Five years after starting Automatic Seafood and Oysters, James Beard Award-winning Alabama chef Adam Evans is opening his second Birmingham restaurant.

Evans has partnered with New Zealand-born chef Luke Joseph and Birmingham businessman Raymond J. Harbert to open Current Charcoal Grill in Birmingham’s booming Parkside District.

The Asian-inspired concept will feature spear-caught fish, Wagyu beef, whole roasted duck, Cantonese-style crispy pork belly, tempura farm vegetables and other dishes influenced by the ingredients, flavors and techniques of Asian cuisine.

The restaurant, which is in its finishing stages, should open sometime in April, Evans tells AL.com.

Located at 1625 Second Ave. South, adjacent to the Red Mountain Theatre Arts Campus, Current Charcoal Grill will serve dinner seven days a week and open for lunch Mondays through Fridays. Weekend brunch service will likely come later.

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‘Stepping out of my comfort zone’

For Evans — a Muscle Shoals native who worked in such revered restaurants as La Petite Grocery in New Orleans, Craft in New York City and The Optimist in Atlanta before opening Automatic Seafood and Oysters in Birmingham’s Lakeview District in 2019 — the new restaurant presents an opportunity to expand his culinary horizons and prepare food he has always loved but never really cooked before.

“I’ve always said you should do the things that make you feel uncomfortable because that means you’re learning something and you’re able to grow,” Evans says.

“Never having worked for an Asian chef or in an Asian country — even in New York and Atlanta I never worked at an Asian concept — I’m kind of stepping out of my comfort zone,” he adds.

But it is right in the wheelhouse of Joseph, who has worked with Evans as the brunch chef at Automatic for the past couple of years.

“He is a super-talented chef who is more than ready for his own restaurant,” Evans says of his chef-partner in the new restaurant. “And this is an opportunity to show what he can do, and there’s no doubt he will.”

The two chefs are kindred spirits “from different parts of the world,” Evans adds.

Having grown up in New Zealand, cooked in Australia and traveled throughout Japan and Southeast Asia before moving to Birmingham about three years ago, Joseph brings a lifetime of knowledge about Asian cuisine to the Current Charcoal Grill table.

“Southeast Asian food in New Zealand is very prevalent,” Joseph says. “So I grew up eating Japanese food and Southeast Asian food. Then I spent about two months in Japan and about six months in Southeast Asia.

“I don’t have any technical training in Japanese cooking, but I’ve been around it enough to know quite a bit about it.”

The “Current” in the restaurant’s name references the nearly 2,000-mile Kuroshio Current, a major ocean current in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, and “Charcoal Grill” alludes to a centuries-old Japanese grilling tradition using slow-burning Binchotan charcoal.

“We’ve got a big charcoal grill that’s the centerpiece of the cooking,” Evans says. “It gives a really clean, smoky flavor as opposed to a wood-fired grill.”

‘Like the waters of the Pacific’

Suzanne Humphries Evans, Adam’s wife, designed the space, transforming the roughly 100-year-old building that had been everything from an automobile repair shop to a screen-printing business into a stunning, new, 6,000-square-foot restaurant. She was also the project designer for Automatic Seafood and Oysters.

“While this restaurant is maybe a little bit a bit more refined than Automatic, we want it to be just as approachable,” she says. “Just like at Automatic, Adam and I worked together to make sure that this space reflected the concept and vice versa.”

Suzanne Evans took advantage of the building’s 22-foot, cathedral-like ceilings and its exposed, two-layer brick walls and added reclaimed wood floors along with deep-blue ceramic tile along and above the twin bars that front and flank the open kitchen.

“When you walk in the front door, you’ll see that there are two mirror- image bars with shelving that goes all the way up to these giant ceilings,” she says.

“The ceilings are just the coolest part to us, and we wanted to really highlight those and make everything along that back wall tall, as well.”

The deep colors in tile reflect the inspiration behind the restaurant.

“The tile is pretty much the only splash of color, and it’s this deep teal, dark blue that felt like the waters of the Pacific,” Suzanne Evans says. “They’re deeper, they’re colder — not as turquoise or bright blue like the Gulf.”

Other Asian touches include Shou Sugi Ban wood paneling, shibori-dyed fabrics in the curtains and chairs, rice-paper light shades above the bar, and a 200-year-old Chinese altar table that she plans to repurpose as a host stand.

Including the dual bars, a 70-foot-long banquette and roomy booths throughout the dining area, the restaurant will seat 120 guests inside, plus another 25 to 30 on the patio.

“We felt like, with it being next to the theater and downtown, that it would be fun to have lots of bar seats,” Suzanne Evans says. “We hope that people will drop in by themselves or with one or two others and feel very comfortable not having a reservation for a table.”

Likewise, the corner to the left of the entrance will be a lounge area for guests to enjoy a cocktail while they wait on their table, or just hang out.

“We really hope that people will come use this space, kind of like you would a hotel lobby in New York,” she says. “There’s this culture of bringing your laptop and getting a coffee and working or having a meeting. I haven’t really found a great place to do that in Birmingham, so I’m hoping to create an environment to do that here.”

‘Might we try something else?’

Harbert, a fan of Evans from his days at The Optimist, says he got to know the chef through the Auburn University Hospitality Gala, where Evans has been a guest chef. They are both AU graduates, and Harbert has served two terms on the school’s Board of Trustees.

“I love working with Adam,” Harbert says. “I think he is a very, very talented chef.”

It was Harbert who helped recruit Evans to Birmingham from Atlanta and who put together the capital for him to open Automatic Seafood and Oysters. He did the same for Rob McDaniel, another Auburn alumnus, at his downtown Birmingham restaurant Helen, which McDaniel and his wife, Emily, opened in 2020.

“I feel like a great part of the renaissance of Birmingham and downtown Birmingham was driven by the excellent culinary environment that really started with Frank Stitt,” Harbert says. “It has really been transformative for Birmingham, and I wanted to continue to do that.

“I am certainly not in the restaurant business,” he adds. “I’m in the investment management business. This is purely and simply to try and continue to bolster what we’re doing in Birmingham from a culinary basis.”

Harbert was also instrumental in helping Birmingham’s Red Mountain Theatre find a home for its $25-milion arts campus, which occupies much of the block between 16th and 17th Streets and Second and Third Avenues South in the Parkside District.

But the big building on the northeast corner of the block sat empty, and around the time Red Mountain Theatre moved into its swanky, new home in 2021, Harbert and Keith Cromwell, the theater’s executive director, started brainstorming ideas and thought a restaurant would be a good fit.

“I ended up inviting Adam and Suzanne to come and walk through it and see whether they had any interest,” Harbert recalls. “Now that Automatic was doing so well, might we try something else?”

Suzanne had just given birth to the couple’s first child, their son Hank, a few weeks earlier, so the timing wasn’t ideal.

“If it had been anyone but Raymond asking us to do this with him, we would have politely declined because of the timing,” she says. “There was no way we were going to turn down the opportunity to work with him again and (the chance) to do something else cool for the city of Birmingham in a new area.

“He made Automatic possible for us,” she continues. “So it was a no-brainer. This was the least we could do in return to him.”

‘A place I’ll never leave’

So, here they are, about two and a half years later, and much has happened in the lives of Adam and Suzanne Evans since they toured that empty, old building with Raymond Harbert.

“We ran into some pretty major construction delays because there was a lot that had to happen for the site,” Suzanne Evans says. “This project has moved slowly for a number of reasons.”

An adjoining building was torn town to make room for the courtyard patio, windows were cut into the previously windowless building, sidewalks were added, HVAC had to be installed.

Meanwhile, in June 2022, less than a year after Hank was born, Adam won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South in his first year as a nominee.

Then, this past November, Suzanne had their second child, daughter Ella.

And now, in another month or so, she and Adam will open their second restaurant.

There is a certain symmetry to all that, Suzanne says.

“It’s amazing that the gestation period for a restaurant is longer than that for a human, right?” she says, laughing. “It gives it a little perspective.

“It’s not the easiest thing to produce, but we enjoy it and we’re proud to have a chance to do it.”

To take that new baby analogy one step further, Adam Evans says they haven’t forgotten their first restaurant child.

“I’m not ever going to leave (Automatic),” he says. “I’ll still be there a couple of nights a week, even when we open this.

“Once you have a second child, you don’t just abandon the first one or let somebody else watch ‘em,” he adds. “That’s a place I’ll never leave, but this will require some attention and time, especially in the beginning.”

Current Charcoal Grill will open in Spring 2024 at 1625 Second Ave. South, Suite A, in Birmingham, Ala. For more information, go to currentcharcoalgrill.com