A little homeland on Hickory Street
Loxley has grown fast in the last few years — new retail, new rooftops, new traffic on Highway 59 — but some of its best food is still tucked away where you have to be looking for it. On Hickory Street, a short hop from the main corridor, El Paisita serves the kind of Mexican cooking that built a following almost entirely by word of mouth. The name translates roughly to “little homeland,” and the kitchen means it.
The restaurant is owned and run by Lucero and Cody Stamper, and it is small — the kind of place you can drive past a hundred times before a friend finally tells you to stop. For the Stampers, the restaurant is a family inheritance in the truest sense. “We started with cooking just for family, but we had a similar place in Mexico,” Lucero says. “So we decided to open a restaurant here.”
El Paisita opened in 2015 and has been quietly turning out authentic Mexican fare ever since, long enough now that the children who grew up eating there are bringing their own families in.
What the kitchen does well
The lunch menu is the place to start. It is enormous, built around one-, two- and three-item combos, each of them anchored by the kitchen’s beans and rice. The queso dip is made from scratch — as are most of the restaurant’s dressings, dips and sauces — and it is the thing returning customers order before they even open the menu, with a basket of chips alongside.
From there, the classics hold the line: crunchy tacos, chile rellenos, beef enchiladas, all executed the way they would be in the Mexican states whose cooking they represent. The dining room’s décor tells the same story, with paintings of bullfighting scenes, agave farmers and porcelain-smooth senoritas on the walls, and the staff is friendly and fast. When the meal is over, it is not unusual for the young chef to come out of the kitchen to ask how everything was.
Not the same old combination plates
What separates El Paisita from the strip-center pack is the breadth of the menu. Where many Mexican restaurants in the area stick to a predictable roster, El Paisita carries half a dozen vegetarian choices, and the kids’ menu is quietly available to adults who want a smaller plate — at a small upcharge. The house specials push further: a ribeye steak with grilled zucchini, and a chipotle agave glazed grilled chicken topped with fresh grilled pineapple that regulars recommend without hesitation.
The menu has continued to grow. The Stampers have added new items in recent years, including Mexican wings, and happy hour brings special pricing on mixed drinks, wines and cervezas. The margaritas, by all accounts, are worth the drive from Fairhope or Spanish Fort on their own — though diners who plan to sample them would be wise to bring a designated driver, as one visitor from across the bay put it after making the drive herself.
Family run, family friendly
The restaurant welcomes children and offers handicap-accessible seating, and the room is spotless — the kind of clean that reflects a family eating their own cooking there every night. The service style is unhurried but efficient, and prices are noticeably below what comparable plates run in the beach towns to the south.
El Paisita is open seven days a week for lunch and dinner at 3800 S. Hickory Street in Loxley; the kitchen can be reached at 251-964-0083. The happy hour food specials run in the late afternoon, and the lunch combos remain the best value on the menu.
Ten years in, the Stampers’ little homeland has become exactly what its name promised: a small piece of old Mexico set down in Baldwin County, cooking the food of home for anyone who finds their way down Hickory Street. Go hungry, order the queso first, and plan the repeat visit on the drive home — you will not be the first to do so.