Documenting, studying, and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
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Interviews by Amy Evans Streeter.
This project was produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian's traveling exhibit "Key Ingredients"
and is sponsored by the
Mississippi Humanities Council, The Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and The Lafayette County City of
Oxford Public Library.
Restaurants of Oxford's Past
Oxford, MS
Football and Faulkner, kudzu and coeds. Oxford, Mississippi, has as many claims to fame as it does traditions, but it’s the restaurants in this small southern town that are the glue of the local community. Places for catfish, cocktails, and conversation, restaurants here are a little bit unlike anything outsiders might be used to. And they always have been. From the midnight munchies at the Hoka Theater’s Moonlite Café, one of Willie Morris’s old haunts, to the tangy shrimp sauce at The Mansion, where Faulkner went for barbecued chicken and peach cobbler, a unique culinary—and cultural—history is still being told. The doors of these places may have closed long ago, but the memories are still very much alive.
