A fixture of Old Towne Daphne for nearly a century has gone dark. Alex Manci, longtime owner of Manci’s Antique Club, confirmed this week that the bar and restaurant served its last customers the previous Sunday, ending an era for one of Baldwin County’s most recognizable gathering spots. The handwritten “Closed” sign that Manci hung on the front door Monday morning did more than announce a shuttered business; it closed out a run on Main Street that stretches back almost as far as Daphne itself has had a recognizable downtown.
“I have spent my whole lifetime up there,” Manci said of the decision. “It’s time for me to leave. It’s still not easy to talk about, but it was time to go.” He called the moment emotional after so many years behind the bar, and he acknowledged that saying goodbye publicly has been harder than the business calculation that led to it. For decades, the dark interior, the shelves of old bottles and the walls of farm tools made the place as much a museum of Baldwin County life as a bar, and generations of regulars treated it that way.
A century on Main Street
The building’s story stretches back to 1924, when Italian immigrant Frank Manci purchased property on Main Street in Daphne and opened a gas station. It was a practical business for a growing bayfront town. Daphne sits on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, and Main Street served as the backbone of the community’s commercial life, drawing farmers, fishermen and families from across the surrounding countryside long before the subdivisions and retail corridors of modern Baldwin County arrived. Service stations in that era often doubled as neighborhood gathering spots, and the Manci property was no exception.
Frank’s son, Arthur Manci, took over the business in 1947. Arthur, who later served as mayor of Daphne, transformed the operation into a bar after securing a liquor license two decades later, giving the site the identity it would carry for the rest of the century. Over the years, the walls filled up with farm tools, old bottles and other curiosities, an unplanned collection that gave the place its “antique club” name and its unmistakable character. Nothing about the decor was staged. Items accumulated the way they do in a place where generations of the same families stop in, and nobody ever wants to throw anything away.
That history made Manci’s a rare thing on the Eastern Shore: a business that survived every transformation of the city around it. Daphne grew from a small bay community into one of Baldwin County’s largest cities, its population swelling as families migrated across the bay from Mobile and new development spread along U.S. Highway 98 toward Spanish Fort and Fairhope. Old Towne Daphne kept its own identity through that growth, and Manci’s was central to it — the kind of place where the clientele ranged from attorneys and teachers to contractors and fishermen, and where conversations picked up mid-sentence across decades.
Locals will also tell you the bar sat at the heart of a stretch of the city best known for its oak-lined streets, its historic churches and the annual jubilee phenomenon that makes Daphne’s shoreline famous among Gulf Coast residents. In a downtown that has worked for years to hold on to its small-town character while the rest of the county booms, Manci’s functioned as an anchor — a place where newcomers went to learn the local history and old-timers went because nothing had ever really changed.
Third generation, full kitchen
Alex Manci took the reins in 1987, becoming the third generation of his family to run the business. By then the bar had long since earned a reputation that extended past Daphne’s city limits, drawing regulars from across Baldwin County and across the bay in Mobile for an atmosphere that newer establishments could not replicate. In 1995, he and his wife began serving food, expanding the business into the full-service eatery that generations of Baldwin County residents came to know.
The menu built a devoted following around its burgers, seafood po-boys, fried softshell crab sandwiches and Bloody Marys. The kitchen leaned on the bounty of Mobile Bay and the nearby Gulf, and the softshell crab sandwich in particular became the kind of dish people planned a week around. Lunch rushes mixed suits and work boots, and in the evenings the bar filled with regulars who had their own seats and their own orders that never needed repeating.
The bar’s quirks became part of its brand. A wooden cutout rigged with a buzzer in the restroom turned first-time visitors into storytellers, and photos of the contraption circulated among locals long before social media made sharing such things routine. Over the years the interior filled with artifacts from every era of the business — family pictures, memorabilia, tools from Eastern Shore farms. Nothing had been updated to chase trends, and that was precisely the point.
The spot’s reputation reached well beyond South Alabama after a Food Network crew featured it on a national cooking show in 2008. The appearance introduced the bar to a national audience and brought a steady stream of curious travelers who detoured off Interstate 10 to see whether the place lived up to what they had seen on television. For years afterward, out-of-state visitors crowded in alongside the regulars, many of them saying they had planned an entire Gulf Coast trip around a stop in Daphne.
Those regulars became part of the fabric of the place. Birthdays were celebrated at the bar, retirement parties spilled out onto the floor, and generations of families marked milestones in the same room where their grandparents had done the same. The restaurant became the kind of business communities measure themselves against: when people from Daphne moved away, a visit back was not complete without a stop at Manci’s, and when they described their hometown to outsiders, the bar was among the first places they named.
The restaurant also occupied a place in Baldwin County’s broader dining culture. In an era when the Eastern Shore’s food scene has grown rapidly with new restaurants opening across Daphne, Fairhope and Spanish Fort, Manci’s stood apart precisely because it never changed — a holdover from an older Alabama of corner bars and family kitchens that predated the area’s boom.
Why the doors closed
Manci said the closure came down to wanting more time with his wife and a life outside the business after years of long days that started at 8 a.m. and stretched until the last customer left. He employed a small staff of kitchen workers, waitresses and a part-time bartender, whom he told directly about the closing before the news spread. For a business of its size, Manci’s depended on those employees personally, and Manci’s decision to deliver the news face to face reflected how closely he worked alongside them every day.
News of the shutdown caught many regulars off guard. The business’s social media page had promoted a catfish special just days before the closure, and longtime patrons flooded the page afterward expressing disbelief and asking whether the rumors were true. Manci confirmed them, comparing the closure to losing family. “It’s like losing my mother and father,” he said, “but I have to have a life myself.”
The reaction underscored how deeply the bar was woven into the community. Former customers posted memories of first dates, holiday gatherings and long lunches that stretched into the afternoon. Others asked what would become of the building and the collection of antiques inside it, reflecting how much of the place’s identity was tied to a one-of-a-kind interior that no renovation could recreate.
Regulars also remembered the small rituals that made the bar feel like an extension of home — the bartender who knew the order before it was spoken, the tables where the same groups gathered on the same nights week after week, the postgame crowds that rolled in after Daphne High School football games. Those habits are difficult to replace, and their loss is felt in ways that go beyond the closure of any single business.
What comes next
Manci said he hopes the business can continue under new ownership in some form rather than disappearing altogether, saying he intends to find someone willing to carry on the Manci’s name. Whether a buyer preserves the restaurant as it has operated for decades or takes it in a new direction, the name and the collection give any successor a foundation few start-ups could match. Transitions at other longtime Alabama establishments, however, show how difficult it can be to hand off not just a business but an institution — the regulars, the recipes and the atmosphere are all bound up in the people who built them.
For now, Old Towne Daphne has lost one of its longest-running and most colorful institutions, closing a chapter that spanned three generations of one family and nearly a hundred years on the same stretch of Main Street. The city around it will keep growing, but the spot where Frank Manci first opened a gas station in 1924 will no longer be the place where his family poured drinks, fried softshell crab and kept the story of Old Towne Daphne alive night after night. For the regulars who called it their second home, Sunday’s last call marked the end of an era that will not come again.