Weidmann's: Mississippi's Oldest Restaurant

Meridian has been a railroad city, a rail junction, a timber hub, and a music town, but through all of it, one restaurant has been serving meals since eighteen seventy. Weidmann's is the oldest restaurant in Mississippi, and its story starts with a Swiss chef on an ocean liner.

Felix Weidmann was born in Zurich. He worked as a chef on transatlantic steamships before deciding to try his luck on land in the American South. He arrived in Meridian, then a young and rapidly growing town at the intersection of two rail lines, and in eighteen seventy he opened a restaurant-hotel he called the European House. Meridian was growing fast enough to feed a good kitchen, and Weidmann's grew with it.

The restaurant moved to its current downtown location in nineteen twenty-three under the Weidmann family, led then by Phillip Weidmann. The move planted it in the heart of Meridian's commercial district, and it stayed.

What Weidmann's became over the following century was the kind of institution that cities accumulate but rarely manufacture on purpose. The walls filled with photographs. The menu calcified around its most beloved items. The black bottom pie, a rich chocolate custard dessert with a gingersnap crust, became a signature that regulars ordered before they ordered anything else. Small crocks of peanut butter arrived at tables as a matter of course, a tradition that has been attributed variously to different owners across the decades.

The building was listed as a contributing property to the Meridian Urban Center Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine. The district was later merged into the larger Meridian Downtown Historic District.

Weidmann's has outlasted generations of change in Meridian, every economic cycle, and every dining trend. One hundred fifty-six years in, it is still serving the black bottom pie.