A grocery store that never sold groceries
Drive south from Fairhope on Highway 98 and you will pass a building that confuses first-time visitors: a place called Delta Grocery that is, in fact, a restaurant and bar. The name is deliberate. Ryan Holloway, who owns the place with his family, grew up around the old mom-and-pop groceries of the Mississippi Delta — the kind of country stores that fired up a kitchen at midday and cooked hot plates for the laborers and farmers in the area. The name is a nod to that tradition, and to the geography that shaped him.
“I grew up in the Mississippi Delta and have always lived and cooked in the Deltas, like here and New Orleans,” Holloway says. The building itself has history along this stretch of Highway 98: old-timers around Fairhope remember it as the Blue Marlin Restaurant, a seafood house that served the area for years before the Holloway family took over the space and gave it a second life.
Thirty years in the kitchen
Holloway has been in the restaurant business for three decades, and the path that brought him to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay ran through two states. He left his hometown of Greenwood, Mississippi — the heart of Delta catfish country — and spent a decade in New Orleans working kitchens and absorbing the city’s food traditions. He eventually went home and bought Yianni’s, a Greek American restaurant in Greenwood, and ran it for 15 years.
The move to Fairhope came by way of his wife, Candice, who he cheerfully credits as the brains of the family operation. She visited relatives on the eastern shore, fell for the area, and moved the family over. The Holloways opened Delta Soul in the Mill in downtown Fairhope, a space that later became Fairhope Burger Company under their watch before the building’s owners began reworking the property. Delta Grocery, which sits on its own lot south of town, became the family’s flagship — though Holloway says he intends to bring Fairhope Burger Company back once Delta Grocery is fully established.
A two-man kitchen
The cooking at Delta Grocery is a family affair in the most literal sense: Holloway and his son Tristan run the kitchen themselves. The menu leans heavily on the two cuisines Holloway knows best — Mississippi Delta home cooking and New Orleans classics — and the kitchen’s sourcing habits show it.
The tamales arrive from the same supplier Holloway has bought from for thirty years: Willie of Hot Tamale Heaven in Mississippi. They come out with freshly made slaw on the side, a cool counterpoint to the spice. Fried green tomatoes are cut into quarters for dipping and served with two house sauces. The catfish, not surprisingly, is the house benchmark. Before he ever cooked professionally, Holloway worked as an oxygen checker on a catfish farm, running paddle-wheel aerators across the ponds when dissolved oxygen dropped. “This man knows catfish,” as the regulars put it, and the Mississippi farm-raised fillets — fried in corn flour, though broiled and blackened versions are available — come out moist under a light, crisp breading, with hushpuppies and smoked gouda cheese grits alongside.
What to order
The menu reads like a map of the Delta-to-Gulf corridor. The New Orleans-style beef debris po’ boy, dressed with the house beef demi-glace, is the dish Holloway pushes on visiting carnivores, and it has already built a following. There is a fried apple chicken sandwich of Holloway’s own invention — chicken, bacon, smoked gouda pimento cheese, house comeback sauce and a fried cinnamon apple — that manages to be both odd and addictive, the sweetness of the apple playing off the smoke of the bacon.
The New Orleans-style barbecued shrimp is one of the kitchen’s showpieces: six blackened shrimp sauteed with garlic, shallots, lemon, rosemary, butter and beer, served with fresh French bread for the sauce. Steaks, seafood, salads and Southern entrees fill out the menu, and dessert traction belongs to the blueberry white chocolate bread pudding.
The philosophy in the kitchen is simple. Holloway says his freezer is nearly empty because roughly 95 percent of what he serves is fresh. And the atmosphere is deliberately unpretentious — guests are welcome to walk in off the boat in fishing shirts and flip-flops, and regularly do.
Room for the whole family
Beyond the dining room, Delta Grocery has built a second business in private events. The restaurant’s event rooms can accommodate 80 to 100 guests, and bookings started arriving almost before the doors opened — a sign, Holloway says, of how badly the Highway 98 corridor south of Fairhope wanted a gathering place.
Hours run Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. The kitchen is closed Sundays. A full bar sits at the center of the building, and live music plays Friday evenings from 6 to 9, which has quickly made Friday nights the busiest seat in the house.
For the Holloways, the restaurant is the latest chapter in a three-decade run that has stretched from the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans to Mobile Bay. The name on the sign promises home cooking the way the old country groceries used to serve it. On a Friday night, with the parking lot full and the band setting up, the promise holds.