Southern Food and Beverage Museum

Come to this long awaited museum along Central City's Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and find a cavernous new 16,000-square-foot space with an ambitious mission. The museum is home to a spiffy exhibition kitchen, a second location of Toups'Meatery restaurant and bar, a fab book and gift shop for foodies, and a series of central exhibits called Gallery of the Southern States of Taste. Here you can see a somewhat higgledy-piggledy series of displays dedicated to the food culture of 15 Southern states and the District of Columbia. The museum's home is part of the conversation. Formerly an old Dryades Street Market that dates to 1849, the building's terrazzo floors still bear the dividing marks of the original vendors' stalls. The Rouse's Culinary Innovation Center by Jenn-air/Whirlpool, a demonstration kitchen in the rear of the building, sits where the fish market used to be.