Restaurants on the Alabama Gulf Coast tend to have short memories. The strip malls fill, the names change, and a favorite spot from five summers ago becomes a “remember when” conversation. The Original Oyster House has spent more than four decades refusing to be part of that conversation — first in Gulf Shores, then on the Mobile Bay Causeway — while quietly becoming one of the most successful and longest-running seafood restaurants in South Alabama.
It opened in May 1983 in Gulf Shores’ Bayou Village Shopping Center with sixty seats and a small crew, the dream of two couples: Joe and Mary Lou Roszkowski and Jane and David Dekle. Joe had been the executive chef at Gulf State Park; David worked for a produce distributor. The partnership clicked, and within two years it produced a second restaurant on the Causeway overlooking Mobile Bay.
Today the Gulf Shores restaurant seats 300 and employs around 130 people after expansions in 1986, 1996 and 2012. The Causeway location, on Battleship Parkway overlooking Mobile Bay, grew from eighty seats to 300, adding a gift shop, a boat dock and a waterfront private events room that seats 30 to 100. Together the two kitchens move roughly 400,000 pounds of fresh Gulf seafood a year — and the oldest seafood restaurant on Pleasure Island shows no sign of slowing down.
Built to outlast the fads
Any restaurant that survives four decades on the coast has to be more than a kitchen with a view. Southerners with discerning palates have watched plenty of competitors bloom and vanish, and the Original Oyster House endured by keeping the formula simple: fresh Gulf seafood, casual atmosphere, genuine hospitality and prices that let a family of five leave without wincing.
The menu’s center of gravity has never moved far from the oyster bar. Platters arrive fried, grilled or raw; gumbo and crab claws hold their place beside the salads; and the view — Little Lagoon on one location, Mobile Bay on the other — does quiet work as an ingredient. It is a formula that has outlasted hurricanes, recessions, a pandemic and every dining trend that swept through the coast promising to replace it.
The giving back is the brand
What separates the Original Oyster House from other long-running coast institutions is the sheer volume of what it gives away. The restaurants have long supported schools, athletic programs, churches, healthcare organizations and environmental causes across Baldwin County, and those programs survived even the 2020 pandemic year, when hospitality businesses everywhere were cutting anything that wasn’t bolted down.
Since 2006, the company has awarded two $1,000 Chelsea Garvin Scholarships each year to Baldwin County high school seniors. The scholarship honors a former employee — a talented artist and a fire department rescue diver who died in 2005 — and it has now sent dozens of local students to college in her memory.
Each September 11, the restaurants host their Never Forget free lunch, honoring first responders who risked their lives on 9/11 and recognizing local first responders for their service. The event marked its sixteenth year recently, and it has become a fixture on the coast’s calendar of remembrance.
The environmental ledger
The Original Oyster House’s sustainability work reads like a checklist written years before most restaurants thought about it. As a member of the Green Council, the company runs a wind turbine that generates power whenever winds reach eight miles per hour, converts its fryer vegetable oil into biofuel, lights its dining rooms with LEDs and heats water with solar panels.
The oyster work goes further. In 2014, the restaurants sponsored the Mobile Bay Oyster Gardening Program, which partially funded a trail of four-foot oyster-shaped sculptures along the coast — proceeds from the sculptures fund the growing of stocker oysters to refurbish area reefs. The Gulf Shores sculpture, designed by Dr. Barry Booth, was singled out as the only one serving as a memorial, paying tribute to Honor Flight South Alabama, the organization that flies veterans to Washington to see their memorials.
In 2016, the Original Oyster House became the first restaurant in Alabama to recycle oyster shells through the Alabama Coastal Foundation — a meaningful distinction in a state where millions of shells were historically hauled to landfills. Two years later the restaurant began oyster gardening itself, and it remains one of the only restaurants in the state growing oysters for reef restoration. For an establishment whose name is literally an oyster house, putting shells back into the bay that produces them is both good stewardship and good sense.
Recognition
The awards accumulated over the years include national magazine Readers Choice honors, regional “Best Seafood Restaurant” titles, a spot on Time’s list of the top oyster bars in America and Alabama’s GOLD Retailer of the Year. Regulars tend to shrug at the plaques; what they mention instead is that their parents ate there, and now their kids do.
The sale that wasn’t a sellout
In 2016, after more than three decades, the Roszkowskis and the Dekles retired and sold the company to Ark Restaurants, the New York-based restaurant group founded the same year, 1983. The deal, completed that November for a combined $10.75 million across the two properties, could have been the beginning of the end — coast lore is full of beloved restaurants that died in corporate acquisitions. Instead the founders did their homework.
“When Joe and I decided to retire, we did our research. We wanted to find an organization that genuinely cares about its employees and would continue the programs in our community that the Oyster House started. They definitely are the right fit. Ark kept our full staff on and has continued our giving back programs,” David Dekle said at the time.
Ark has kept its word. The full staff remained, the charitable programs continued, and the Annual Employee Picnic — held the Sunday after Labor Day, a tradition older than some of the staff — still anchors the year for the people who run the dining rooms and shuck the oysters.
Still the benchmark
More than forty years after two couples signed the paperwork on a sixty-seat room in a Gulf Shores shopping center, the Original Oyster House stands as proof that the coast’s most durable restaurant was never really selling seafood alone. It was selling the idea that a business can feed a community in more ways than one — and the lines out the door at both locations, year after year, suggest the customers have understood that all along.