Dick Russell’s Bar-B-Q in Tillman’s Corner has closed for good, ending a run that traces back 72 years to when the restaurant first opened in 1954. The closure came a day earlier than planned after a wave of customers during its final weekend of business led the restaurant to sell out of food, sending one of Mobile’s most enduring barbecue institutions into history on its own terms.
The barbecue restaurant had planned to serve its last meals on a Sunday, but announced on Facebook that Saturday’s crowd was so large that it ran out of food, forcing an early close. For a restaurant whose final days were already drawing an outpouring of visits from longtime customers, the sellout was a fitting final chapter — a last rush of the kind of loyal trade that had sustained the place across three generations.
“We are grateful for every day you have supported us. We are grateful for the love you have shown our employees. It will never be forgotten. We love y’all,” the restaurant wrote in its announcement.
Seven Decades of Mobile Barbecue
Dick Russell’s originally opened on Craft Highway in 1954, a postwar-era barbecue joint serving the growing neighborhoods of Mobile County. In 1982 the restaurant relocated to its longtime home on Highway 90 in Tillman’s Corner, the busy commercial district in the southwestern part of the county, where it operated for roughly 44 years and became as identified with that stretch of the highway as any business on it.
Over the decades, the restaurant built a loyal following around its rustic decor, attentive service and menu staples including homemade biscuits, handmade sausage patties, burgers and pulled pork sandwiches. It was the kind of place where regulars had their orders memorized by the staff and where breakfast drew its own crowd, separate from the lunchtime barbecue line that stretched out the door.
Recognition eventually followed the loyalty. In 2015, Dick Russell’s was inducted into the Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame as one of 29 restaurants honored in the hall’s inaugural class, a distinction that placed the Tillman’s Corner landmark among the most celebrated barbecue operations in a state where barbecue is treated as a point of civic pride.
A Last-Minute Ownership Gamble That Fell Short
Update: Additional details have emerged about the restaurant’s final months and the circumstances behind the closure. In January 2026, ownership of Dick Russell’s was transferred from Dick Russell’s children to five longtime employees in an effort to keep the restaurant running. That arrangement ultimately was not enough to prevent the closure.
The handover to employees was an unusual step for a restaurant of that age, reflecting how badly those inside the business wanted it to survive. Five staff members who knew the recipes, the routines and the customers took ownership of a 70-year-old institution rather than watch it shut down outright — a measure of how personal the restaurant was to the people who worked there.
Longtime co-owner Jimmy Popple said the restaurant’s lease had become part of the problem in its final stretch, compounding the pressures that made continuing difficult. He said running a restaurant had become too difficult a job to continue and that it was time to close the business, bringing an end to an ownership era that had stretched from the restaurant’s founding family through its final employee-led attempt at a rescue.
Tillman’s Corner Loses a Landmark
The closure resonated well beyond the restaurant’s front door. Tillman’s Corner grew up around Highway 90 as one of Mobile County’s major commercial hubs outside the city limits, and Dick Russell’s was among the businesses that defined the area for decades — a stop generations of families planned their weeks around, whether for a breakfast of homemade biscuits and sausage patties or a late lunch of pulled pork dressed the way Mobile likes it.
News of the closure drew hundreds of comments on social media from longtime customers sharing memories of meals at the restaurant, with many expressing disappointment that they did not get one last visit before the doors closed for good. Some recalled first dates and family birthdays at the tables under the rustic decor; others wrote about parents and grandparents who had been eating there since the Craft Highway days, back when the restaurant was brand new.
That reaction is typical of what happens when a restaurant crosses the 70-year mark. A business that operates that long stops being simply a place to eat and becomes a shared reference point for a community — the answer to “where did you go after the game,” the standard against which every other barbecue plate gets judged, and the place residents point to when visitors ask what the area was like before the strip malls arrived.
Barbecue, and the Economics of Staying Open
The end of Dick Russell’s also reflects the pressures bearing down on old-school, family-run restaurants across the Gulf Coast. Food and supply costs have climbed sharply in recent years, labor in the restaurant trade has grown harder to find and hold, and lease terms in established commercial corridors have risen along with the value of the land beneath them. Establishments that survived on thin margins for decades have found those margins impossible to hold, no matter how loyal the customer base.
Popple’s assessment that running the restaurant had become too difficult a job to continue captured both sides of that equation — the financial squeeze and the sheer physical demands of operating a restaurant for the people who had devoted their working lives to it. The failed employee ownership bid showed that even deep institutional knowledge and a willing workforce could not overcome the underlying economics.
Its induction into the Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 2015 now stands as the formal record of what the restaurant meant to the state’s food heritage. That class of 29 restaurants gathered some of the oldest and best-known barbecue names in Alabama, and Dick Russell’s presence among them confirmed what Mobile County customers had known since 1954.
What Remains
For now, the restaurant’s final Facebook message stands as its farewell, written after the Saturday sellout that pushed the closing up a day. The gratitude it expressed — to customers, to the employees who carried the business through its final attempt at survival — echoed the tone of the hundreds of comments that followed it: less a complaint about a closure than a thank-you for 72 years.
The Highway 90 location that anchored Tillman’s Corner for four-plus decades is now dark, and the pull of homemade biscuits, handmade sausage patties and pulled pork sandwiches that defined the menu is gone from the neighborhood. What survives is the memory — and a reminder to communities across the region that the oldest names on their commercial strips are finite, and worth visiting while they are still open.
A Legacy Shared With the Region’s Oldest Restaurants
Dick Russell’s spent its final decades as one of the last of its generation in the Mobile area. Restaurants that open in the 1950s and survive into the 2020s pass through a series of challenges that close most of their peers — changing tastes, the arrival of national chains along the same highways, recessions, hurricanes and the constant turnover of the restaurant labor pool. Each era that Dick Russell’s outlasted added to the claim its regulars made on it: this was the real thing, unchanged while everything around it changed.
The restaurant’s path from Craft Highway to Tillman’s Corner in 1982 mirrored the movement of its customer base. As Mobile County’s population pushed south and west along Highway 90 in the decades after World War II, Tillman’s Corner grew into the retail and dining hub for communities including Halstead, Fonthill and the surrounding neighborhoods, and Dick Russell’s relocation put it at the center of that growth. For the next 44 years it held that position without ever becoming a franchise or a chain — a single location, a single menu, run by the people behind the counter.
Its final weekend told the story in miniature. The plan was to close on a Sunday; the crowd that showed up Saturday cleaned out the kitchen, and the restaurant simply stopped. A 72-year run ended not with a slow fade but with the busiest day in recent memory, customers lined up for one last plate from a kitchen that had been filling them since Eisenhower was president.
The five longtime employees who took ownership in January 2026 were the last caretakers of that legacy. Their willingness to take on a 72-year-old business — with all of its costs, its lease obligations and its aging building — represented the strongest possible vote of confidence in what the restaurant meant. When that effort ended, the closure was not a failure of passion but a recognition of arithmetic that even devotion could not change.
Mobile County’s barbecue map now loses one of its founding names. The Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame’s inaugural class of 2015 preserves the honor, and the memories preserved in the hundreds of social media tributes preserve the rest — a record of a restaurant that fed Mobile for longer than most of its customers have been alive, and said goodbye the only way it could: by selling out of everything it had left.