There is a vault door in Orange Beach, and behind it, one of the most unusual bars on the Gulf Coast.
8 Reale, tucked behind the Frank & Company jewelry store at The Wharf, opened in December 2022 and has quietly become the coastal area’s most distinctive place to have a drink — a speakeasy in the truest modern sense: hidden, by design, behind a vault door and an electronic passcode, with an interior that would not look out of place in Manhattan rather than a beach town.
Speakeasies are thought to have been born in the Prohibition era, when hidden bars had to stay quiet to stay undiscovered. A century later, the form is back in fashion in coastal Alabama — but you have to know where to find these places, and in the case of 8 Reale, how to get in.
From jewelry to jazz-age bar
The bar exists because of a friendship between two local businesses. Jack and Bevelyn Wallace, co-owners of Frank and Company Fine Jewelry, were regulars at Fresh Off The Boat, the restaurant next door run by operators Jerr McCutchen and David Buster. The two couples kept talking, and in 2021 the conversation turned serious.
“We liked each other and began talking about opening a high-end bar together in Orange Beach,” McCutchen said. “We were on the same page without really knowing what they were thinking.”
The moment of commitment came in June 2022, when Jack Wallace walked into the restaurant and said simply: “We are going to do it.” He had just leased 3,500 square feet of retail space at The Wharf — a space that had sat empty for six years — to open a second location for Frank and Company, and he did not need all of it. “They know jewelry, and we know bars and restaurants,” McCutchen said. A deal was made, and 8 Reale opened that December.
Inside the vault
The transformation of the space is the first thing regulars mention. McCutchen laid out the floor plan; Bevelyn Wallace planned the decor and personally purchased every piece of furniture. The result is rich and lavish, with a deliberate New York energy: walls of Chicago split brick, original Afghan rugs under stylish seating areas, buffalo-hide sofas, and a bar adorned with real pennies — an “aristocratic” flourish, as McCutchen puts it — beneath a Yamaha grand piano that is played Monday through Friday.
But the bar itself is the show. 8 Reale positions itself as an ultra-premium mixologist bar, priding itself on rare bourbons, big wines and cordials, and bartenders who can build whatever the guest is in the mood for. There is no dress code, per se — in a beach town where yacht owners wander in off the marina, nobody enforces one — but the atmosphere asks for a certain occasion.
The name: pieces of eight from a sunken galleon
The name is where the bar’s story gets genuinely unusual. A “piece of eight” was the Spanish silver dollar of the colonial era, and Frank and Company is one of the few jewelers anywhere on the coast that carries 8 Reale coins recovered from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha — the Spanish treasure galleon that sank in a 1622 hurricane in the Florida Keys and was found in 1985 in what is widely considered the world’s most valuable shipwreck.
The Atocha was the centerpiece of a 28-ship fleet carrying treasure for the King of Spain. When the hurricane struck, eight ships went down, taking with them some 40 tons of silver and gold and 70 pounds of Colombian emeralds. The coins Frank and Company sells — and the bar that bears their name — are literal pieces of that history.
The bartender’s story
The people behind the bar carry their own stories. On a recent visit, the man preparing for the evening crowd was Nate Strong, one of the few born-and-bred Gulf Shores natives in the area’s hospitality industry. Strong graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans with a degree in Music Industry Studies and tended bar at two of Nashville’s premier hotels, the Thompson Boutique Hotel and the Joseph, before coming home.
There is a sadder thread, too. During construction, McCutchen’s original choice to head the bar, Corey Martin, died by depression in October 2022. Martin, McCutchen says, “was the best mixologist I’ve ever known” — a cocktail competition winner at Las Floriditas, the Cuban-style speakeasy in downtown Mobile — “a friend first.” The bar that opened without him is, in part, a tribute to what he might have built.
The room where the mayors are
Word has spread. On a recent Friday night, the mayors of Orange Beach and Gulf Shores and The Wharf’s owner, Art Farve, spent the evening together at the bar — the kind of quiet endorsement no advertising budget can buy. Plans are already drawn to expand 8 Reale onto the outdoor patio of The Wharf’s marina, with comfortable seating, fire pits and a small bar serving guests, and charcuterie boards planned to pair with the wine list.
The bar opens at 5 p.m. and runs until around 11 p.m. most evenings. It is a different kind of night out, by design — and on the Alabama Gulf Coast, where the beach bar is the default and the tiki hut is the archetype, a Prohibition-style vault, a grand piano and a mixologist’s bourbon list is precisely the difference that draws people in.
Why speakeasies keep coming back
It is worth asking why the speakeasy — a form that should have died with the 21st Amendment in 1933 — keeps being reborn. The most famous of the originals, New York’s Stork Club, was established in the 1920s by the former bootlegger Sherman Billingsley and became the definition of glamour, a place where stars and presidents drank behind an unmarked door. Prohibition ended, the passwords became unnecessary, and the romance did not die with them.
Modern speakeasies sell exactly what the originals accidentally invented: the feeling of being in on a secret. In a beach market full of open-air bars and live music decks, a vault door, a passcode and a hushed, elegant room is a novelty that photographs well, tells well, and — judging by the crowd on a recent Friday — drinks even better.
8 Reale is, in other words, more than a gimmick. It is a serious bar with a serious backbar, run by people with a serious jewelry pedigree, named for sunken treasure, and quickly becoming the place to be at The Wharf. Getting in requires knowing where the door is. That has always been the point.