RBS Chicken Shack Brings New Orleans-Style Cooking to Airport Boulevard

A new independent restaurant on Mobile’s Airport Boulevard is betting that diners want fine-dining craft without the stuffy label. RBS Chicken Shack opens its doors with the confidence of a kitchen that has nothing to prove and everything to offer, pairing white-tablecloth technique with a casual room where families, regulars and late-night crowds are all equally welcome. The concept lands in a corridor already known to Mobile diners for its long row of established eateries, and the owners say the goal is to give that stretch of road something it has not quite had before: food executed at fine-dining standards, served at fried-chicken-shack prices and pace.

RBS Chicken Shack is the creation of three co-owners whose initials lend the name: Chef Bryan “Red” Flaxbeard, “Bow” Saowaluk Sirinanuwut and Chris Sooder. The shorthand is a fitting one for a restaurant built on informality, and each partner brings a distinct piece of the operation. Flaxbeard leads the kitchen, Sirinanuwut and Sooder anchor the front of the house, and the three share a conviction that hospitality should feel personal rather than performed.

Flaxbeard and Sooder each bring more than a decade of fine-dining experience, having met while working at the celebrated New Orleans landmark Commander’s Palace under chef Jamie Shannon. Commander’s Palace is among the most storied restaurants in American dining, the Garden District institution where generations of New Orleans’ defining chefs trained and where standards for Creole cooking were set for the rest of the country. The two arrived during Shannon’s tenure, an era remembered for both rigor and generosity of spirit, and the lessons of that kitchen still shape how Flaxbeard runs his own.

Their division of labor dates to those days. Flaxbeard ran the kitchen; Sooder worked the front of the house. Years of working the same dining rooms taught each man the other’s side of the business, and both say that shared vocabulary shows up in how smoothly service runs, from the timing of courses to the way the room handles a full house on weekends.

A menu built on Creole technique

That background shows in a menu built around Creole technique. The cooking of New Orleans is a layered tradition, part French, part Spanish, part Caribbean and African, and its foundations, roux, stock work, careful seasoning and sauces built by hand, are exactly the skills drilled into cooks at the highest level of the city’s restaurant world. Here those methods are applied to the kind of food people actually crave on a Tuesday night in Mobile.

Creole cooking arrived in Mobile long before it was codified in New Orleans kitchens, and the Gulf Coast has always shared one continuous foodway, seafood from the bay, rice from the wet prairies, okra and peppers from summer gardens, and the French-Spanish-African layering that defines the region’s oldest dishes. Cooking that tradition with formal technique is not a departure so much as a return to fundamentals that home cooks and restaurant chefs once held in common. Flaxbeard’s menu reads like a reminder of that shared heritage, familiar enough for a lifelong Alabamian and detailed enough for a student of the cuisine.

Flaxbeard, who demonstrated fried green tomatoes and crawfish remoulade on Fox 10’s “Someone’s In the Kitchen,” weaves New Orleans flavor throughout, from crab and corn bisque to house-made andouille gumbo. The local television segment gave viewers a preview of the restaurant’s approach: recognizable Southern dishes executed with the patience and precision of a fine-dining kitchen. The bisque arrives rich and velvety, the gumbo starts with a dark roux made in-house, and the andouille that seasons it is produced on the premises rather than ordered in.

The chicken that gives the shack its name is treated with the same seriousness. Fried chicken rewards exactly the habits a Creole kitchen instills, from brining and seasoning through temperature control in the fryer, and the kitchen’s version has quickly become the dish regulars mention first. Plates arrive in generous portions, with sides that rotate with what is good and available.

Sourcing close to home

The partners buy close to home: jumbo shrimp from Jubilee Seafood, chicken from Mississippi and Alabama, sweet potatoes from Baldwin County, and meats from Naman’s Catering. Each of those relationships ties the restaurant into the Gulf Coast food economy. Jubilee Seafood has long been a name Mobile residents associate with fresh local catch, Baldwin County’s farms supply sweet corn, tomatoes and potatoes across the eastern shore, and the chicken sourced from Mississippi and Alabama keeps the signature dish rooted in the region.

The teaching instinct runs both ways in the kitchen. Veteran cooks describe the shack as a place where fine-dining habits, mise en place kept immaculate, sauces tasted and adjusted constantly, fryer oil changed on schedule, are passed to younger staff who may never have worked anywhere so demanding. Several of the current kitchen crew came up through casual Mobile kitchens and are learning stock work and sauce building on the job, which the owners count as part of the restaurant’s role in the local industry.

The “farm table” philosophy means sauces made in-house and nearly everything cooked to order, with the exception of the bread pudding. In practice, that means the kitchen runs with the rhythms of a much more formal restaurant, stocks built daily, dressings and sauces prepared from raw ingredients, and plates finished when they are ordered. The one dish prepared ahead is the signature dessert, which improves with time as the bread soaks up custard and flavor.

That dessert is worth the exception. The signature Moonpie Bread Pudding takes the beloved Gulf South snack cake and turns it into the classic Southern comfort dessert, a playful nod that has become the restaurant’s most talked-about ending. Servers describe it as the item that converts first-timers into regulars.

Prices that leave room for more

Most entrees land in the $11 to $17 range, leaving room for an appetizer or the signature Moonpie Bread Pudding. The pricing is a deliberate choice in an era when a casual dinner out can easily run well past that, and it reflects the owners’ view that craft cooking should be an everyday occasion rather than a special one. Lunch crowds can eat a full plate with a drink for the cost of a fast-casual combo, while the same menu holds up for an anniversary dinner.

The accessibility extends to the room itself. The dining area keeps the tone light, with counter service during busy stretches, a bar where regulars settle in, and none of the ceremony that the chefs’ resumes might suggest. Children are welcome, takeout is a significant part of the business, and the staff is trained to guide newcomers through the menu rather than assume familiarity.

Mobile’s dining public has shown increasing appetite for chef-driven concepts outside the downtown entertainment districts, following the city’s broader growth along the Airport and Schillinger corridors and the explosive development of western Mobile County. RBS Chicken Shack’s early crowds include plenty of diners making the drive from Satsuma, Saraland and Theodore, evidence that a destination restaurant can thrive in the middle of the corridor rather than at either end of it.

Brunch and the road toward late night

A Sunday brunch adds chicken and waffles and traditional eggs Benedict, and the owners are developing a late-night menu as they extend hours toward 2 a.m. Brunch has become a fixture of Mobile’s weekend rhythm, and the pairing of the kitchen’s fried chicken with waffles has proven a natural fit, while the eggs Benedict gives traditionalists their anchor. Service on Sundays draws families after church and the late-morning crowd looking for a proper meal rather than a quick one.

The late-night plans are where the owners see the biggest opening. Restaurant kitchens in Mobile largely wind down by 10 p.m., leaving the city’s after-hours crowd, service industry workers finishing their own shifts, night owls, travelers, with a short list of drive-through options. A kitchen serving real food made to order toward 2 a.m. would put RBS Chicken Shack in a category of one along much of Airport Boulevard, and the developing late-night menu is being built around dishes that hold up well into the small hours.

Extending hours is also a statement about the workforce. Late-night restaurants succeed only when staff commit to the schedule, and the owners say the response from the kitchen crew has been enthusiastic, with cooks who like the energy of a bar crowd and servers who appreciate the tips that come with it. The gradual approach, pushing hours later as business supports, reflects the same patience the partners learned in fine dining, where growth is earned night by night.

The owners are candid about what the coming year holds: solidifying the core menu, finishing the late-night rollout and settling into the rhythm of a restaurant that has found its regulars. If the early months are any guide, the shack’s blend of disciplined cooking and easygoing hospitality has found its audience, and Airport Boulevard has gained a kitchen that treats a plate of fried chicken with the same respect it once gave to the tasting menus of the Garden District.