NYT Names Fairhope's Little Bird Among America's Best

The New York Times' America's Best Restaurants 2026 list puts Fairhope's Little Bird alongside picks in NYC, Miami and Safety Harbor.

The New York Times unveiled its America's Best Restaurants 2026 list on Tuesday, September 15, naming 50 favorite places to eat across the country. According to SoulGrown, Fairhope, Alabama's Little Bird made the cut, a milestone the outlet says says as much about the town's food scene as the restaurant itself. The list is unranked, and restaurants featured in previous years were excluded, Time Out reports.

According to SoulGrown, the Times sent 16 reporters and editors to 538 restaurants before narrowing the field, and critics paid their own way. Patch reports the scouting team ate everywhere from small-town Wisconsin to downtown Manhattan, making reservations, waiting in lines and arriving unannounced while accepting no freebies. For a year-and-a-half-old restaurant in Fairhope to land beside major destinations in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, SoulGrown notes, puts the town's dining scene in a different category entirely.

SoulGrown reports that Times critic Ryan Sutton praised Little Bird's confident, technique-driven coastal Southern food, singling out chef Bill Briand's West Indies crab salad with preserved lemon and his boudin-stuffed quail with candied jalapeños, plus buttermilk pie in the courtyard with a bacon fat old fashioned. In Florida, Patch says the Times highlighted Miami's Tin Tin for Cuban French dishes like snapper in aerated potato purée, and Creative Loafing Tampa quotes writer Brett Anderson praising Safety Harbor's Tides Market for turning exceptionally fresh ingredients into food you know you want.

According to SoulGrown, chef Bill Briand, a five-time James Beard semifinalist, has described nostalgia as his favorite word, and the restaurant reflects it: dining rooms are named for chapters in the life of his late mother, Virginia Eileen Briand, a Naval nurse whose middle name shares roots with the Gaelic word for 'little bird.' SoulGrown also lists standouts including family-style cornbread from his mother's own recipe, a seafood tower, and lemon buttermilk pie, quoting Briand: 'You can tell if food has a soul or not. You can't fake that.'

SoulGrown reports that Little Bird has already picked up nods from The Local Palate's Alabama Dining Guide and Wine Spectator's 2026 awards, but a Times list placement elevates Fairhope alongside the country's biggest food cities. Creative Loafing Tampa notes The Tides was the only Tampa Bay restaurant included and had already appeared on Michelin Guide's recommended list in 2025 and 2026. Time Out frames the four NYC picks — Bistrot Ha, Meju, Yamada and Zoli — as four very different reasons to make a reservation, giving smaller markets rare national visibility on equal footing.

All outlets describe an unranked list of 50 favorites 'right now,' so there is no winner to crown and no prize beyond the recognition itself. For travelers, the practical takeaway the publishers converge on is that reservations at these rooms will get harder to score: Time Out urges readers to start checking the apps, while Creative Loafing Tampa notes the Tides hybrid market-and-restaurant grew from owners Jon and Mary Kate Walker's 2021 opening into what the Times called some of the highest-quality cooking in Central Florida. Expect each room's next booking window to be the test.