A Tour of Alabama’s Unique Culinary Delights
These Restaurants Are Dishing Out Alabama’s Most Distinctive Food

Founded in 1938, Wintzell’s is a Mobile institution, famous for its super-fresh Gulf seafood. While Wintzell’s is known for their “oysters—fried, stewed, or nude”, their menu offers a range of seafood, southern specialties, and more. Begin your meal with some fried green tomatoes, help yourself to a platter of oysters—which you can order ten different ways—and dig into a pile of Alabama blue crab claws, another specialty of this long-standing seafood haven. Don’t miss the West Indies Salad, a mobile-born recipe that’s a sort of lump crab ceviche. Wintzell’s has expanded across the state in recent years, but this location still holds a special place in Alabama food culture. It began as a six-seat bar, and still carries that same charm.

While barbecue in Alabama can mean many different things, the state is perhaps most famous for its white BBQ sauce. And you can trace the history of that sauce directly to “Big” Bob Gibson, an Alabama pitmaster who founded his eponymous restaurant in 1925 and developed the original recipe for the vinegary mixture turned white from the addition of mayonnaise. The restaurant is still open today—with a trophy case full of rewards—and you can try that famous sauce on a smoked chicken sandwich or plate. You’ll also find barbecue nachos, smoked wings, succulent ribs, and a slew of “Mama’s Sides” to round out your plate.

This Birmingham restaurant has become a local favorite and won a handful of awards since opening in 2019. Chef Adam Evans won a 2022 James Beard Award for Best Chef in the South, a testament to the elegant, reliable menu he has put together at Automatic Seafood. The restaurant sources the majority of their seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, but doesn’t limit their menu: on top of locally-sourced dishes like gulf shrimp fried rice and gulf shrimp and grits, you’ll find locavore salads, grilled octopus, and duck fat-poached swordfish. And no meal here is complete without an order of pillowy, tender yeasted rolls.

All Steak Restaurant got its name from a budgetary issue: its original owner wanted a sign outside that said ALL STEAK HAMBURGERS, but couldn’t afford that last word, and the name stuck. As you might imagine, the restaurant serves steaks of all sorts, as well as local seafood and classic steakhouse appetizers, they’re most famous for their orange rolls. These rolls are yeasted and layered, filled with a sweet orange filling. A meal at All Steak isn’t complete without them.

At The Bright Star, Alabama’s oldest restaurant and a James Beard-designated “American Classic, tradition is valued just as highly as quality. Likely the most famous dish on their menu is the plate of deep-fried snapper throats, beloved for their incredibly tender meat. The dish originated with Greek-American chef Gus Sarris in the 1930s, when he put his Greek snapper on the menu. Never one to waste a good cut of meat, Sarris began frying the leftover necks for his staff, and soon they appeared on the menu. The restaurant goes through over 1,000 pounds of snapper in a week, for those necks, the Greek-style snapper, and snapper stuffed with crabmeat and shrimp, along with The Bright Star’s beloved seafood gumbo.

This restaurant in downtown Mobile was inspired by the relationships that chefs Chris Rainosek and Robert Yarbrough established with local farmers and other suppliers through their first restaurant, The Wash House. At The Noble South, they bring locally-sourced flair and a modern eye to comforting classics: their deviled eggs are topped with caviar and bits of bacon, their rabbit and dumplings offers a heartier version of the iconic chicken dish, and they serve local blue crab over perfectly tender Carolina Gold rice. Don’t miss their extensive cocktail menu, where their bartenders find ways to infuse seasonal herbs and local peppers into fresh, creative drinks.

None of us wants to live under a rock, but have you ever considered eating under one? That’s just what you’ll get at the Rattlesnake Saloon, a restaurant built into a naturally occurring cliff overhang. It’s part of Tuscumbia’s Seven Spring Lodge, where visitors can stay the night, and enjoy horseback riding and hiking trails as well as meals in one of the state’s most scenic restaurants. The cowboy-themed menu—divided into sections like “Saddlin’ Up” and “Chow Time”—is just the sort of southern comfort food you want after a long walk in the woods.

Ezell’s, a historic restaurant in southwestern Alabama, began as a two-room cabin that had once served as a trading post during the Civil War. Situated on the Tombigbee River, it has also served as a residence (of the eponymous Ezell family) and a hunting club that regularly hosted fish fries. The restaurant itself opened in the 1950s, and has since expanded to seat over 300 people. Here you’ll find freshly caught catfish, the restaurant’s specialty, as well as fried pickles, crab claws, gulf shrimp, and po’boys.

At Birmingham’s Bottega, Italy and the American South have joined in a harmonious marriage. Local seafood appears across the menu, speaking in an Italian accent: tilefish in a fritto misto, gulf shrimp tossed with chanterelles and spaghetti, and crabmeat appears hidden in ricotta ravioli. The restaurant’s café is open all day, which means you can spend a lazy afternoon here eating wood-fired pizza or spooning away at a slice of coconut-pecan cake.

Alabama’s oldest ice cream shop opened in 1918, when Texas dairy farmer Paul Trowbridge moved to Florence, Alabama. Trowbridge was smitten with the small community—now a small city—so he moved his family there, and opened up an ice cream shop. Today, the shop is best known for its orange-pineapple ice cream, a unique flavor that has won the hearts of locals. Trowbridge has retained its old-school charm (and very reasonable prices), with old soda signs covering the walls and a classic soda fountain still installed.