Brunch is serious business in New Orleans, and the city’s most successful brunch export has quietly become one of the best reasons to set an alarm in downtown Mobile. Ruby Slipper Café, at 100 N. Royal Street in the heart of the central business district, serves a menu that earned its stripes in post-Katrina New Orleans — beignets, bayou shrimp, fried green tomatoes, biscuits and gravy, and Eggs Benedict prepared in more configurations than most diners will get through in a dozen visits.
The café’s slogan, “Brunch Born in New Orleans,” is more than marketing. The concept was founded in May 2008 by Jennifer and Erich Weishaupt, an engineer couple who turned a blighted Mid-City corner store into a 52-seat breakfast joint with a simple goal: give their flood-damaged neighborhood a gathering place and help draw neighbors back. The restaurant drew hour-long waits within months, and the couple — she a chemical engineer, he an electrical engineer — found themselves in the restaurant business full time.
From Mid-City to the Gulf Coast
What began as a neighborhood recovery project became one of the Gulf South’s fastest-growing restaurant groups. Ruby Slipper added locations across New Orleans — the Marigny in 2012, the French Quarter’s Canal Street in early 2014 — then crossed state lines for the first time in July 2015 with a downtown Pensacola opening. Orange Beach followed in June 2016, Baton Rouge in 2017, and in 2018 the brand opened in downtown Mobile. Today the company operates more than two dozen Ruby Slipper and Ruby Sunshine locations across the Gulf South and Southeast, with the Wizard of Oz-inspired name now shorthand across the region for serious daytime dining.
The Mobile café occupies a former bank building, and the conversion gave the space a personality most brunch spots would kill for: high ceilings, big light, and a whimsical décor that makes a Wednesday morning feel like an occasion. It is a fitting home for a menu that treats breakfast as the main event rather than an afterthought.
What to order
The menu’s center of gravity is the Benedict list. Eggs Benedict arrives in many forms, and for the undecided there is the combination platter — or the brand’s famous “Peacemaker” option, which lets diners choose two different Benedicts on one plate. The house best-seller back in New Orleans, Eggs Cochon, stacks apple-braised pork debris over a buttermilk biscuit with two poached eggs and hollandaise, and it translates perfectly to the Gulf Coast palate.
Sweet tooths are well served. The Berry Chantilly Stuffed French Toast — berries, cream, and thick-cut bread built into a dish that will erase your appetite for the rest of the day — shares the menu with a Bananas Foster French Toast riff on the famous New Orleans dessert. On the savory-homestyle side, the biscuits and gravy deserve their reputation: a generous, peppery sausage gravy over biscuits that taste like someone’s grandmother is in the kitchen, served here with crispy Applewood smoked bacon and eggs cooked exactly to order — a detail not every kitchen gets right.
The menu also accommodates nearly every eating style. Gluten-free and vegan dishes — breakfast tacos among them — sit alongside a build-your-own omelet that can be loaded with just about anything. Diners counting calories can choose from lighter plates such as a Cobb salad, avocado toast, or an egg-white omelet. For the traditionalist, there are buttermilk pancakes, classic breakfast sandwiches, and seasonal offerings built on fresh berries and produce as the weather turns.
The practical details
Ruby Slipper does not take reservations, so weekend arrivals should plan for a wait — the line moves, and regulars will tell you it is worth it. The café welcomes little ones and can accommodate larger groups with advance notice. Hours run 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays and 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends. Catering is available for anyone feeding a crowd at home or the office. Prices land comfortably in reasonable territory for the quality, a point the Weishaupts engineered into the concept from the beginning — the average check at the original location was designed around a $15 neighborhood breakfast, not a special-occasion splurge.
Those counting drinks rather than calories will find mimosas on the menu alongside the half-and-half tea and lemonade that makes a fine working-lunch compromise. Coffee flows steadily alongside it.
Why brunch works here
Downtown Mobile has spent the past decade building a breakfast-and-brunch identity to match its lunch and dinner scene, and Ruby Slipper’s arrival put a New Orleans-trained anchor in the middle of it. The formula — daytime hours only, a menu that runs from beignets to burritos, and hospitality that borrows the Big Easy’s warmth — has proven itself across three states, and the Royal Street café delivers it with the consistency of a brand that learned its craft under pressure.
For locals, it is the reliable answer to the weekend question of where to take visiting family. For the workday crowd, it is a breakfast meeting spot that does not feel like one. And for brunch loyalists, it is the closest thing to a New Orleans Sunday without crossing state lines. The ruby slippers, as the original story goes, were always about home — and this one has found a very comfortable home in Mobile.