Wooden City

Morris Avenue is a preserved nineteenth-century warehouse street in downtown Birmingham — cobblestones, cast-iron canopies, no through traffic — and Wooden City occupies one of its ground floors. It is part of a small group that also operates in Chattanooga and in Tacoma, serving wood-fired pizza and shared small plates in a room that fills every night of the week.

The reason it is in this guide is the group's approach to alcohol-free drinks, which is documented in detail at its Chattanooga sibling: five separate zero-proof builds printed on the menu, including a Fizz of berries, coconut cream, cinnamon, nutmeg and soda — the deepest restaurant list of its kind in that city. Five is a section rather than a gesture, and a group that has done that work once tends to carry the recipes and the training across.

This entry is graded three and carries no signature drinks, which is the honest position. What has been verified for the Birmingham room specifically is that it is trading normally and belongs to the group; the individual drinks on its own menu could not be read for this guide, and this directory does not transplant one location's drink list onto another's page. Treat the Chattanooga list as an indication of what to ask for rather than as a promise.

The format helps regardless of the drinks. Shared plates set the pace of an evening by the food rather than by the round, which is a substantially easier social setting for someone not drinking than a bar counter where the rhythm is set by everyone else's glass.

Dinner runs 5pm to 10pm seven days a week — including Sunday and Monday, when several of the better bars in this guide are closed, which makes it a useful fallback as well as a destination.