Dick Russell’s Barbeque, a Mobile dining institution since 1953, is closing for good. The restaurant announced its permanent closure in a Facebook post, setting Sunday, July 19 as its final day of service — the end of a run that began on Prichard’s Craft Highway more than seven decades ago.
Seasons. Everything has them, the announcement read. And like football, deer hunting and green grass, Dick Russell’s has reached the end of ours.
From Prichard to Tillman’s Corner
Dick Russell opened the restaurant in 1953 on Craft Highway in Prichard, building a following on smoked meats and homestyle cooking. After Russell’s death, the business passed to his children. In 1982 the restaurant moved to Tillman’s Corner, where it operated for the next 45 years and became one of the defining eateries of that corner of Mobile County.
The family ran it through tragedy and change. Lois Peacock, one of Russell’s children, died in 2023, leaving Jimmy Popple — a member of the family circle that had run the place for decades — at the helm. In early 2026, Popple handed the business over to five longtime employees who had worked at the restaurant for decades, an arrangement that was meant to carry the institution forward. It was not enough to keep it going.
A cabin in the middle of the city
Part of what made Dick Russell’s beloved was the place itself. The Tillman’s Corner restaurant had the feel of a hunting cabin, with cozy lighting, wood-framed interiors and a lodge theme that made it feel more like a hunting camp than a dining room. Many of the decorations dated to the restaurant’s earliest days in 1953, according to its website.
The kitchen’s reputation rested on doing everything in house. Breakfast was a daily draw, the barbecue came off the pit with house-made sides, and the cheeseburgers were built from beef ground on site. Regulars describe coffee-drinking mornings that stretched for hours, tables of regulars who came six or seven days a week, and a staff that knew every order by heart.
The community says goodbye
Word of the closure brought an outpouring of memories from Tillman’s Corner and beyond, with customers making a point to come dine one last time. For its final days, the restaurant opened at 6 a.m. and closed at 2 p.m. The demand was so strong that the restaurant sold out of food a day early, announcing Saturday that it would not be able to open Sunday for its planned final day after the community came out to help say goodbye.
This community has served us well for over 45 years, the owners wrote, but it is time for us to step aside and welcome all the new growth in Tillman’s Corner.
The farewell post thanked every customer who ever ate there, and saved its warmest words for the staff. Thank you to our staff, it read. Y’all are family. We are grateful for every moment you showed up and showed out. There was never a day this could have been done without you.
An era of change in Tillman’s Corner
The closing lands at a moment of visible transition for the Tillman’s Corner area, where new retail and residential development has been steadily remaking one of Mobile’s oldest suburban commercial districts. The restaurant’s owners nodded to that growth in their farewell, welcoming the new development even as they stepped away from it.
Longtime customers remembered the restaurant as a constant: the same wood-paneled dining room, the same scratch-made cooking, through seven decades of change in the city around it. Restaurants that survive 70 years are rare anywhere; ones that do it on the strength of a single family’s cooking, in two locations over that span, are rarer still.
Eat local
In its final post, the restaurant asked the community for one more thing — memories. The owners invited anyone with photos or stories from the restaurant to share them as the last week came to an end, part of an effort to keep the institution’s history alive after the doors close.
And they closed with the message they wanted to leave behind: please remember to eat local and shop local, because the mom and pops need the community more than ever.
With love, Jimmy and the DR family, the post ended — a sign-off that summed up the restaurant’s role in the community as well as anything on the menu ever could. A piece of Mobile’s dining history is gone, but the recipe of what made it matter — consistency, family and a very good cheeseburger — is worth remembering the next time a locally owned plate lunch place asks for your business.