 Be Ours
Valentine’s Day Lunch at Bottega Café
By Jan Walsh
Bottega Café takes no reservations. So, we show up early to get in line for Valentine’s Day. We are third in line at 10:45. In minutes the line is from the door, through the gates, and onto the sidewalk. The sun shines warmly on this cold day. So the wait just builds anticipation and appetite. Recently I noticed that after several years of a different seating arrangement, our old table was back in the window above the driveway. And today I have my heart set on it for Valentine’s. Promptly at 11:00 the doors open and we are welcomed inside. Surprisingly the first couple in line choose to sit at the bar. The two ladies in front of us are taken to the opposite side of the restaurant. I point and ask for our table. And it is ours! So many years since we have sat right here in this corner. Déjà vu, this happened to us a couple of months ago at Chez Fonfon! Just like that, our tables are reappearing. Both restaurants along with Bottega Dining Room, next door in this building, are the Culinary masterpieces of Chef Frank and Pardis Stitt.
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 Chef Features
Chef Andrew’s features at Bellini’s deserve a menu of their own.
By Jan Walsh
Before you order dinner at Bellini’s, look over tonight’s food and drink features. In addition to the featured, seasonal hand-crafted cocktails, Bellini’s cocktail list is segmented by spirit. For example, if you are a bourbon drinker it is easy to find your pleasure, and mine. I also do not often see a restaurant print out their features on a separate menu, in addition to the server describing them at the table. But with a long list it is helpful to see the features and their descriptions. Nice touch.
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 5th Anniversary
A Sol Y Luna Celebration
By Jan Walsh
The first year of a business is the hardest, says everyone who ever opened a restaurant. Sol Y Luna replies, “Hold my tequila!” The restaurant opened in Mountain Brook one month before Covid. Yet Owners, Jorge and Amiee Castro pivoted to serve the community’s needs, providing everything from margarita mixes to toilet paper via curb pick up. A couple of months later, for my birthday, we took advantage of this and had a private party on our screened in porch with our favorite Sol Y Luna dishes, margaritas, and churros with a birthday candle. You can guess what I wished for… And it has come true.
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 Belated Birthday
Kev’s birthday was snowed in. Now time for birthday night out.
By Jan Walsh
It snowed us in for Kev’s birthday week. So, rather than his wish of reservations at Ocean Restaurant, he got his new wish for homemade chicken and dumplings and a blueberry cheesecake.
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 Wide Net
A variety of fresh catches for lunch and dinner at Bistro V.
By Jan Walsh
Bistro V is one of my favorite restaurants. Locally owned by Chef Jeremy Downey and partner and pastry chef, Emily Tuttle Shell, Bistro V is open for lunch and dinner. Originally from the “Seafood Capitol of Alabama,” Bayou La Batre (with family still there who can make fresh seafood runs) Chef Jeremy keeps several seafood options on the menu, including a daily special.
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 Downtown Destination
Bistro 218 is a diamond in the Birmingham dining scene.
By Jan Walsh
Downtown Birmingham has been a special place to me since I was a child. Like the old song, “… where all the lights are bright.” As a girl I loved to ride the escalators and try on ladies’ hats at Loveman’s. At Burger Phillips, my friends and I bought prom and pageant gowns. Blachs was THE place for shoes, displayed in their storefront window displays that wrapped around the building. It was the Saks of its day. Before I was old enough to drive, I fulfilled my fetish for shoes, buying shopping bags full on my mother’s Blachs card. At the payment window where I presented the card, the shoe salesman nodded, smiling, and vouching, that he had known me since I was born, to a stern, number crunching lady, who grudgingly allowed me to sign the receipt. Downtown also brought Town into my County life with rock concerts, off Broadway plays musicals, the Iron Bowl, and more. Yet among my most fond downtown memories are restaurants long since gone, including my beloved Joy Young and La Paree.
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Table for Two Déjà vu
 Like Old Times at Chez Fonfon
By Jan Walsh
Our table is back! For many years Kev and I sat in the bar’s window corner of Frank and Pardis Stitt’s Chez Fonfon.. It was “our table.” And to secure it, we arrived early, standing outside the door until it opened. This was back in the day when Fonfon did not take reservations. A few years ago, the café replaced bar window tables with overflow bar seating. Now the bar tables are back. And with reservations accepted we can now request as we reserve our table. Today we are seated at it for the first time in years… So many memories at this frosted window live in my heart, folding onto each other like layers of soft meringue.
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 Forever Home
Galley and Garden celebrates 10th anniversary in its Highland Avenue home.
By Jan Walsh
Tonight, Galley and Garden is hosting a VIP Cocktail Party to celebrate the restaurant’s 10th Anniversary. And we are welcomed at the door by the ever present, General Manager, Virgil Morris. Galley and Garden is now ten years old. But its building dates to 1898.
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 Rolling In Doughs
Falling for Birmingham Breadworks’ autumn specials and new offerings
By Jan Walsh
Today we pop into Birmingham Breadworks to get a taste of fall and take-home pastries, farm loaf, plus hamburger buns, and hotdog buns for football home-gating. I cannot find a buns for burgers and hotdogs in grocery stores without seed oils, even the organic ones. So, we buy them out of the buns and freeze some. Birmingham Breadworks ingredients are simple, natural, and recognizable. Most of their breads are made with three ingredients: flour, water, and salt. Baked goods that have more components may include natural sugar, butter, seasonal fruit, eggs, and cheese.
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 Woof, Woof
Who took the dogs out?
By Jan Walsh
Vino and Galley Bar’s annual Pooches on the Patio event benefits the Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS). This is an opportunity for us, “dog people” to dine out with our pups, donate to the GBHS, or even adopt a dog.
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