When the city of Mobile announced that its aging Civic Center would come down — demolition hastened, memorably, by the January snowstorm — the biggest question wasn’t architectural. It belonged to Mardi Gras: where would the krewes load their floats, rehearse, and hold the balls that have anchored the season for generations? Enter Sarah Clark, founder of Bay Gourmet Catering and Events, who answered the question the way she answers everything — by buying a building.
Her new venue, Crown on St. Louis, rises from the former home of the Mobile Antique Mall on Lower St. Louis Street, steps from the parade routes. When it opens, it will offer 30,000 square feet of interior space across five configurable rooms, 5,000 square feet outdoors, and — the detail that made krewes pay attention — room for floats to pull up to the entrance so revelers can hop off and walk straight into the ball. There is even a separate room reserved for krewe members.
The caterer who kept buying real estate
Clark’s path to a 30,000-square-foot event empire began with a catering kitchen. Six years before the Civic Center announcement, she took the leap from a small commercial kitchen into Crown Hall, her first event space, carved out of the old Red Cross building at Broad and Dauphin streets. The timing, by any measure, was terrible: Crown Hall opened in June 2019, hosted its first weddings that summer, and had just debuted its Crooked Crown bar in time for Mardi Gras when COVID shut the city down around Ash Wednesday.
“The struggle was real,” Clark says. She refused to send anyone home. The team pivoted to gourmet-to-go meals, kept the crew intact, and survived on community support marshaled through social media. “The community support was huge. It kept everyone’s morale up.”
By 2023, Crown Hall had matured into a multi-room campus: the larger hall with a bridal suite upstairs, the Crooked Crown (2,800 square feet of bar and dining), and Crown on Broad (2,000 square feet for gatherings of up to 200), all anchored by a 2,000-square-foot commercial kitchen designed to run on-site events and off-site catering simultaneously. Bay Gourmet’s off-site business remained the bread and butter — fully insured for event bartending, capable of handling up to three weddings in a weekend, with catering runs stretching from the Eastern Shore to Gulf Shores and Orange Beach.
Building for the next Mardi Gras
So when the Civic Center’s replacement — a new state-of-the-art entertainment facility — threatened to leave Mardi Gras societies without a home, Clark went into overdrive. “I immediately started looking for a larger building that would be able to host many of the displaced Mardi Gras balls,” she says. The former Mobile Antique Mall came on the market, and she moved. The timeline slipped from an aggressive opening for the coming carnival season to a late-spring debut — deliberately. “Things took longer than expected, as they always do, so I backed off the aggressive opening date to make sure everything was done to my satisfaction.”
The design brief is ambitious: a former retail box reimagined as a first-class gathering place, with architects Robert Maurin and Don Bowden shaping the renovation and Rogers and Willard handling construction. “The acoustics, the beautiful interiors, and especially the lighting are so important,” Clark says. “Going from a retail building to a first-class place for people to gather has had its challenges, but I’m excited about what this event space can be. The building has a personality and a good feel.”
The specifications tell the story of scale: capacity for up to 3,000 guests inside, larger groups outdoors with the side street blocked off, Bay Gourmet offices and bridal prep space upstairs, and — because parking is destiny for event venues — two adjacent empty lots purchased for additional parking, plus a freestanding building Clark envisions as a restaurant someday. Financing came through the Small Business Administration and Climate First Bank, the first FDIC-insured bank dedicated to the environment and sustainability. “They really understood the big picture and embraced it,” she says.
A neighborhood with a cool vibe
Part of the appeal is the block itself. Lower St. Louis Street has filled in with destinations — The Wingman Brewing Company from the Fairhope Brewing family, The Cheese Cottage, and BoHayden’s sports bar — and Clark likes her neighbors. “This Lower St. Louis Street area has so much potential,” she says. “There’s a lot of Mobile history here.” The street runs through one of the oldest parts of the city, blocks from the colonial-era footprints that made Mobile the birthplace of Mardi Gras on this continent — a tradition the city has celebrated since 1703, more than a century before New Orleans staged its first parade. Locating a venue here is a statement that carnival is not an event on the calendar but the backbone of downtown’s identity.
The bookings came early. Camp Rap-A-Hope, the coastal charity camp for children with cancer, reserved Crown on St. Louis for its 300-guest 40th-anniversary celebration; the 2026 calendar filled with a car dealer show party, office Christmas parties, rehearsal dinners, wedding events, and at least one Mardi Gras ball. Clark’s vision reaches beyond the standard reception circuit: she hopes to attract the Mobile Ballet, the Big Band Society, and street parties, with the venue oriented toward entertainment and sports events as well.
Charity work has long been part of the Bay Gourmet calendar, and the Camp Rap-A-Hope booking carries its own weight. The organization has provided a free week-long summer camp for children with cancer from across the Gulf Coast since the mid-1980s, funded entirely by donations and community fundraisers — the kind of milestone celebrations that event venues traditionally host at cost or as donations. Landing a 300-guest anniversary party before the building even opened signaled to other nonprofits that the new space was open for community business, not just private celebrations. For Clark, whose pandemic playbook meant keeping her entire staff and serving take-home meals through a shutdown, the mix of commerce and community in the booking calendar is not incidental — it is how Crown Hall has always operated.
Bay Gourmet, meanwhile, isn’t going anywhere. “This will help us grow,” Clark says. The company remains the exclusive caterer for on-site events, backed by a new commercial kitchen, while continuing its off-site work across the coastal region. Chef Jayme Richburg and the Bay Gourmet team carry the culinary side of both venues.
Mobile’s bigger moment
Crown on St. Louis opens into a city remaking itself. The new terminal rising at Brookley Field, the baseball Hall of Fame Walk on Water Street honoring Satchel Paige, Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, Ozzie Smith, and Billy Williams — the deepest Hall of Fame bench of any American city, with an NFL statue for Robert Brazille to boot — the demolition of the old Civic Center, and survey crews mapping a new bridge over the daily traffic jam all point the same direction. Mobile is building for its next era, and the entrepreneurs who bet on it early are the ones who will host it.
Clark has been betting since 2019, through a pandemic, a rebuild, and a real estate acquisition that tripled her square footage. Her first event at the new venue was scheduled for September 2025, with Crown Hall continuing to operate in the meantime. For a caterer who once refused to send her staff home when the world shut down, a 30,000-square-foot party palace with a float-ready front door is simply the next course. And the stakes for the city are bigger than one business: carnival season draws visitors from across the region for weeks of parades and balls, with economic impact the city has pegged in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Giving those societies a proper home while the Civic Center’s successor rises is part of keeping the season whole — and Clark’s building may be the first place the new downtown can practice for its debut.
It is also a case study in how event businesses actually grow. Catering is a margins-thin, logistics-heavy trade, and the venues that anchor it do best when they control the whole equation: the kitchen, the parking, the loading doors, the bar licenses, and the calendar. Clark’s campus model — multiple rooms of different sizes under one operator, with off-site catering running in parallel — means a slow Saturday for weddings can still host a corporate lunch and a charity gala. The Crown on St. Louis plan pushes that logic to its conclusion: five rooms that configure to almost any event size, outdoor space that expands with the crowd, and a location chosen not for scenery but for logistics — because in Mobile, the most important road in the events business is the parade route.
Before Crown Hall: A Paralegal Who Cashed In Her 401(k)
Clark’s route to Mobile’s event business was anything but direct. She was born in Holland, Michigan, where her father owned the Crazy Horse Saloon, which she says was for three straight years the largest distributor of Miller Lite on tap in the United States; he ran a steakhouse and a Dairy Freeze at the same time. He later entered Western Theological Seminary, graduating when Sarah was in sixth grade, and accepted a church position in Mobile. Both of her parents are now Presbyterian ministers in Mobile.
Growing up on Michigan farmland, Clark says farm-to-table was simply how her family ate. “There was nothing unusual or novel about it in our family,” she says. After high school in Mobile, she earned a bachelor’s degree in criminology from Auburn in 1996, then moved to Hyde Park, New York, to attend the Culinary Institute of America. “It’s in my blood,” she says. “It was always tugging on me. I love to cook and entertain.” On weekends she worked at Pazzo, an Italian restaurant on Long Island, near where her parents then led a church. “If you are going to cut your teeth in the restaurant business, there is no more effective place than New York,” she says.
Back in Mobile, she spent eight years as a paralegal at the Armbrecht Jackson law firm and was accepted to the University of Alabama School of Law before deciding law was not for her. Instead, she cashed in her 401(k) and bought a catering kitchen. “My dad was horrified,” she says.
Trial by Fire and the Move to the Loop
Clark chose a name other than her own for the business because, she says, many Mobile caterers already used theirs, and she built a menu around rotating regional and ethnic cuisines rather than a fixed list. Early bookings included a 400-guest wedding and, within three months of opening, the Mothers of Mystics (MOMs) Mardi Gras ball for about a thousand guests. “It was trial by fire,” she says. “We made it work.”
Two years in, Bay Gourmet took over the former Silver Ladle kitchen at the Loop, along with its staff. Candy Simmons, who has been with Clark from the start, taught her how to handle clients in their own homes. “Candy would always tell me, ‘Kill them with kindness,'” Clark says. “I couldn’t have made it without Candy in those early years.” In 2018, wanting an event space and a liquor license, Clark bought out her partner and leased the former Red Cross building at Dauphin and Broad streets, a 6,300-square-foot shell she rebuilt around one big open room. “When I first walked into the building, I said, ‘this is it,’ and stopped looking,” she says.
By 2023, Clark said Chef Jayme Richburg, then with Bay Gourmet for 12 years, had “come into his own,” and the company was expanding ticketed wine dinners, including a Moët & Chandon tasting and food pairing in the Crooked Crown. She also said at the time that she hoped to host a restaurant night several times a week in the Crown on Broad room.