William E. Stitt grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the self-described “Gateway to the Delta” on the Yazoo River, in the company of storytellers and Ole Miss loyalists. The town also produced Governor Haley Barbour, author Willie Morris, NFL cornerback Willie Brown, and comedian Jerry Clower. Stitt took a different path out, but it led him to Fairhope, Alabama, where he now runs two businesses under one roof: BILL-E’s Restaurant, a rambling burger-and-bacon roadhouse on Highway 181, and BILL-E’s Small Batch Bacon, a USDA-certified curing operation that ships thousands of pounds of bacon across the United States and beyond every week.
The road from Yazoo City to bacon kingpin started, appropriately, with food and family. Stitt earned a hospitality management degree at Ole Miss in 1991 and stayed in Oxford, working at the Downtown Grill on The Square, where he spent time with Willie Morris, the great Mississippi writer and devoted football fan. “My dad wanted me to learn a trade, something I could always fall back on,” Stitt says. At 15, his father arranged an apprenticeship with a butcher outside Yazoo City, who taught him to cure bacon the way people did before refrigeration existed.
Twenty Years at Ruby Tuesday, Then Home
Stitt’s professional career began in earnest in 1993, when Ruby Tuesday hired him. He spent the next two decades with the company, starting in Memphis before a transfer to Mobile to run a location. He rose to Director of Operations and helped develop the to-go model, curbside pickup, and the catering brand, back when those ideas were innovations rather than industry standards.
In 2011 he struck out on his own, opening BILL-E’s, then called Old 27 Grill, in a small building in Fairhope. The original concept was modest: a burger joint with an order counter. Then servers from his Ruby Tuesday days began showing up asking for jobs, and the counter-service plan gave way to a semi-full-service restaurant. “We started with eight tables and three bar stools,” he says. “I immediately realized we needed a bigger bar, with indoor and outdoor seating.” The name dropped “Old 27” after the road in front became Highway 181.
How the Bacon Business Was Born
The bacon almost happened by accident. Food suppliers kept bringing samples for the restaurant, and Stitt kept thinking he could make better bacon than what was being offered. “Bacon kept coming back into my life,” he says. He started in a small square box of equipment next to the restaurant’s kitchen, curing without interrupting dinner service.
The product took off quickly. The process is entirely natural, producing what Stitt calls a center-of-the-plate premium protein, the kind chefs build dishes around rather than crumble onto salads. Demand grew to the point that he built a separate USDA facility on site, custom smokers named after close friends, and a packaging and shipping operation. The Original Oyster House and the Grand Hotel were early local customers, and distribution expanded through national food brokers to customers across the country, including Canada and Guam. The bacon has collected numerous awards along the way, and it is available through the company’s website and Goldbelly.
A chance meeting in a Piggly Wiggly added another line to the resume: the sales manager for a New Orleans food distributor wandered in, struck up a conversation, and recruited Stitt to service local accounts as a food broker.
More Than a Burger Joint
The restaurant itself is a maze of meandering nooks: additional dining areas, bars, outdoor games including bocce ball, ping pong, cornhole, ring toss, and giant Jenga, music stages, a gazebo guarded by Blues Brothers statues, a bathtub that doubles as a photo op, and two studios built for podcasts and corporate events. Live music runs Friday through Sunday most of the year, shifting to Thursday, Friday, and Sunday during football season, because, as Stitt puts it, everyone in the restaurant business knows music on football Saturdays is a waste of a good band.
Catering is a major part of the business, from beef tenderloin and Oysters Rockefeller to low-country seafood boils, cooked on Stitt’s custom grill or the host’s own. He swears by the PK Grill from Little Rock and still uses his grandparents’ at home. He consults for specialty food markets, test-drives new products, and competes in BBQ cookoffs. His 1959 Chevy Apache pickup is being converted into a personal chef vehicle with a slide-out kitchen and folding buffet tables.
Long term, Stitt wants the compound to be a destination for corporate gatherings from New Orleans to Destin. “We want to be more than a burger and bacon joint,” he says.
Rooted in Fairhope
Stitt has woven himself into the community: years on the board of the Fairhope Educational Enrichment Foundation, a past presidency of the Eastern Shore Ducks Unlimited, and the Outstanding Alumnus award from Ole Miss’s School of Applied Sciences in 2022. He and his brother, a physician, both earned Eagle Scout ranks early. His children, now 25 and 28, both own homes in Baldwin County, a fact he mentions with pride.
On growth in the coastal area, his philosophy is characteristic: “Fighting it is worthless. Controlling it is dangerous. Embracing it with gracious hospitality is the only answer.”
For a Christmas gift, Stitt has a pitch he has honed over years: a pound of sliced bacon, a slab, and a hat. “It’s the best Christmas present in the world.” Given the story behind it, he might be right.