Tyler Alford will be coming home.
The Millsaps College product and veteran culinary entrepreneur will be entering the Jackson restaurant market this fall with his plans to open Eudora’s Mississippi Brasserie in the former Fine & Dandy building at The District at Eastover
According to a press release, the restaurant and bar will specialize in craft cocktails with fresh ingredients and an active happy hour. For cuisine, they’ll serve a variety of dishes with an emphasis on many Southern favorites with an elegant twist.
“We have been out west exploring Montana, but we felt Jackson is a great place to continue to raise our family,” said Alford, a North Carolina native, whose wife, Sarah, is from the Jackson area. “First and foremost, this gets us closer to family and to be able to seem all of them.”
But from a professional standpoint, Alford couldn’t turn down the opportunity in the former Fine & Dandy building. He believed so much in it that he signed a 10-year lease with Duckworth Realty.
“That restaurant property is phenomenal,” said, Alford, who actually ate at Fine & Dandy before it closed last year. “The District is a really well-structured development. Everything starts with a hope and a dream, but once we got into conversations with Duckworth Realty, we realized this really could happen. This is a great space, a great opportunity and everything began to fall in line.”
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Alford, who is a serial entrepreneur, having been a part of opening 22 restaurants in his career, said that he had been looking at properties in Jackson since 2019 but had not come upon the perfect location, until the property at The District. In a perfect world, Alford says he has a specific date and time he wants to open Eudora’s, but to be safe, fell back to fall as a general starting point.
“This was a chance for me to kind of change my career and Jackson is one of those places we had earmarked,” Alford said. “We know the people there. We have family close by. It is a great place for us to land to do our own concept. But with the way the restaurant was built our and the minor changes and touches that we are going to make to that space, it was just the perfect deal for us.”
Alford most recently was president of the hospitality group overseeing the award-winning Copper Whiskey Bar & Grill and Brigade Restaurant in Montana and has previously served as vice president of operations and beverage director, opening 12 locations for Tupelo Honey, which is based in Asheville, North Carolina, with more than 24 locations across 17 states. Prior to that, he was the bar manager at Commander’s Palace Restaurant, a New Orleans staple.
Alford attended Millsaps from 2003 to 2005, where he also played football for two seasons.
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He said there will be a selected cocktail each month that a dollar per purchase will go to a non-profit that the employees select.
“We want this to be a very inclusive environment where folks have a great work, life balance and equitable pay so they can support their families,” he said. “We want this to be Jackson’s restaurant. We want this to be a place that everyone can be proud of and feel a connection to.”
The menu will follow a seasonal pattern, and many of the ingredients will be sourced from local farmers, when available.
Some of the top items on the French-inspired menu will be a pecan-crusted trout, steak frites and duck confit as well as bistro favorites. All of that with a Southern twist like what he believes will be one of the favorites, the Agoo’s Buttermilk Biscuits, which came from his grandmother’s recipe, who was from Greenwood.
“Greenwood-influenced French cuisine,” he joked.
There will also be more mainstream fare, like burgers, truffle fries, freshly shucked oysters.
The cocktail menu will feature specialty beverages along with timeless classics like Manhattans, Palomas and Mint Juleps.
“We are thrilled that Eudora’s has chosen The District at Eastover as its home,” said Breck Hines and Ted Duckworth of Concord Companies in a press release. “Since the project’s beginnings, we have strived to provide an elevated experience, starting with intentional design details that come together to create a special place for all of Metro-Jackson. Tyler’s experience is vast, and his passion is infectious; these are the qualities on which great restaurants are built upon, and we look forward to being part of Tyler’s vision for something special with Eudora’s.”
