Chatom, the seat of Washington County, spent most of its history as a dry town where anyone wanting a drink had to leave town to get one. That changed when Cassanova’s Rendezvous Cafe opened its doors in 2009, becoming the first bar in town after local voters brought Chatom in line with state standards for alcohol sales roughly a year and a half earlier.
A bar hidden behind a storefront
From the street, the business looks like an ordinary cafe in a strip mall on the edge of downtown. Diners pass through a small restaurant front before following a long hallway back to a single-room bar the owners call the social club. Inside, the room is fitted with dartboards, billiards tables, a handful of seating areas and a full bar along one wall, with a painted seaside veranda scene covering the back wall. A projector sometimes runs sitcoms over the bar on slow weeknights.
The kitchen serves sandwiches and plate lunches — the house Chatom cheesesteak is a point of local pride — while the bar keeps a surprisingly respectable beer selection for a town of roughly 1,200 people. A separate party room hosts touring bands and karaoke nights on busier evenings.
An unlikely cross-section of town
Owner Frankie Beech has built a clientele that cuts across the community’s usual lines. On a typical Thursday night the bar draws everyone from the town’s head librarian to its newly hired economic developer and the mayor’s son — a generation of Washington County leadership far more comfortable with the town’s wet status than their parents were.
Next door sits another first: Chatom’s first liquor store, which opened alongside the bar. Even so, old habits die hard in the deeply church-going county; longtime residents say plenty of prominent families still drive to Mobile County to buy their beer and liquor rather than be seen carrying a bag out of the local store.
Cassanova’s Rendezvous Cafe closes at 10 p.m. on weeknights. For a rural south Alabama town that went more than a century without a bar, it has proven a durable — and by all accounts friendly — experiment.