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Paul:
What do donuts, burgers, and outdoor recreation have to do with each other? Not much, unless you think about adding one to the other to balance them out. But we thought a couple of past episodes of our sister brand's My City TV held up really well... and why not create an extra episode of our podcast to help show you even more to love about Jackson?

Hey, it's Paul Wolf, and you've found conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. Soul Sessions is the podcast that brings you a look at the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. Today we'll start by taking a look back at the days leading up to the opening of District Donuts + Sliders + Brew at the Belhaven Town Center. I was recently there for breakfast, and after enjoying the new menu - maybe a little too much - and meeting one of the founders, Aaron Vogel, in person, I thought it was worth a look back at how they got to Jackson. So here's Aaron telling me exactly what makes District Donuts + Sliders + Brew.

Aaron:
We are a restaurant - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM, seven days a week, and we hit on every day part with things that fit in your hand very easily. So we can be a knife and fork spot, but we like to be a sloppy, messy, get a crazy good donut, slider, waffle cheese fries, or bacon ranch cheese fries, or a double cheeseburger sandwich. So we do a lot of fun stuff that's all day long. We're doing small batch donuts. We're changing those flavors every single week. We make everything in-house, so from our breads to our dough, the sprinkle, pickles, the jalapenos, the sauces. I mean, everything we do, we're trying to do in a culinary forward way. But we have a ton of fun. We wrap a lot of bows around it, and we don't take ourselves too seriously while achieving those things.

Paul:
District has a really great draft system, beer, cocktails, and milk. And their coffee, well it's their own, roasted in New Orleans.

Aaron:
That's right. We call it Cool Kids Coffee Roasters. It's tied in with kid-centric nonprofits, who serve the cool kids of each community that we're a part of. But yeah, we're sourcing our own beans and then roasting our own beans. So we're super proud of the coffee that we put out, and it's going to be really, really neat to be able to bring it to Jackson as well for sure.

Paul:
District Donuts at the Belhaven Town Center has a really cool vibe. It's a really comfortable spot to stay for a while.

Aaron:
We're trying to make sure that we're authentic to the space that we're in. And one of our pieces from the beginning has always been about letting people into what we do, and so our first location, if you go to the Garden District from near eight years ago now, we wanted to have no walls, no office. Everything was visible. Our leaders work in the same space that burgers are being grilled, and guests are watching over at the bar and engaging in conversation with the barista, who's pouring latte art. We do take the art element very seriously when it comes to looking at not just culinary art, but also the aesthetic art.

Paul:
For a restaurant that started in New Orleans and is growing every year... Jackson makes number seven... I asked Aaron, why here? Why the City With Soul?

Aaron:
We've come to understand and we've learned through the years that we hope that New Orleans is a sweetheart city to Jackson. That we're a hop, skip, and a jump away, two and a half hours, and people come to spend the weekend here with us and we get to serve them. And a lot of friends who I've had who live in Jackson, they're very aware of their surrounding circles or they're aware of District. They've been once or twice. So we thought that Jackson was just a perfect fit for us, that would appreciate what we're doing already.

We love the South. We're big fans of anywhere we can drive a couple hours away. So yeah, I mean, it just made a lot of sense. Jackson's a food city, loves great food, and the more I've gotten to know people out there, the more... They talk about food in Jackson the way people talk about food in New Orleans. I mean, that really is true. It's a really big deal. And so we hope that we can meet that mark and run side by side with these people who really love great cuisine.

Paul:
That's Aaron Vogel, one of the owners and founders of District Donuts + Sliders + Brew at the Belhaven Town Center. Okay, you want my menu recommendations. In the morning, you've got to go with the Big Bird Biscuit. It's a buttermilk biscuit, fried chicken breast, applewood bacon, sausage gravy, and a sunny side egg. Need I say more? My wife loves the chorizo-bacon breakfast taco. You've got to give that a shot. And in the evenings, can't go wrong with a burger, but if you want something on the lighter side, they make a pretty good salad, too.

Let's stay in Belhaven for this next guest, a Belhaven resident, who talked to us about a pandemic project that is a real benefit to outdoor enthusiasts. Andy Hilton is an outside junkie who thrives on his forays into the woods and on the waters. He's explored so much, he created a public map so that you, too, can find the best spots to get outside in Jackson.

Andy:
Well, I've always had a fascination with maps, and for a long time I've been keeping a map of the wooded areas around the Pearl River. It's an ongoing personal project. And then ever since the market trail was completed, I've heard a lot of people on social media struggle to find out where it is, which I'm privileged to live at one end of it and work at the other, so to me, it is a part of daily life. But I thought there really should be a resource where people could find things like that. So I created a public map on Google Maps, which I've sheepishly put out to the world, and I'm glad it found its way to you. It's really two maps in one. One map is showing you what is, and another map to get you brainstorming about what could be.

Paul:
I asked Andy about inspirations for his map, and our Google Public Art map? Well, it might have been an inspiration for his work.

Andy:
It was, yeah. Yeah, it was. I didn't realize through my engineering schooling and working in MDOT... I've done some GIS, which is a little bit inaccessible to the public, but I didn't realize there was a tool like Google Maps that could make something accessible to the masses. And yeah, thanks for showing me that.

Paul:
Andy chronicles a little bit of everything on this map, on the beaten path and, well, off the beaten path too.

Andy:
I've tried to break it into useful, intuitive layers. One layer is like all the paved biking and walking trails, another layer for maybe more like dirt running trails, which includes a lot of things that are sort of unofficial, like the trail along the levy that might be one of Jackson's more popular running trails, but wouldn't be on a map anywhere. It also includes layers that show where public land is. Now, publicly-owned doesn't necessarily mean publicly accessible, but there's some really beautiful stuff to see on the hundreds of acres that the city owns, that the state owns, and it's all right here in town.

The map is a work in progress, so there's a lot to explore, and I might find new things, and I hope people will share their spots with me. As far as lesser known stuff, you got to be careful what you say, but I really love the city property that's in the Eastover area. Now, I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to go crossing across someone else's property to get there, but the river is an officially navigable waterway, so that means it's public. So if you paddle a canoe down the river, all those woods are yours to check out. So yeah, there's some beautiful cypress swamps in there off Westbrook Road. There's a beautiful piece of land that anyone that grew up in that part of town would know about. So yeah, those are some of my favorite areas.

Paul:
So I asked Andy, how about the River Basin Model at Buddy Butts Park?

Andy:
That's a great spot and it's totally inside a city park. The Mississippi Engineering Society has adopted that as a project. I think they hope to put in some trails and stuff out there. If you have any interest in engineering or even just maps in general, it's like a giant topographical map of the Mississippi River you can walk around in.

Paul:
Jackson is on the cusp of something, something that people who look to move here might be expecting.

Andy:
I think Jackson has tremendous opportunity to improve quality of life through access to green space. I think when you think of vibrant communities, you think of places that have this almost Venn diagram of arts and culture and food. And then typically they have some kind of... I would say a circle for green space. I can't think of a better term than outdoor recreation. But yeah, if you think about another town, I think that young people would pick a place to live based on having access to all that stuff.

And Jackson actually is fortunate that it has hundreds, if not thousands of acres of beautiful forests on the east side of it, but most of that is locked behind private property. Something as simple as parking spaces and signs and trash cans, and then you'd have a real resource.

Paul:
And so how about those changes? Who's going to do it? Who are they? Well, you're they. Andy says, "Be the change you want to see."

Andy:
Yeah, I think Jackson's strengths are also kind of its weakness. If you want to see something happen here, it's really up to regular people to make it happen, but it's also a privilege to be the people that make it happen.

Paul:
That's Andy Hilton, a Belhaven resident and the creator of the JXN Outdoor Recreation Map. You can find that on our website. The best thing to do is to search "Experience JXN Outside." There's a link at the top of that post.

Soul Sessions is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Rickey Thigpen. To learn more about us, you can go to our website. It's always up to date at visitjackson.com. I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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