By Donna Cornelius
When Adam Evans opened Automatic Seafood and Oysters in Birmingham about five years ago, it made a high-water mark on the city’s culinary landscape. Now, he’s set to make another splash with his new restaurant, Current Charcoal Grill.
The James Beard Award winner for best chef South in 2022, Evans has partnered for this venture with fellow chef Luke Joseph and owner Raymond J. Harbert. Evans and Joseph, Automatic’s brunch chef, have put their heads and palates together to create an exciting Asian-American menu that includes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese flavors, ingredients, recipes and techniques.
“We wanted to go for a completely different concept,” Evans said. “You learn and grow by stepping outside your comfort zone. My wife and I love Asian cuisine, and we wanted to add it to the dining scene here. I love a nicely made bowl of ramen, a perfect bite of nigiri, scallion pancakes, grilled skewers. I crave those flavors.”
Fans of Evans’ work at Automatic Seafood have been eagerly waiting for the uber-talented chef to open another restaurant. The pieces fell into place when New Zealand native Joseph entered the picture.
“Luke and I first met when he came to Automatic and said, ‘I’d like to stage with you guys,’” Evans said. In restaurant lingo, a “stage” is an internship that lets cooks or chefs learn and gain experience in another chef’s kitchen.
“His experiences working in Melbourne and Sidney were similar to my experiences in New York. He really brought this concept to life.”
Joseph grew up on an island near Auckland, New Zealand.
“My family was focused on food in general,” he said. “I grew up grabbing mussels off rocks and being in my grandmother’s orchards. My family loves food.”
Although he cooked during his college days to make extra money, he didn’t start seriously pursuing a career in food until he was in his 20s.
“I got a degree in biomedical engineering and moved to Australia for an internship in engineering, but it just wasn’t fulfilling,” Joseph said. “The food scene in Australia blew me away. I quit engineering and ended up working in about 30 restaurants, mostly in Melbourne.”
He met his wife, who’s from Birmingham, when she was studying abroad.
“She wanted to come home to be near her family,” Joseph said. “I worked as a consultant for Woodlawn Cycle. I found out about Adam; we’re alike in many ways. We both are focused on seasonality and sustainability.
“New Zealand is naturally close to Southeast Asia, so a lot of ingredients are the same. I grew up eating ramen and sushi, and Vietnamese and Thai cooking are prevalent in Australia. I worked at some fusion restaurants.”
Pacific Meets Parkside
Another of the restaurant’s key team members is responsible for the stunning interior design: Suzanne Humphries Evans, Adam’s wife. An accomplished designer, she’d never taken on the task of creating a restaurant from scratch until the couple opened Automatic Seafood.
Coming up with just the right look and vibe for Current Charcoal Grill was a daunting challenge.
“I had this ‘oh my goodness’ moment because Asian wasn’t an aesthetic that I had much experience with,” she said. “But I felt very excited to try something new.”
The menu draws inspiration from Asian techniques and flavors rather than simply reproducing standard favorites, and her design is based on that same philosophy. To get started, she familiarized herself with the architecture of the Parkside District building chosen for Current: the front half of a high-ceilinged, cavernous former warehouse near the Red Mountain Theatre campus.
“When we developed the concept for this restaurant, I first thought about a good old New York City style due to its proximity to the theater,” Suzanne said. “But the more we thought about it, the more we wanted to make a restaurant that we’d want to go to – something that you couldn’t find anywhere else in Birmingham.”
She chose to take an approach that would evoke the Pacific Ocean, and she succeeded. Guests may feel they’ve wandered into an exotic South Seas hideaway.
“I wanted it to be a little darker, a little mysterious,” she said. “The point of the design is to support the menu. You want diners to feel the food before they taste it.”
To that end, Suzanne opted for lots of dramatic teal-colored tiles, which she calls “the star of the show.” A nice contrast to the rich blue of the tiles is the copper-topped bar, where diners can see the chefs at work.
She’s hoping the lazy Susans she placed on two round tables will make it easy for large groups to share what they order.
Notable Asian touches include Shou Sugi Ban, a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood by charring it, wood paneling; Shibori-dyed fabrics, which refers to a Japanese cloth-dying technique that dates back to the eighth century; and rice paper lanterns. On a 200-year-old Chinese altar table that serves as the hosts’ stand are two brass lamps of which she’s especially fond.
“They belonged to my grandmother,” she said. “My grandfather’s brother brought them back from Japan. It’s nice having something of my grandmother’s here.”
Unlike a residential designer whose focus is creating a space for an individual or family, coming up with a restaurant design means taking both the diners and the staff into consideration.
“It’s about so much more than making things attractive,” Suzanne said. “You don’t want the staff to have to take extra steps; you don’t want to have finishes that don’t wear well. You want to create an environment that makes working there easier.”
In her work at both of the Evans’ restaurants, she’s succeeded in beautifully combining form and function.
“I think we’re creating a whole experience for our diners – an adventure,” Suzanne said
Bringing the (Clean) Heat
Some of Current Charcoal Grill’s culinary standards will be familiar to Automatic Seafood regulars: sustainably harvested seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, locally sourced produce and superior proteins. Adam Evans is a proponent of spearfishing – he said this technique results in better quality – and even works with a Destin, Florida-based spearfisherman, Josh Livingston.
“We get our fish in whole and butcher it ourselves so it doesn’t compromise the meat,” Evans said.
The menu will change with the seasons, but at any time of year, diners will have a tempting array to choose from, including raw fish and rice preparations, grilled skewers, whole roasted duck, Cantonese-style crispy pork belly and dumplings. There are small and large plate options, which makes it easy for diners to try more than one dish and to share.
Joseph said Current’s tempura will be a “vessel to highlight the wonderful local produce here.”
“It’s a light batter made with vodka and soda water,” he said.
One of the restaurant’s most intriguing features is a grill that uses traditional Japanese Binchotan charcoal.
“Binchotan charcoal has a clean flavor and doesn’t smoke a lot,” Evans explained. “It’s a fuel that doesn’t overwhelm with smoke flavor; it’s more subtle. It’s an ancient practice that produces a clean fire.”
Desserts on the menu at Current’s recent soft opening for family and friends included toasted milk soft-serve ice cream with a huckleberry compote, pistachios and biscuit crumble as well as a rich dark chocolate delice with mandarinquat, which is a cross between a mandarin and a kumquat, and black sesame.
The restaurant’s beverage program doesn’t get short shrift. Shelves filled with bottles stretch all the way up to the tall ceiling. There’s a lot to choose from – high-quality Japanese spirits and sake, a curated wine selection and imported Asian beers on draft. Cocktails will complement the menu’s flavors and ingredients and, like the food, will vary with the seasons.
The meticulous cooking that helped earn a James Beard award for Evans is evident at Current. The emphasis is on delicious, not pretentious, and no ingredient on the plate is without purpose.
Evans said choosing a name for the new restaurant was “actually the hardest part” of the venture and resulted from suggestions and collaboration.
“The word ‘current’ calls to mind different bodies of water,” he said. “We thrive off the Gulf Stream current, and the Sea of Japan has the Kuroshio Current.”
Beyond the Beard Award
Evans, a native of Muscle Shoals and an Auburn University graduate, said that winning the James Beard award was an unforgettable experience and a “nice way to validate all the hard work.”
“When I first learned about the awards, I said, ‘I want to win one of those one day, or at least be nominated,’” he said. “It still seems like a dream. It was an accumulation – a tribute to all the chefs I’d worked with and for, and it gives you a platform. But it’s also something to live up to.”
He’s found an enthusiastic and appreciative audience for his skills in Birmingham. He credited Frank and Pardis Stitt, whose Highlands Bar and Grill won the James Beard award for best restaurant in 2018, for “paving the way for an exciting dining scene here.”
“What I’ve learned with Automatic is that if you provide good service and good value, Birmingham diners are overwhelmingly loyal – and very savvy,” Evans said.
If you go: Current Charcoal Grill is at 1625 Second Ave. S, Suite A, in downtown Birmingham. It’s open daily for dinner and will add lunch hours soon. The restaurant can accommodate up to 120 people at dual bars, a 70-foot-long banquette and expansive booths. There’s a lounge for pre- or post-dinner cocktails. For reservations and more information, visit currentcharcoalgrill.com or follow the restaurant on social media @currentcharcoalgrill.
