Anniston, AL: Comfort amid the harm

Your mid-week dose of Southern food news

Anniston, Alabama is a spooky city.

That’s partly by the design of local tourism officials. They’ve maneuvered downtown’s only upscale hotel onto lists of lodgings stalked by ghosts, and promoted the rumor that Anniston’s most popular restaurant is haunted.

Yet the city just east of Birmingham also has an unsettling veneer of violence that’s at odds with …