A Delightful Stopover in Mobile
Experiencing the Charms and Hedonistic Pleasures of Coastal Alabama
Mobile, Alabama was a surprise highlight of our recent road trip from North Carolina to New Orleans. We pulled into the port city mid-morning and after driving around several residential neighborhoods populated with stately Victorians, Creole cottages and towering live oaks, we strolled through downtown’s Lower Dauphin Historic District.
Lined with ornate buildings crowned with cast iron balconies, the commercial zone resembled a scaled-down version of New Orleans’ French Quarter. In place of Bourbon Street’s seediness and tourist traps, we found a vibrant area dotted with independent businesses, including several throwbacks to an earlier era.
The first was the A&M Peanut Shop (formerly a Planters retail store, open since 1947)—a time capsule of a storefront with slanted display cases and antique scales where our salted Spanish peanuts were roasted in a machine dating from 1907.
The second was Olensky Bros., a self-described “general store and office supply” stocked with Mardi Gras souvenirs (including cartons of pre-packaged MoonPies that Mobilians toss from floats along with beads), rolls of toilet paper and spiral-bound notebooks.
When we asked the employee at the register to recommend a seafood restaurant for lunch, she pulled the owner, 91-year-old Fabian Olensky, into the conversation. In a patrician drawl he suggested Original Oyster House out on the Causeway; he became dreamy-eyed at the mention of their seafood gumbo.
I thanked him for his recommendation, saying that we didn’t want to end up with subpar seafood for our only meal in Mobile.
He chuckled, “Down here in Mobile we love our seafood. In Mobile, if you don’t have good seafood, you don’t stay in business for long.”
The drive to the restaurant was spectacular. Brown pelicans flew overhead as we made our way across spits of lowland marsh. Locals cast lines from the trunks of their cars into the sparkling blue waters as we crossed into the town of Spanish Fort.
We pulled into Original Oyster House’s (3733 Battleship Pkwy, Spanish Fort, AL) sprawling parking lot on a Monday around 12:30 p.m. and nearly every spot was taken. Many patrons exiting the restaurant carried plastic bags drooping under the weight of styrofoam containers.
I turned to BB and sighed, knowing that we were in for yet another supersized meal. Alabama’s official nickname may be the Yellowhammer State, but I think the Styrofoam State is more apt. Owing to obscenely-large portions, even the heartiest eaters inevitably leave with leftovers.
The restaurant—a behemoth structure perched on stilted beams—was a full-on expression of coastal kitsch: marine animal skeletons and gators adorned its garish turquoise blue facade and sharks poked out of its roof. (I can imagine that Mobile’s native son Jimmy Buffet took some design inspiration for Margaritaville from this and other seafood joints along the Causeway).
We marched up the exterior stairs to the second floor entrance and took our seats in a wood-paneled dining room replete with mounted fish, boat motors and painted buoys. Our view could not have been better—a look back at downtown Mobile across the spectacular Mobile-Tensaw River Delta.
We opted for the seafood gumbo, a half-dozen fire-grilled oysters and, on the recommendation of our server, a half-pound of peel-and-eat red shrimp.
Chock full of crab meat, fish and shrimp and thickened with a rich, bacon-rendered roux, the gumbo was too spicy for this delicate flower, but BB inhaled his cup and mine without coming up for air.
We laughed heartily when our server set down the oysters. They looked as beefed-up as the bodybuilders in Pumping Iron. The largest shell measured the distance from the base of my palm to the tip of my middle finger, with meat the size of a plum.
There’s nothing subtle about these big and briny beasts, which is why in these parts they douse them in an aggressively-seasoned mixture of garlic butter, Parmesan and Romano cheeses and herbs before setting them atop a charcoal grill until the garlic butter starts bubbling and the cheese turns golden brown.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Italians are completely wrong about their arbitrary “no dairy with shellfish” rule. These charred Gulf oysters were delightfully smoky, meaty, cheesy, juicy and herby—an umami explosion.
The red shrimp clocked-in at the opposite end of the flavor spectrum: steamed and barely seasoned so that you could savor their delicate, nuanced flavor. Their meat was so tender and sweet that after being dragged through drawn butter, they were nearly indistinguishable from fresh lobster.
We ate as much as was humanly possible (after all, leftover seafood and a road trip don’t mesh) before calling it quits. We teetered down the steps and paused at the picturesque marshland behind the restaurant before piling back into our car.
Mobile wasn’t a place I had given much thought to before this trip, but after experiencing the energy of the city, the beauty of the bay and the hedonistic pleasures of its coastal cuisine, I very much look forward to making a return trip.
All photos by Jared Wheeler and Whitney Moeller
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