A popular midtown Mobile wine shop is preparing to more than double its footprint after signing a lease on a Dauphin Street building being vacated by a well-known restaurant. The move marks a milestone for a small business that has grown steadily in its original location and now finds itself in need of the kind of space midtown rarely frees up.
Owners Randy and Sherri Williams confirmed they have signed a lease at 1104 Dauphin St. and hope to relocate their business, a wine and gourmet shop that also serves dinner, sometime in September. The new address places the shop on one of midtown Mobile’s principal commercial corridors, in a stretch of Dauphin Street that has long mixed neighborhood businesses with destinations that draw customers from across the city.
For the Williamses, the lease is the answer to a problem most small business owners would like to have: a customer base that has outgrown the room available to serve it. What began as a wine and gourmet retail shop has become, over five years, a hybrid of retail and restaurant that its building was never designed to accommodate at scale.
A growing business needs more room
The Williamses opened their Mobile shop five years ago inside the former Nixon Drugs building on Old Shell Road, across from the Dew Drop Inn. The location quickly proved itself: Old Shell Road’s foot traffic and the Dew Drop’s across-the-street draw put the shop in the middle of one of midtown’s most reliable commercial corners, and the neighborhood took the business in as if it had always been there.
About two years in, they began serving dinner five nights a week, and the business has since outgrown that space. The dinner service transformed the shop’s identity — customers stopped in for a bottle and stayed for a meal, or came for dinner and left with cases of wine — and each side of the business fed the other until the building’s limits became the business’s limits.
“It’s been a really good location for us,” Randy Williams said, “but the kitchen could never be what we wanted, and parking is an issue. That’s what prompted the move.” The twin constraints of a cramped kitchen and tight parking capped the growth of a restaurant operation that kept filling every seat it could set.
The new Dauphin Street location will grow the business from roughly 2,200 square feet to about 5,000 square feet, though Williams predicted the extra room “will get eaten up pretty quickly.” Businesses that double their space rarely double their capacity to fill it slowly, and the owners are planning the larger footprint with the assumption that Mobile’s appetite for the concept will keep pace.
He described the new layout as a significant departure from the current setup: much of what is currently dining space will become retail area, while the bar will be redesigned but remain in the same general spot. In effect, the expansion will rebalance the business — more shelf space for the wine and gourmet side that started it all, with dining and the bar reworked around a floor plan that finally fits both.
The redesign will also let the shop display inventory it currently cannot stock in depth. A larger retail floor means broader selections, better browsing and the ability to stage the kind of seasonal and themed displays that wine shops use to introduce customers to new regions and producers — amenities impossible in the Old Shell Road building’s footprint.
Timing tied to a restaurant’s closing
The opportunity arose as another Dauphin Street tenant, a three-year-old restaurant, was closing its doors the same evening the lease news broke, following its general manager’s acknowledgment that the location’s size presented both opportunity and challenges. The restaurant’s experience with the building — ample room, but a lot of it to fill — made it the right opening at the right moment for a business that had proven it could fill smaller space beyond capacity.
That irony is a familiar one in the restaurant trade. The same square footage that burdens one operator becomes the growth platform for another, and the transition at 1104 Dauphin will swap an operation strained by its size for one that has been strained by the lack of it. For Dauphin Street, the quick turnover also avoids the prolonged vacancy that can drag down a commercial block.
Commercial turnover along midtown’s corridors tends to draw close attention from residents, who track which businesses open and close as a gauge of the neighborhood’s health. A lease that moves a proven, popular business into a vacated space — rather than leaving the address dark or subdividing it — is generally read as a vote of confidence in the corridor.
Room to grow, and to entertain
The larger space will let the business begin offering private dining for the first time, something Williams said customers have long requested for business meetings, rehearsal dinners and wine tastings. The private room will be among the most visible changes the new address brings.
“When a good winemaker comes to town, we can have tastings and tasting dinners that will be really popular with people, I think,” Williams said, sketching out the kind of programming the current kitchen and dining room could never accommodate. Producer visits and tasting dinners are signature events for wine-driven restaurants, drawing enthusiasts from across a region and positioning the host as a destination rather than a neighborhood option.
Private dining is among the most reliable revenue streams in the restaurant business — booked in advance, predictable in headcount and often attached to the highest-margin occasions on the calendar. Business meetings, rehearsal dinners, holiday parties and club gatherings fill weekday rooms that would otherwise sit quiet, and a private room doubles as a hosting space for the shop’s own supplier events.
The request itself says something about the customer base the Williamses have built. Guests who ask for private dining are guests who plan to return with groups — and groups of diners introduced to a wine shop’s cellar frequently leave as retail customers, keeping the two sides of the business feeding each other in the new location just as they did in the old one.
What the move means for midtown
The relocation carries weight beyond one storefront. Midtown Mobile’s commercial identity rests on locally owned businesses like the Williamses’ — shops and restaurants that draw customers from across the city and give the neighborhoods between Spring Hill and downtown their character. A homegrown business scaling up within midtown, rather than leaving it, reinforces the case that the area can sustain ambitious small businesses.
Dauphin Street west of downtown has been gaining momentum as a dining and retail corridor, and each established name that commits to it extends the corridor’s gravitational pull a bit further west. The wine shop’s dinner service, five nights a week, adds steady evening traffic to a stretch that benefits from every destination restaurant it can hold onto.
For the Old Shell Road location, the departure leaves a familiar building vacant across from the Dew Drop Inn — a spot whose history with Nixon Drugs and, more recently, the wine shop gives it proven commercial bones. Midtown corridors have generally shown an ability to backfill well-located spaces quickly, and attention will turn to what comes next for one of Old Shell’s recognizable addresses.
The logistics of a September move
A September relocation sets a brisk pace. The Williamses must build out the new space — redesigning the bar, converting former dining areas to retail floor, and fitting a kitchen to the standard the old one never met — while keeping the Old Shell Road operation running until the doors close there for the last time.
Inventory is its own project: a wine and gourmet shop relocating must catalog, transport and re-shelve hundreds of bottles and specialty items, with temperature and handling concerns throughout. Owners typically schedule such a move to minimize closed days, and the September target suggests the Williamses intend to carry as much momentum from the summer season into the new location as the build-out allows.
The customers, meanwhile, will need to adjust five years of habit. Regulars who planned their routes around Old Shell Road will now find their favorite wine counter and dinner table on Dauphin Street, in roughly twice the space, with the same owners and — the bet the Williamses are making — more of what they came for.
From a storefront across from the Dew Drop Inn to 5,000 square feet on Dauphin Street, the shop’s trajectory tracks the kind of growth story midtown Mobile likes to tell: a local business that started small, listened to its customers, outgrew its walls and found its next home just a few blocks away.