When Beth Anne McCormick launched The Eat Beat, she was a newcomer to Fairhope looking for a way to meet people. More than two decades later, the founder of the Eastern Shore’s long-running dining and entertainment guide is a familiar face in nearly every restaurant from the Causeway to Magnolia Springs, and her bound archive of back issues reads like a history of how the region learned to eat, drink and dance.
McCormick and her husband, Tim, moved to Fairhope from Montgomery in 1999 after the telecommunications company he worked for transferred him to the coast. She is one of those residents who can clearly recall when the Eastern Shore’s communities were genuinely quaint, and she admits her first impression was not exactly love at first sight.
“It was like Mayberry,” she says. “There wasn’t even a Walmart back then. I remember driving down County Road 27, before it was Highway 181, and there were cows on one side of the road and crop dusters on the other.”
Filling a Gap Nobody Else Saw
Beneath that sleepy surface, McCormick noticed that interesting things were happening in local dining and entertainment. The trouble was that there was no easy way to find out about them. She had years of marketing experience and had spent nearly a decade producing print advertisements for Gayfers department stores, so she decided to put those skills to work in a new direction.
“I didn’t know anybody here, and I wanted to make some connections,” she says. “I realized there wasn’t anything in print that you could pick up and see what was happening in the area — where kids eat free, who’s having a wine tasting, what bands are playing where. There was actually a lot going on in our community, so I just put it in print form because that was my background.”
Restaurants seemed like a natural focus with universal appeal, she reasoned, because everyone has to eat. The name was a play on words: “beat” refers both to a journalist’s regular coverage area and to the rhythm of the local music scene. Apart from a hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, she has been compiling the area’s culinary and musical happenings on glossy printed pages since 2002.
Ahead of the Foodie Curve
The Eat Beat arrived well before the “foodie” boom fueled by the popularity of Food Network and similar media, which arguably put McCormick ahead of a major cultural shift. She does not see it that way. She says she has always loved cooking and trying new flavors, but mostly she was meeting a practical need. Walking into a restaurant to sell an ad was also simply a way to meet people.
“And I’m not a salesperson,” she insists. “I like to help people, and that was my way of helping these small businesses get exposure and bring customers in.”
She is not a food critic either, but she is a journalist in her own way, having chronicled a large slice of the Eastern Shore’s social and cultural history over her long run. Beyond event listings, a typical issue includes a recipe and cooking tips, community news and a feature story on a food professional.
The archived copies she keeps in her office are a genuine treasure trove. Paging through the bound editions, McCormick points out people and places, some well remembered and others nearly forgotten. Every issue seems to spark a memory.
“I’ve always enjoyed having the privilege of talking with people and learning about the experiences they’ve had,” she says, “and it doesn’t necessarily have to be about food.”
Mapping Fairhope’s Ever-Changing Downtown
One of the clearest measures of how quickly Fairhope’s food and entertainment scene changes arrives each spring. Many visitors to the annual Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival rely on a map McCormick produces to navigate downtown’s shifting maze of businesses.
“It’s an insert that has a map that covers from Sunset Pointe to Scenic 98 and has at least 50 businesses from that small area. It’s restaurants and bars plus bake shops and a grocery store,” she says. “Each year I have to rearrange it because this person’s now over here and this person’s gone out of business and this business is called something different.”
The festival itself is one of the largest events on the Eastern Shore. Held each March since the early 1950s, it draws artists from across the country and crowds that fill downtown’s streets for three days, making a reliable guide to where to eat and drink especially valuable for out-of-town guests.
A One-Woman Band on the Delivery Route
Producing The Eat Beat takes a great deal of work: gathering information, writing it up, publishing it and then delivering copies to places where people can pick them up, often while enjoying a meal or a drink. For years, McCormick made every delivery herself, frequently turning the route into family time with one or more of her three children riding along.
“I would start up on the Causeway and make my way down to Jesse’s in Magnolia Springs,” she says. “It was anywhere from 40 to 60 stops, and I would do it in one or two days. That’s how people got to know me. They saw that I was the owner, the production person, the distribution person, and the salesperson. I was a one-man band for years.”
When the publication returned after the COVID break, she had help. Her partners are now C.J. and Valerie Ezell of CrossBay Digital, located on Morphy Avenue in Fairhope, who handle both printing and The Eat Beat’s online presence.
“We complement each other,” she says. “It gives me great comfort knowing I’ve got somebody I can count on, and I can bounce ideas off of and that I can collaborate with. They are also well versed in the digital aspects of marketing and social media.”
From Restaurant Connections to Real Estate
Although she once had reservations about trading Montgomery for small-town life, McCormick clearly found a rewarding niche, and then some. Connections she made on the restaurant scene led her into a separate career in property management and real estate. Among her ventures is managing an enclave of vacation rental properties overlooking Mobile Bay known as The Bay House & Bungalows. The property is owned by Joe Ou, owner of Master Joe’s, and the house and surrounding buildings were formerly the home of longtime restaurateur Rick Gambino.
Her path is a familiar one on the Eastern Shore, where relationships built in one small business often open doors to another. In a community where many owners know one another personally, a newcomer who spent years walking into restaurants and chatting with chefs and managers ended up with one of the widest networks in town.
Watching the Eastern Shore Grow
The Eastern Shore has changed enormously since the McCormicks arrived. Baldwin County has been one of Alabama’s fastest-growing counties for years, and Fairhope, Daphne and Spanish Fort have added new neighborhoods, shopping centers and restaurants at a remarkable pace. Fairhope itself, founded in 1894 as a single-tax colony by idealistic settlers from Iowa, has grown from a small bayfront village into one of the most popular destinations on the Gulf Coast, known for its pier, flower-lined downtown streets and thriving arts scene.
McCormick has watched that growth firsthand and is not sure she likes everything the sleepy town has become. She can laugh now at her initial reaction after the move.
“Back then, I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’ I mean, there was nothing down here, but it turns out that ‘nothing’ was good. My boys grew up on the pier with a cast net catching their bait for fishing and playing Little League before it turned into a mega sports complex. Looking back on it, Mayberry wasn’t so bad. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to experience and appreciate the Fairhope community when I did.”
Why Local Guides Still Matter
In an era of review apps and social media feeds, a printed local guide might seem old-fashioned. Yet publications like The Eat Beat fill a role algorithms rarely do. They are curated by someone who knows the owners, understands which spots are family-friendly and keeps track of which bands are playing where. For small, independent restaurants that cannot afford large advertising budgets, a local guide offers affordable exposure to exactly the customers most likely to walk through their doors.
They also preserve community memory. Menus change, restaurants close and buildings get new names, but a shelf of back issues captures what a place was like at a given moment. McCormick’s bound volumes chart more than two decades of openings, closings, chefs, musicians and neighborhood characters on the Eastern Shore.
Readers looking for The Eat Beat can typically find copies in restaurants and businesses around the Eastern Shore, along with its online presence managed through CrossBay Digital. For McCormick, the publication has always been about more than listings. It is how a newcomer who knew no one became someone who seems to know everyone.