Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q

Since 1984, Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q has been smoking meat the old way on the edge of Birmingham, in a brick pit built specifically for the job. The restaurant is run by Myra Grissom Harper and her family, and it has stayed close to its roots even as it has picked up national attention over the decades, including recognition from The Food Network and a visit from food writer and television host Andrew Zimmern, who featured the restaurant as an example of real, unpretentious Southern barbecue.

What separates Miss Myra’s from many barbecue joints is its custom-built brick pit, a fixture that gives the hickory smoke a slow, even character. Pork and chicken both come off that pit, chopped and pulled for sandwiches, and the restaurant’s white sauce, made from mayonnaise, vinegar, salt, and pepper in the North Alabama tradition, gets ladled over meat that has already spent hours absorbing hickory smoke. It is a style of barbecue distinct from the tomato-based sauces more common outside Alabama, and it is one of the clearest regional signatures a visitor can find on a Birmingham-area menu.

Alongside the pulled pork and chicken sandwiches, the kitchen turns out fresh sides made daily and a rotating list of homemade desserts that the restaurant considers just as important as the barbecue itself. The dessert case is treated as a genuine part of the meal rather than an afterthought, with hand-crafted options that change based on what the kitchen has made that day. The combination of smoked meat, tangy white sauce, and made-from-scratch sides and sweets has kept the restaurant’s regulars coming back across four decades.

The restaurant sits on Cahaba Heights Road in the eastern part of the Birmingham area, a low-key commercial stretch that has quietly built a loyal following rather than relying on a flashy location. It is the kind of spot locals point newcomers toward when they want a barbecue answer that has not changed to chase trends, run by the same family that opened it in the 1980s.

Visitors should note that Miss Myra’s is open Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and closed on Sunday. The restaurant offers curbside pickup for anyone in a hurry, and delivery is available for larger orders with a fifty dollar minimum, a ten dollar delivery fee, and a day’s notice requested, a detail worth planning around if you are ordering for an office lunch or a family gathering. Catering for larger groups is also available directly through the restaurant.

Because the restaurant does not publish detailed pricing online, first-time visitors are best served by calling ahead or simply stopping in to see the day’s offerings, a habit that fits a restaurant built more on word of mouth than on marketing. The pit itself, built specifically for this restaurant rather than adapted from off-the-shelf equipment, remains the centerpiece of the operation and the reason regulars describe the smoke flavor here as distinct from other barbecue spots around Birmingham.

The restaurant’s approach has stayed essentially unchanged since it opened, relying on the same hickory pit and the same family recipes rather than chasing barbecue trends that have come and gone over the past forty years. That consistency is part of why national outlets keep circling back to it: it represents an older, steadier style of Alabama barbecue built around a single pit and a single sauce recipe rather than a menu of experimental rubs and sauces. For visitors trying to understand the North Alabama white sauce tradition in a single stop, Miss Myra’s remains one of the clearest and most reliable places in the Birmingham area to do it.

For anyone tracking down Alabama’s white sauce barbecue tradition without leaving Birmingham, Miss Myra’s remains one of the most consistent, family-run places to find it, still built around the same hickory pit and the same handwritten-feeling menu it has served for more than forty years.