Pizza by the square, on a quiet Fairhope corner
Not everyone wants a whole pizza. That simple observation — that sometimes lunch is one square of cheese, a salad, and a cup of soup — is the whole idea behind Nini Squares, the family pizzeria on the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Bancroft Street in Fairhope, at 451 Magnolia Avenue. Order a slice, or three, add a soup or a generous salad, and you have a meal that would be hard to improve on a drizzly gray afternoon.
The name comes from the owners’ daughter, Nina, and the squares themselves are exactly what the name promises: pizza served by the piece, cut square, in five different varieties on any given day. The restaurant opened in 2023, when owners Chris and Rachel Cullen transformed an old house into a dining room with the cozy, intimate feel Chris wanted from the start — inside tables, a covered porch that regulars consider the best seat in town, and outdoor seating for the fair-weather months.
In the two-plus years since, the menu has grown well past its basic beginnings. Whole pizzas are now available, boxed pizzas travel well for takeout, burgers joined the lineup, and the kitchen has branched into pastas — including a linguini with shrimp that reviewers compare to what you would get in a fine-dining room. Wings and tenders, soups and salads round it out.
What to order when you go
The salads deserve their reputation. One is a chopped salad with a creamy Parmesan dressing; the other is a spring mix with a house-made balsamic vinaigrette that has converted more than one customer into a regular. The soup rotation changes — cream of cauliflower made an appearance on a recent visit — and there is a house-made meat sauce built from ground beef, ground pork, tomatoes, carrots, onions, and celery simmered into a tomato cream sauce, the kind of thing that rarely happens in a slice shop.
The pizza itself is the point, of course. The crust runs light and crispy, the toppings are fresh, and the slice format means a table can mix cheese, pepperoni, and whatever the specialty is that day without committing to a full pie. Reviews around town have been kind — customers call it the best pizza in Fairhope and praise the friendly, fast service, the family-friendly prices, and the weeknight-dinner reliability that every neighborhood needs.
The kids’ menu handles the pickiest diners: a square of cheese or pepperoni pizza, a choice of three different noodle dishes, and a cookie. Parents of small children will recognize the genius of that combination. For the adults, there are handcrafted libations alongside the sodas and teas — the jalapeño margarita is the one to try, refreshing and surprisingly not spicy.
An old house, a new tradition
Part of Nini Squares’ charm is architectural. The restaurant occupies a converted house, which gives it rooms and corners instead of a single open box, and the covered porch out front turns dinner into something closer to a porch-sitting evening. It is the kind of setting that suits Fairhope’s downtown neighborhood fabric — walkable streets, older homes, corners that invite lingering.
That fit is no accident. Fairhope’s dining scene has grown quickly along with the city itself, which has added more than 9,000 residents since 2010 and now counts somewhere north of 25,000 people. New restaurants open constantly on the Eastern Shore, and the ones that last tend to be the ones that give families a reason to come back weekly — reasonable checks, food kids will eat, service that remembers your name. Nini Squares checked those boxes early. The staff, when they are not serving or taking orders, are checking on customers and wiping down tables, which tells you most of what you need to know about the place.
The hours have expanded too. The restaurant opened Mondays to its schedule, making it a Monday-through-Saturday operation running 11 to 8, and boxed takeout pizzas and delivery through the major apps have made it an easy weeknight answer for households across town. Pets are welcome in the outdoor seating, which matters in a town where the sidewalk traffic includes a fair number of dogs.
Where the square slice comes from
Pizza cut into squares is not a gimmick; it is one of the oldest traditions in the American pizza story. Sicilian-style pizza — baked in a rectangular pan, thick or thin depending on the baker — has been a fixture of Italian-American bakeries for more than a century, and in many Sicilian towns the ancestor of all pizza, sfincione, was sold in rectangular pieces long before pizza ever reached a round tin. In the Midwest, tavern-style pizza cut into squares became the default order, and generations of American school cafeterias immortalized the rectangular slice in memory if not always in quality.
What Nini Squares does is take that familiar format and give it the treatment it rarely got: a light, crispy crust, fresh toppings, and a menu built to accompany it. The square format solves real problems for a small kitchen — faster baking, easier portioning, less waste — and for customers it turns pizza into something closer to a lunch counter experience than a commitment.
A dining scene growing up fast
Fairhope’s restaurant landscape has changed dramatically in just a few years, and Nini Squares arrived in the middle of that wave. The town’s growth — among the fastest in a county that ranks near the top of national growth charts — has brought chains and concepts of every description to the Eastern Shore, along with national attention for the area’s established kitchens. In that environment, the restaurants that build durable followings are usually not the ones with the biggest launch; they are the ones that become habits.
The habits Nini Squares encourages are small and repeatable: a Tuesday lunch of two squares and soup, a Thursday porch dinner with a margarita, a Saturday boxed pizza for the soccer team. That is how a family restaurant earns its place in a town’s week, and it is why the two-year-old pizzeria already reads like a fixture rather than a newcomer. Online reviewers consistently land on the same points — the light crispy crust, the fresh ingredients, the friendly staff, the prices that do not break the bank — and the delivery apps that carry its menu to the rest of Fairhope have only widened the circle.
The corner itself
Magnolia Avenue runs through one of the most storied parts of Fairhope, a few blocks from the bluff-top parks and the 1,448-foot municipal pier that reach out into Mobile Bay. The neighborhood around the corner of Magnolia and Bancroft is the classic Fairhope mix — older homes, shade trees, streets built for walking — and a converted-house restaurant fits it naturally. Diners can park once and make an evening of the area, or stop in for a slice on the way to the pier for sunset.
Why the slice format works
There is a quiet genius to the square-slice model. A family of four can order exactly what each person wants — a cheese square here, a pepperoni square there, a chopped salad to share — without a leftover half-pie problem. Solo diners get a real lunch for pocket change compared to a whole pie. And the kitchen, freed from making only full pizzas, has room to run specials, rotate soups, and experiment.
It is the rare restaurant concept that scales down as well as up: a quick solo lunch, a kids’-menu dinner, a porch evening with a margarita, or a stack of boxed pizzas for the team. The Cullens have quietly built a neighborhood fixture on a corner where an old house used to stand, and Fairhope — a town that has never been short of opinions about its restaurants — has taken to it.
The restaurant’s online presence makes the rest easy: orders can be placed for delivery through the major apps, and the menu travels well, from the wings — buffalo, barbecue, or garlic Parmesan with that creamy Parmesan dressing — to the pastas and the boxed pies. For a town where weekday schedules are packed with school runs and sports practices, that flexibility is not a luxury; it is the product.
So if you live in or around Fairhope and want pizza without buying a whole pie, the corner of Magnolia and Bancroft has your answer. Get the chopped salad, try the jalapeño margarita, and if it is nice out, take the porch. The squares will take care of the rest.