Southern Food Guide: 30 Classic Dishes and Where to Eat Them

The classic Southern dishes every visitor should try are fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits with gravy, shrimp and grits, collard greens, cornbread, barbecue, gumbo, red beans and rice, fried green tomatoes, hushpuppies, banana pudding and pecan pie. The best places to eat them are New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, Nashville, Memphis and the small towns between, usually at a meat-and-three, a family-style dining room or a church supper. Order sweet tea. Leave room for pie.

Southern food is one of the great regional cuisines of the world, and one of the most misunderstood. It is more than deep frying and butter, though there is plenty of both. It is a cuisine built by Native Americans, who grew corn, beans and squash; by enslaved West Africans, who brought rice cultivation, okra, black-eyed peas, sesame and cooking techniques that shaped everything; and by European settlers. It is slow-cooked vegetables, seasonal produce, smoked meat, rice, seafood and, above all, hospitality. Travon is based in New Orleans. We eat this way every day, and we have opinions about all of it. Here are the 30 dishes we would put on a first-timer’s list, grouped by meal.

• 30Classic dishes in this guide
• Meat-and-threeThe best way to sample many at once
• Sweet teaThe default drink below the Mason-Dixon line
• SundayThe biggest meal of the week

Breakfast

Biscuits and gravy. Flaky, buttery buttermilk biscuits split open and smothered in a peppery white sausage gravy. Great biscuits are a point of pride in every Southern kitchen.

Grits. Ground dried corn, simmered until creamy, served with butter, salt, pepper or cheese. Stone-ground grits from small mills taste far better than instant. Don’t put sugar on them unless you want a lecture. Cheese grits, with sharp cheddar stirred in, are the gateway for skeptics who think they don’t like grits.

Country ham and red-eye gravy. Salty, aged ham, fried and served with a thin gravy made from the pan drippings and black coffee.

Chicken and waffles. Crispy fried chicken on a waffle with syrup and butter. Its exact origins are debated, but it became a beloved dish in Black communities in both the North and South.

Beignets. Square French doughnuts covered in powdered sugar, eaten with café au lait in New Orleans. See our 48 hours in New Orleans.

Main dishes

Fried chicken. Buttermilk-soaked chicken, dredged in seasoned flour and fried in a cast iron skillet until crisp. Every family has its own recipe. In Nashville, it comes coated in fiery cayenne paste as hot chicken. See our Nashville guide.

Shrimp and grits. Creamy grits topped with shrimp, often in a gravy with bacon or andouille sausage. Once a simple breakfast of fishermen in the Lowcountry, it’s now on menus everywhere. See our Charleston guide.

Gumbo. A dark roux, the “holy trinity” of onion, celery and bell pepper, and seafood or chicken and sausage, simmered for hours and served over rice. Its name likely comes from a West African word for okra. Some versions are thickened with okra, others with filé, ground sassafras leaves used by the Choctaw. Every cook in Louisiana has a favorite version, and every one of them will tell you the roux should be the color of chocolate.

Jambalaya. Rice cooked with meat and sausage in a spicy, tomato-tinged pot, a Louisiana cousin of Spanish paella and West African jollof rice.

Red beans and rice. Creamy red kidney beans cooked with ham hocks or sausage, traditionally eaten on Mondays in New Orleans, which was laundry day. The beans simmered all day while the washing was done.

Barbecue. Slow-smoked pork, beef or chicken, with sauces that change by region. Our barbecue styles guide explains them.

Chicken-fried steak. A tenderized beef cutlet, breaded and fried like chicken, with cream gravy. A Texas and Oklahoma favorite.

Catfish. Fried in cornmeal batter, a staple of the Mississippi Delta and much of the South, often served with hushpuppies and coleslaw.

Po’boy. A New Orleans sandwich on light, crusty French bread, filled with fried shrimp, oysters or roast beef with gravy. Order it “dressed” for lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayonnaise. Our New Orleans food guide has more.

Lowcountry boil. Also called Frogmore stew, a pot of shrimp, smoked sausage, corn on the cob and potatoes, dumped onto newspaper on a table outside.

Crawfish boil. A Louisiana spring tradition, with live crawfish boiled in spicy water with corn and potatoes, then piled on tables for everyone to peel and eat.

Vegetables and sides

The vegetable side, often called a “vegetable” even when it’s mac and cheese, is the heart of Southern cooking.

Collard greens. Leafy greens slow-cooked with smoked ham hock or turkey, served with their cooking liquid, called pot likker, which is delicious with cornbread.

Black-eyed peas. Eaten on New Year’s Day for luck, often as Hoppin’ John with rice.

Fried okra. Okra sliced, battered in cornmeal and fried until crisp. Okra came to the Americas from West Africa.

Fried green tomatoes. Firm unripe tomatoes, sliced, coated in cornmeal and fried, often topped with remoulade.

Macaroni and cheese. Baked, with a golden crust, and in the South, considered a vegetable.

Cornbread. Baked in cast iron. Southern cornbread traditionally has little or no sugar, unlike the sweeter northern version.

Hushpuppies. Fried balls of cornmeal batter, served with seafood and barbecue.

Sweet potato casserole, butter beans, squash casserole and deviled eggs are other favorites, especially at holidays and church suppers.

Pimento cheese. Cheddar, mayonnaise and pimentos mixed into a spread, sometimes called the pâté of the South.

Desserts

Pecan pie. A rich, sweet filling of pecans and butter, bound with syrup in a flaky crust.

Banana pudding. Layers of vanilla pudding, sliced bananas and vanilla wafers, topped with meringue or whipped cream.

Peach cobbler. Georgia peaches baked under a biscuit or pastry topping, best with vanilla ice cream.

Sweet potato pie. A spiced custard pie with deep roots in African American cooking, often preferred over pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

Red velvet cake. A red-tinted chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting.

Pralines. Creamy pecan candies, rich with butter and brown sugar, sold in New Orleans and Savannah candy shops.

What to drink

Sweet tea is the default. Ask for unsweetened if you want it; “tea” means sweet. Try a Coca-Cola in Atlanta, where it was invented in 1886, or a Cheerwine cherry soda in North Carolina. For adults, Kentucky and Tennessee are the home of bourbon and Tennessee whiskey, and New Orleans invented several classic cocktails, including the Sazerac.

The South is many kitchens

Calling it “Southern food” hides how different the region’s cooking really is.

Appalachia, in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas and West Virginia, has a cuisine of preserving and foraging: soup beans and cornbread, ramps in spring, apple stack cake, chow-chow relish and country ham.

The Lowcountry of coastal South Carolina and Georgia is rice and seafood country, shaped deeply by Gullah Geechee cooks, with dishes like red rice, okra soup, shrimp and grits and she-crab soup.

The Mississippi Delta is catfish, tamales, a surprising Delta tradition brought by Mexican laborers in the early 1900s, and comeback sauce, a spicy dipping sauce.

South Louisiana has Creole cooking in New Orleans and Cajun cooking in the rural parishes to the west, with gumbo, étouffée, boudin and boiled crawfish.

Florida mixes Southern cooking with Cuban, Caribbean and seafood traditions, from key lime pie to grouper sandwiches.

Texas, partly Southern and partly Western, adds barbecue brisket, chicken-fried steak and Tex-Mex to the table.

Each region rewards slowing down and asking what is local. Our famous foods by state guide maps them.

Sunday dinner and holiday tables

Southern food is at its best at family meals. Sunday dinner, served after church in the early afternoon, traditionally means fried chicken or a roast, several vegetables, biscuits or rolls and dessert. Holidays bring out the full spread: cornbread dressing instead of stuffing at Thanksgiving, sweet potato pie, ham, deviled eggs and congealed salads. New Year’s Day brings black-eyed peas for luck, collard greens for money and cornbread for gold. If a Southern friend invites you to a family meal, say yes and bring a pie.

Where to eat it: by city

See our Savannah guide for family-style dining, where you sit at shared tables and pass bowls of food around like at a big family dinner.

The meat-and-three

If you only try one Southern eating experience, make it a meat-and-three. It is a cafeteria or diner, often open only for lunch, where you choose one meat, like fried chicken, meatloaf or country-fried steak, and three vegetable sides from a long list that changes daily. Cornbread or a roll comes with it, and sweet tea is the drink. It’s cheap. It’s filling. It’s also the best way to sample a dozen classic dishes in one meal. Nashville is famous for them, but you will find them across the South.

How to eat Southern on a road trip

The best Southern meals are rarely in the fanciest places. Look for small-town diners with full parking lots at noon, barbecue joints with woodpiles out back, church fish fries on Friday nights and roadside stands selling boiled peanuts, peaches and pecans. Ask a local where they eat after church on Sunday. Order the daily special. And don’t skip breakfast: a Southern breakfast of eggs, grits, biscuits and country ham can carry you to dinner. Our best road trips list includes several routes through the South, like the Blue Ridge Parkway.

A note on history

Much of what the world calls Southern food was created by Black cooks, enslaved and free, who shaped the cuisine with African ingredients and hard-won skill, often without credit. Today, many chefs and food historians work to tell that story fully. Seek out Black-owned restaurants, soul food kitchens and Gullah Geechee cooking on the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. Eating there is part of eating the South honestly.

Common misconceptions

“Southern food is all fried.” Much of it is slow-cooked vegetables, beans, rice and seafood.

“Soul food and Southern food are the same.” They overlap, but soul food specifically describes the cooking of African American communities, which shaped Southern food and traveled north during the Great Migration.

“Cajun and Creole are the same.” Creole cooking developed in New Orleans with many influences; Cajun cooking comes from the French Acadians of rural southwest Louisiana. They share dishes but differ in style.

Southern food etiquette

A few customs make meals smoother. Say “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” to servers and elders; it’s ordinary politeness here, not formality. Expect warm, chatty service and some friendly questions about where you are from. Portions are big, so sharing is fine, and so is a to-go box. At family-style restaurants, you sit with strangers and pass bowls to the left. At barbecue joints, you often order at a counter and seat yourself. And when someone offers a second helping, the polite answer is usually yes.

Frequently asked questions

Your Southern food checklist

1. Eat at a meat-and-three for lunch.
2. Try biscuits and gravy for breakfast and pie for dessert.
3. Order one regional specialty in each city you visit.
4. Seek out a Black-owned soul food or Gullah Geechee restaurant.