Mobile restaurants start 2022 with openings, closings and a TV spot

Mobile’s restaurant world turned over a fresh leaf at the start of 2022, with familiar favorites closing their doors, new concepts opening, and a local chef landing a national television spot. The first weeks of the year delivered the full range of the industry’s post-pandemic realities: two beloved pizza spots shut down, a Midtown Italian kitchen and a downtown bistro welcomed diners, a sandwich shop returned from the dead, and a Dauphin Street restaurateur headed back in front of national cameras. For a city whose dining scene has always run on neighborhood institutions as much as new openings, the turnover touched nearly every corner of town.

Cortlandt’s Pizza Pub Says Goodbye to Spring Hill

The Old Shell Road shopping center lost one of its most popular gathering spots when Cortlandt’s Pizza Pub announced in early January that it would close. The pizzeria had built a loyal following thanks to its lively bar, well-regarded happy hour and attentive staff. Ownership pointed to the widespread staffing shortages that have strained the industry as a factor in the decision.

The closure landed hard in Spring Hill, a close-knit neighborhood where the shopping center has long served as a practical town square. The space sits alongside Rouses, Hemline and Ace Hardware, a lineup that puts groceries, women’s fashion and hardware on the same strip — and that, until January, included a pizza pub where Little League teams, church groups and after-work regulars all crossed paths. Restaurants like Cortlandt’s function as more than food service in neighborhoods like this one; when one closes, the loss registers as a civic change, not just a menu that disappeared.

The neighboring Red Beard’s Outfitter has also relocated farther east near Nixon’s and the Dew Drop Inn, thinning the center’s roster of independent businesses further. The shifts left the center with a different character than the one regulars had grown used to, and they reflected a broader reshuffling of Mobile retail: tenants moving to accommodate different rents, foot traffic patterns and post-pandemic shopping habits, with the effects concentrated in older neighborhood centers along Old Shell Road.

The reason behind Cortlandt’s exit — staffing — was the same story playing out in kitchens and dining rooms across the country. Restaurants that had run for years on experienced bartenders, servers and line cooks found themselves competing for a thinner pool of applicants, raising wages and trimming hours just as supply costs climbed. Establishments with deep customer bases were not immune; the shortage hit operations regardless of how loyal the clientele, and ownership at Cortlandt’s concluded the math no longer worked.

Spiffy Fox Exits Leinkauf

Leinkauf’s Spiffy Fox Pizza and Pub also confirmed it would shut down permanently. The Irish- and Gaelic-inspired pizzeria, known as well for its fish and chips, had celebrated its first anniversary just as the pandemic upended the industry. Compounding business struggles with recent health issues for its ownership made continuing difficult.

The timing could hardly have been crueler. A restaurant that marks its first birthday and immediately faces a global shutdown of dining rooms has spent nearly its entire existence in survival mode, and Spiffy Fox’s run tracked the industry’s worst stretch — capacity limits, staffing gaps and a slow return of the office crowds and nightlife that keep a pub business alive. Leinkauf, Mobile’s historic district just south of Government Street, has seen its share of turnover over the years, and the neighborhood’s mix of cottages, storefronts and long-standing bars gives it a loyal local base that new concepts work hard to earn.

The building has a long history of turning out well-loved pizza. That lineage matters in Mobile, where certain addresses become associated with a dish the way others become associated with a family name, and where a new tenant inherits both the goodwill and the high expectations of the one that came before. What fills the Spiffy Fox space next will be measured against decades of neighborhood memory the moment its doors open.

T Marie’s Brings Italian to the Loop

Midtown gained a new Italian destination as T Marie’s Ristorante Italiano opened at 2056 Government Street in the Loop. The restaurant grew out of the former Mirko Pasta location; local owners purchased the franchise rights outright, securing access to the recipes without running afoul of naming restrictions tied to the original franchise agreement.

The arrangement is an unusual one, and it says a good deal about how determined the ownership was to keep a going concern alive. Rather than letting a closed franchise leave a dark storefront and its regulars without their usual table, the buyers bought their way into the recipes and rebuilt the concept under a new name. Regulars of the former restaurant found the dishes they remembered; the new sign above the door reflected the new, locally owned reality. It is a model other communities have watched closely as franchise closures mount: sometimes the fastest path to preserving a restaurant’s identity is for its fans to buy it.

On its third day open, the kitchen was still working through a new point-of-sale system and awaiting a liquor license expected in February, but early visitors found the food worth the wait. Opening week under those conditions — no beer or wine on the tables, staff learning a new ordering system in real time — tested the kitchen’s momentum, and the early reviews from diners suggested it held. A second room expands the footprint and helps fill Midtown’s appetite for Italian fare, giving the restaurant room for larger parties and a seating capacity its predecessor did not have.

The Loop — the stretch of Government Street just west of downtown that takes its name from the old streetcar line — has been one of Midtown’s most closely watched corridors for new dining. Its mix of offices, shops and neighborhood institutions gives a restaurant at that address a built-in lunch crowd and a dinner crowd drawn from surrounding streets. An Italian kitchen with full dinner service and, once the license arrived, a working bar fits the corridor’s pattern of dependable, family-friendly spots.

Bistro St. Emanuel Opens at Fort Conde Inn

Late 2021 brought the debut of Bistro St. Emanuel inside the Fort Conde Inn at 200 St. Emanuel Street. The renovated space offers daily breakfast from 7 to 10 a.m., with several takes on eggs Benedict, a range of omelets, waffles, French toast and pancakes. Sunday brunch runs until 2 p.m.

The bistro gives the downtown hotel a proper restaurant anchor and gives morning visitors to the historic district a sit-down option within sight of Fort Conde and the city’s museum district. St. Emanuel Street runs through the heart of downtown Mobile, steps from the convention area and the buildings that house the city’s history institutions, and a reliable breakfast service fills a practical gap for both hotel guests and downtown workers looking for a hot morning meal before the workday starts.

Mediterranean Sandwich Co. Returns Downtown

A downtown favorite came back to life: the refreshed Mediterranean Sandwich Co. reopened with its gyros, pita sandwiches, orzo and hummus. Customers who can’t make it in person can order online for delivery. The return was a small but meaningful piece of good news for downtown Mobile, where the recovery of lunch traffic — office workers, jurors, students and visitors — has driven which shops survive. A sandwich shop with a devoted following and a delivery option slots neatly into that economy, serving both the desk-lunch crowd and the midday walk-in traffic that has been returning to Dauphin Street and the surrounding blocks.

Reopenings like this one carry extra weight after a stretch in which downtown storefronts have changed hands rapidly. Regulars who lost a favorite lunch spot during the pandemic era tend to reward the ones that come back, and a refreshed space with the same menu is about the most welcome sight a street-level block can get. For the blocks around it, a busy sandwich counter means foot traffic at hours when the sidewalk might otherwise be quiet.

SOCU’s Erica Barrett Heads to the Food Network

Erica Barrett, the force behind SOCU Southern Kitchen and Oyster Bar on Dauphin Street, will appear on Food Network’s competition series “Raid the Fridge.” The show, which airs its episode featuring Barrett on Tuesday, Jan. 25, challenges chefs to build dishes from mystery refrigerators — a format that tests improvisation and speed rather than a signature menu, and one that tends to reveal which cooks can really think on their feet.

Barrett is no stranger to national television, having appeared on ABC’s “Shark Tank” and CNBC’s “The Profit,” and her Southern Culture Artisan Foods grits earned a spot on Oprah’s Favorite Things in 2016. Those appearances built a national profile unusual for a Mobile restaurateur, and each one fed back into the local businesses: viewers who first saw her pitch investors on television became diners at her Dauphin Street restaurant, and the grits line gave the SOCU kitchen a retail footprint far beyond Mobile. Her latest turn on the Food Network extends that pattern, putting the city’s name in front of a national food-focused audience.

The restaurant is also preparing to open SOCU Coffee Bar directly across the street. A dedicated coffee concept widens the brand’s reach into the morning hours that a full kitchen and oyster bar do not typically capture, and adds to the growing lineup of daytime options on that stretch of Dauphin Street. Together with the Television appearance, it marks Barrett as one of the most visible figures in Mobile’s dining scene heading into the new year.

A Scene in Transition

Taken together, the first weeks of 2022 sketch a fair picture of where Mobile’s restaurant industry stands. Closings at Cortlandt’s and Spiffy Fox traced the pressure lines — staffing, pandemic-era losses and owners’ health — while openings at T Marie’s, Bistro St. Emanuel and the Mediterranean Sandwich Co. showed operators still willing to bet on the city’s neighborhoods. Add a hometown chef appearing on national television and a new coffee bar going in on Dauphin Street, and the scene’s through-line is resilience rather than retreat: the names on the storefronts keep changing, but Mobile keeps setting the tables.

For diners, the practical takeaway was simple. Spring Hill lost a pizza pub, Leinkauf lost a second, Midtown gained an Italian kitchen with room to grow, downtown gained a breakfast spot and got a favorite sandwich shop back, and Dauphin Street’s oyster bar put the city back on national television. In a food town that measures itself by its neighborhoods, that is a busy stretch by any standard — and it all happened before the end of January.