Jackson’s Greatest Tables
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Best for First Date in Jackson
Best for Business Dinner in Jackson
The Top 5 Jackson Restaurants
Walker's Drive-In
Walker's Drive-In occupies a converted 1940s diner on North State Street in Fondren, the historic neighbourhood three miles north of downtown Jackson that has become the city's chef-driven dining district. The original drive-in service window remains as a piece of facade history — a deliberate nod by chef-owner Derek Emerson — but the interior has been completely rebuilt around an open kitchen, a small bar at the front, and a warmly lit main dining room of perhaps forty-five covers. Walker's has been a Jackson institution since Emerson took it over in 2002, and a James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Best Chef: South in multiple cycles since. Food writers from Garden & Gun to Southern Living have named it the defining table of the Mississippi capital.
Saltine Restaurant
Saltine sits in a converted brick warehouse behind Duling Hall, the historic 1920s school in Fondren that now operates as Jackson's leading independent music venue. The dining room runs to about sixty covers across two principal spaces: a long marble-topped oyster bar with raw-bar service for the front room, and a slightly more formal main dining room with banquette seating, low pendant lighting, and an exposed-brick south wall. A second-floor private dining space handles parties of fourteen to twenty. Saltine opened in 2014 from the team behind Babalu Tacos and a small Mississippi restaurant portfolio, and has been Jackson's go-to first-date and quiet-celebration table since.
BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar
BRAVO! Italian Restaurant & Bar sits on the upper level of Highland Village, the open-air upscale retail centre on I-55 in north Jackson that has anchored the city's affluent Belhaven Heights and Eastover dining clientele since the early 1980s. The dining room runs across a long rectangular space with high ceilings, exposed-wood beams, white tablecloths, low-lit pendant fixtures, and a marble-topped bar that runs the south wall. An open kitchen at the back faces the room, with a wood-fired pizza oven and a pasta station visible from the main dining floor. BRAVO! has been in continuous operation under the same ownership for more than two decades — a long Jackson run by any measure — and the kitchen has held the upscale-Italian standard for the Mississippi capital with rare consistency.
Char Restaurant
Char Restaurant occupies the ground-floor corner of Highland Village in north Jackson, a level below BRAVO! Italian and around the corner from the city's most concentrated cluster of upscale retail. The dining room runs to about ninety covers across a generously spaced main floor, a glass-fronted private dining room for parties of eight to fourteen, and a long marble-topped bar that anchors the room's social half. Dark walnut floors, white-linen-topped tables, low-lit pendant fixtures, and brass accent work give the space the New Orleans steakhouse register that the original Char concept — a Mississippi capital relative of the Brennan's-influenced Gulf Coast steakhouse tradition — drew from when it opened in the early 2000s. Char has been a Jackson business-dinner staple for the better part of two decades.
The Iron Horse Grill
The Iron Horse Grill occupies a restored 1907 brick warehouse on West Pearl Street at the edge of downtown Jackson's historic Farish Street District. The building — originally a meatpacking warehouse — runs across three principal levels: a ground-floor dining room with exposed-brick walls, heart-pine floors, original cast-iron columns, and a long marble bar; a mezzanine balcony with banquette seating that opens to the main room below; and a second-floor live-music venue that hosts the Mississippi Music Experience museum by day and Jackson's most considered touring-music programme by night. The restaurant reopened in its current form in 2013 after a multi-year restoration, and has become downtown Jackson's defining celebration room — a piece of Mississippi architectural history put to working dining use.