Two of Esquire’s best new restaurants in America have South Mississippi ties
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- Esquire named Siren Social Club among 33 best new U.S. restaurants in 2025.
- Owners Austin and Tresse Sumrall connect Siren to White Pillars and Gulfport dining.
- Esquire cited atmosphere and experience alongside food as criteria for selection.
Only 33 places made it onto the list of Esquire’s top new restaurants in the country for 2025, and two of them have ties to Gulfport and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
“Follow the pink lights: The old building used to be a mortuary, but it’s got plenty of life in it now,” is Esquire’s description of Siren Social Club. Owned by Austin and Tresse Sumrall, who also own White Pillars restaurant in Biloxi, the restaurant at 1409 24th Ave. in Gulfport sits right in downtown near the Mississippi Aquarium and has a boutique hotel attached.
The restaurant that opened in October 2024 recently was one of three Coast restaurants to make it onto the recommended list in the new Michelin Guide American South. White Pillars shares that honor along with Vestige in Ocean Springs. Siren Social Club also was named to Southern Living’s top 20 best restaurants in the South this year.
“It definitely feels great,” Sumrall said, and he attributes the awards to “A lot of hard work and a lot of people that work together to get us to where we are.“
The Esquire honor is about more than food — it came down to the whole experience that Siren Social Club and the other restaurants deliver.
“This year at Esquire we’ve seen dozens of new restaurants like this, places where spectacular food is coupled with a damn good time — where ambition and abandon meet,” the announcement said. “These are the places you hate to leave, but when you do, you leave full. Full of some of the most deeply personal food you can remember eating, full of joy and ideas and hope. You stumble out, way past your bedtime, practically dancing in the street.”
Gulfport family affair
Siren Social Club was the only restaurant in Mississippi to make it onto the Esquire list, just as Emeril’s in New Orleans is the sole representative of Louisiana.
While Emeril’s isn’t new, it now is under the operation of Chef E.J. Lagasse, who took over for his father, famed chef Emeril Lagasse, and made it his own.
It was at the awards ceremony for the Michelin Guide that the Sumralls met up with the Lagasses. Now both are on the way to New York City to collect their new award that Sumrall said is especially nice to receive at this time of the year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
E.J. Lagasse is 22 and scored the only two diamond rating in the new Michelin Guide for the South.
He was about 4 years old when his father, at the height of his career as a television chef in 2007, opened Emeril’s Gulf Coast Fish House at Island View Casino in Gulfport. The city is the hometown of Emeril’s wife and E.J.’s mother, Alden. Even at that young age, E.J. knew what he had to tell his father at that very moment was more important than his dad’s interview with the Sun Herald.
Now his father is watching his son with pride.
“Off to the side, you might see Lagasse père, Emeril, without a station of his own, gazing affectionately at his son,” Esquire said. “It is rare for anybody to abdicate power, and rarer still for a chef to locate a familial path to succession. But the ambitious young Lagasse, who was mentored by Eric Ripert of New York’s Le Bernardin, has swept through Dad’s restaurant like a brisk wind.“
The Gulfport connection is there between the two families.
“We got to visit with them a little bit when we were at South Carolina for the Michelin ceremony,” Sumrall said. They now will get to see each other in New York, he said.
Just as E.J. was exposed to the restaurant industry at a young age, the Sumralls are taking their son, Ollie, 10, with them to New York. “He’s been right there in the kitchen. We opened White Pillars when he was 2,” his father said.
Young Ollie is big on pizza and his father said, “We’re going to go around, and we’re going to try to find the best pizza in New York.“
The siren song
When they decided to turn an old art deco building into Siren Social Club, the Sumralls each had a role in creating this new experience.
A graduate of Culinary Institute of America and a James Beard semi-finalist for “Best Chef South,” Chef Austin created the food and drink menus. He designed the raw bar and the menu that includes things like authentic beef Wellington and homemade pasta not found at many other places. And he keeps creating new recipes, something he said is the most fun of owning a restaurant.
Esquire mentioned his shrimp cocktail with buttered crackers, thousand-layer potatoes and crispy chicken with spicy honey as “luxe party food,” to be enjoyed with a mojito, margarita or a piña colada.
“So this one being so much smaller than White Pillars, we had the opportunity to go all in on the decor,” Sumrall said of the Siren. Not trying to sound young, he said, they created the vibes they like.
“I have to give my wife a lot of credit,” he said. “She was really the driving force behind the design of the actual restaurant, which I think came out so beautifully, and I think that that has a lot to do with why it’s being so well received.” It’s darker, moodier, sultry and uncommon — a recipe that’s winning awards.
This story was originally published December 2, 2025 at 4:03 PM.
