and just big giant trees and the leaves come off and it can look kind of brooding and moody. You know, we have, like, train tracks downtown and the steel mill that’s now a museum. And it can be a more brooding landscape in the winter, but also quite fun. And it’s not going to snow on you.

Aislyn: Sounds like a great time to go there and, like, write the next great American novel or something like tuck in with a cup of coffee.

Jenny: Yeah.

Aislyn: So outside of food, you mentioned hiking. What other things do you feel like people should know about in terms of activities?

Jenny: I would tell people it’s a great shopping town. There is a ton of vintage. There is a ton of like artisan Alabama stuff, which I love. So if someone were with me for the weekend, I would start at Pepper place, which is this old warehouse collection. It’s like, you know, old brick warehouse buildings. And they were right along the train tracks, so they were able to load and unload right there. And now it is this great collection of permanent shops. And then on the weekends, a gigantic farmer’s market. And the farmer’s market is focused around Alabama growers and purveyors. We have like banjo players playing you can bring your dog. It’s really cool. And I think sometimes you go to a farmer’s market and it feels like you’re just in an outdoor Whole Foods. This is just more authentic, like you feel like you’re meeting the farmers and they’re like in their welly boots and their overalls, and they have okra and they have corn. And like, you’re chatting with people from like, very small towns in Alabama. In the season, they have these huge dinner plate dahlias that are like eleven inches across. Yeah. It’s incredible. Oh they’re massive. We grow them in central Alabama in the fall and you can go and buy them. They’re like the size of your head.

And then all year round we have a lot of artisan stuff there. So we have a place called Stone Hollow Farms which is a farmstead. And they sell little jars of pickles that they’ve made and little ginger syrups and lemongrass syrups. And they have a huge collection of cast iron cookware from different small purveyors of that design supply is next door to them. And that’s all southern artists. And like large scale art pieces, some furniture. We have a place called Devore. It’s a vintage shop, and they have everything from the Victorian era to the nineteen seventies. It’s really cool. There’s a lot of architectural salvage places in Birmingham, so you can go pick up old doors or old fences or mantels.

Aislyn: I love the variety and the spectrum. Like, it seems like anything that you might want to shop for if it’s not closed. Yeah, you can find it there.

Jenny: And it’s particularly just good for vintage. We have a great garden shop called Shop, and they have a little cute general store next door to their garden shop. And you can go in and you can get like a BLT while you look at like, tablecloths and old spoons.

Aislyn: It’s interesting to me that I think Birmingham has been on the radar for certain types of travelers for a long time, but it hasn’t really burst into this kind of national spotlight yet. Yeah, I don’t know, maybe, you know, this list will do that. So do you have mixed feelings about that? Like, what if it does become the next Nashville and you suddenly have the bachelorette parties?

Jenny: I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen for Birmingham. I mean, maybe I’m silly and saying that. Maybe it will. It’s never been a place that has had a lot of tourism. I think part of that is Birmingham. Has this reputation still left over from what happened in the 50s, 60s. We had a lot of civil rights issues in my city, and I think growing up we had very open, frank conversations about it. We studied it in school. We were talking about it. There was, you know, it was at the forefront. And in New Orleans, we always get mentioned with Katrina. You know, it’s always we got to talk about Katrina before. We’re talking about what’s going on now. And that’s been the way with Birmingham, I think, and it’s kept people away somewhat. I think people are a little bit like, ah, this town.

And I think now it’s something that we embrace there, and I hope that more people come down and that they go to the civil rights monuments. There we have the sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Reverend Shuttlesworth was there. We have a lot of great history and great places to really go experience that history, and I think it’s an essential part of any trip.

But I’m also excited because now the conversation is not just what happened in our past, but also like where we’ve been for the last 20 years, 30 years. So I think that’s great. And I think that’s why we’re seeing a bit more tourism. I think in the post-Covid landscape of travel, people aren’t necessarily looking to go to Chicago or New York or LA. They want to go get in a car and take a great American road trip. And Alabama is one of those states that is like the beaches are incredible. The northern part of the state is incredible. The center of the state is Black Belt farmland, and there’s these little old sort of dying out towns you can visit. We are the hub for our state. We are the largest city. And so if you were going to do some Alabama travel or if you wanted to combine several states in the South, we are 3 hours from Nashville. We’re 2 hours from Atlanta, where 6 from Charleston, 4 from New Orleans. 2.5, I think from Memphis. So you could do like Nashville, Birmingham, New Orleans.

Aislyn: I love that.

Jenny: And combine everything. Yeah.

Aislyn: Well, if you were to do like an Alabama road trip, do you have places that you would recommend going out from Birmingham?

Jenny: I mean, if you could start up in the north, start in either Huntsville or go to Muscle Shoals. So it depends on what you love. Muscle Shoals is where everybody recorded. Right. I mean, everybody did albums here. I think Zeppelin was there, Elvis was there. And still to this day, major recording going on there. And that’s where Billy Reid, the fashion designer, is out of Florence, Alabama. It’s right on the river, and that’s up near the state line in the north. You could start there.

You could then if you wanted to go to Huntsville, they have the Space and Rocket Center, which is super fun. So fun. You can go eat the freeze dried strawberries and get in the anti-gravity machine. And then you could come down to Birmingham and do Birmingham.

There is a really cool place, Greensboro, Alabama that is in the middle of the state, sort of near Auburn University. And it is one of the poorest counties in America, if not the poorest. It’s really fallen on hard times. But they have something there called the Rural Studios, which is where they asked architecture students at Auburn to design rehabs for old buildings, reuse for old buildings, and now it’s got like bakeries and a bike shop. I have not been there in many years, so whoever’s listening, don’t go there and then be like, the bike shops closed.

They designed all these cool houses out of cast off debris. So it’s a really cool part of the Auburn architectural program. And that town is very cool. They have a place called Mustangs Gas Station, really incredible barbecue at the gas station. And then I would tell you to go to the beaches, because I think we have the prettiest beaches in America. If you’ve been to the panhandle of Florida, it’s the same sand. Just cross over the state line. There’s actually a great bar on the Florida Alabama state line called the Flora-bama.

Aislyn: Oh, my God.

Jenny: It’s, uh, covered in bras and dollar bills, and it has a sand floor. And you go there and you drink the painkiller and you want to die the next day. It’s right on the ocean. Mobile and Fairhope, Alabama are cool cities down the coast. A lot of old antebellum architecture, a lot of places to eat and shop and things to see and do.

Aislyn: So you’re like an amazing representative for Alabama. Like you’re really selling me on doing a full, like, road trip. This is so cool. Yeah.

Jenny: We gotta go.

Aislyn: Yes, exactly.

Jenny: Yeah. Just get Afar to give us a convertible and we’ll go do the trip.

Aislyn: Oh, or like an older V-dub van?

Jenny: Yeah.

Aislyn: Yes. Make it happen. Yes. Well, Jenny, thank you so much. Is there anything else that you feel like travelers, on a practical note, should know about in terms of visiting? We talked about seasons. We talked about where to stay. But anything else that you think people should know.

Jenny: Go with an open mind, maybe? I think a lot of people have preconceptions about the Deep South, and it’s probably going to surprise you. We do not like that stereotype where everybody’s, you know, Did you marry your cousin? Type of thing. That is not the case.

You’ll find just like any major place on earth, you’ll find liberal people. You’ll find more conservative people. You’ll find people of all spectrums and shapes and sizes. Maybe if you feel like you’re in a minority and you’re like, is it great for me to go travel there? My answer would be yes. Yeah, it is great. People are going to take you in their houses and take care of you and be kind to you and get to know you, so go. It’s affordable. Have a good time. Spend money in my hometown.

Aislyn: Yes. I thank you so much. Well, I really appreciate it and I’m looking forward to my visit.

Jenny: Yeah, it was great to catch up. Thanks.

Aislyn: Thank you so much for joining this special “Where to Go episode.” In the show notes, we’ve included links to all the places Jenny recommended, as well as to her website and social handles. And if this is your first time listening to one of our “Where to Go” episodes in the show notes, you’ll also find links to our past and future episodes, which we will continue to roll out in the New Year. Happy travels!