Frank Stitt opened the Highlands Bar and Grill on a gritty street corner in Birmingham, Ala., in 1982, when most of the city’s elite still took its meals in country clubs and restaurant dining meant flambéed everything at the Hyatt downtown. His was a Southern cuisine married to French technique, which meant it was plain and simple as much as it was the exact opposite. Stitt, who was 28, intended the Highlands to evoke a classic worth-a-detour restaurant in a small European town, although transplanted to a fading American steel city.

Such restaurants are now common in the United States. You can find similar, farm-to-starched-tablecloth experiences in Portland, Maine, in Louisville, in Houston. Back then there was Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, Calif., which Stitt cites as an inspiration, and precious few others. In New York, the Odeon was starting its run as a Parisian brasserie devoted to style and substance, but the city’s big restaurant story that year was the refurbishment of an old-school chophouse, Keens.

The Highlands was a hit from the start, though Stitt had to work double shifts for a decade to make the success stick, occasionally tangling with customers shocked that no salad came with the entree, or that you couldn’t get a baked potato with your steak. Here instead was local country ham elevated to the status of jambon de Paris and Cullman County sweet potatoes treated as if they were chickens from Bresse — the simple French food of Richard Olney, one of Stitt’s mentors, translated into a drawl. The restaurant, expensive but not outrageously so, offered a kind of cosmopolitan élan for a city long associated with segregation and violence, the ugliness of industry and class.

More than three decades later, the Highlands is still crowded every night from 5 p.m. onward with ruddy-faced local salesmen in golf shirts and blue blazers, businesswomen in blowouts and Prada, lawyers in suits, gentlemen farmers and city councilmen, even the mayor, William A. Bell. White and black alike socialize at the Highlands, and have since the start, Stitt said. The restaurant is a kind of social bazaar, the town square, a club where the dues are paid nightly.