Some restaurants earn their reputation on novelty. Ed’s Drive-In in Jackson has spent six decades earning it the other way — by refusing to change. The hand-pressed hamburgers, the chicken-fried steak sandwich, the flaked-ice Cokes, and the giant steel I-beams rising through the dining canopy have all outlasted ownership changes, economic swings, plant closings, a pandemic, and every fast-food chain that has planted a flag along Highway 43. And now, 60 years in, the drive-in is growing again: owners Justin and Julia Brooks have added a second location, buying Grove Hill’s beloved old Dairy Bar and turning it into Ed’s Dairy Bar.
The recognition came from outside first. In 2024, a regional news website named Ed’s to its list of classic Alabama burger joints worth revisiting, and a national magazine included the drive-in among the South’s most beloved hamburger joints. For anyone who has pulled into the parking lot at 3018 College Avenue, the honors made sense — and for anyone who hasn’t, they were a reason to make the trip north.
Clarke County itself has a long relationship with the road. Jackson sits along U.S. 43 roughly an hour north of Mobile, and for decades the highway has carried a mixed traffic of timber trucks, school buses, hunters bound for camps in the Tombigbee bottomlands, and families heading to Tuscaloosa or Birmingham. Towns along the route lived or died by the businesses that served that flow, and the drive-ins and cafes of Clarke County — in Jackson, Grove Hill, and Thomasville — became landmarks precisely because travelers could count on them, decade after decade, to be exactly where they remembered.
Ed’s occupies a special place in that landscape, because it never rebuilt, rebranded, or relocated. The sign out front, the canopy, the I-beams, even the phone number have stayed constant while everything around them changed. That kind of continuity compounds: grandparents who ate at Troy’s brought their children, who brought theirs, and the restaurant now serves customers whose family history with the building spans most of its sixty years.
A building that dates to June 1964
The restaurant has operated from the same classic-looking building since June 1964, when Troy Jones built it as Troy’s Drive-In on U.S. 43 — the main artery running from Mobile toward Tuscaloosa, and still the road by which hunters, students, and travelers pass through Jackson on the way to Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and points north. Jones ran it through its first two decades.
The man who gave the place its permanent name arrived on day one. Ed Harris started working at Troy’s in 1964, bought the business from Jones in 1984, renamed it Ed’s Drive-In, and ran it for another twenty years before retiring in 2006. Customers knew him as “Mr. Ed,” and regulars still describe him the same way: “He greeted the people. Everybody was somebody to him.” Two owners came and went between Harris’s retirement and 2019, when Justin and Julia Brooks bought the business and the building — becoming, fittingly, the fifth owners in the drive-in’s history.
The Brookses knew the place as customers first. Julia grew up in Jackson, and when the two were dating, Ed’s was their standing date spot — hamburgers and cherry Cokes eaten in Justin’s pickup in the parking lot while they talked about the future. “There’s not many restaurants here, so that would be like our little date spot,” Julia has recalled. “We really didn’t have a reason to buy it. We just knew we loved the food. We loved the feel it gave us. We didn’t want to change anything.”
Their backgrounds could hardly be more different from restaurant ownership. Justin works in construction and oversees the restaurant’s operations. Julia started her career as an RN and LPN for Blue Cross before founding her own real estate agency, Village Properties, in Jackson — though she says restaurant management was always in the back of her mind. And their daughters’ names, Emma and Delta, quietly confirm the drive-in’s famous initials weren’t leaving the family. The couple has kept the restaurant’s oldest traditions intact while modernizing the parts customers never see — most visibly, the way a small-town drive-in now reaches new customers through social media instead of word of mouth alone.
The hamburger, engineered by hand
The centerpiece of the menu is unchanged, and its production is a small piece of industrial theater. No hamburger meat at Ed’s is ever frozen. The kitchen hand-rolls the beef into balls thirty at a time, then runs each ball through a patty press that has been in service for longer than anyone can precisely remember — its upper plate lined with an oiled leather swatch, cured by decades of use, that keeps patties from sticking and keeps the line moving. New employees are not allowed near the press until they have been on staff for a couple of months and learned its feel.
At the front of the process stands April Taylor, the veteran kitchen manager who oversees the mixing of the meat — a proprietary blend the family guards. She “twists” the meat, a step that defies easy explanation. Asked how one twists meat, Justin has said: “I don’t know exactly how — she just twists it. It helps the burger hold strong.” The result is a patty nearly half an inch thick, pressed to the exact diameter of the bun, delivered under thick arcs of fresh white onion. On a busy day, the kitchen can turn out as many as 200 made-to-order burgers.
The menu runs about 30 items, and the second-most-popular is the steak sandwich — a breaded, deep-fried hamburger steak patty dressed with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise on a sesame-seed bun — still cooked to Troy Jones’s original recipe. Justin is proud of that continuity. So is the rest of the operation: crinkle fries dusted with the house seasoning blend, onion rings, hand-spun milkshakes, soft-serve cones, and the famously crisp flaked ice under the fountain Cokes. When customers asked for the wet walnuts Mr. Ed used to serve, the Brookses brought those back, too.
Same old, same old — with breakfast
Under the Brookses, the formula has been change almost nothing, advertise well, and let the food do the rest. Sales have climbed significantly, driven by Julia’s social media marketing, growing traffic on Highway 43, and a customer base that now splits roughly half Clarke County locals and half travelers — including devotees who drive over from Orange Beach or Andalusia, eat, and drive straight home.
The one significant addition has been a breakfast shift, which opens the restaurant at 6 a.m. on weekdays (7 a.m. weekends) and features Ed’s version of “breakfast gumbo” — the hearty bowl made popular by a Chevron station in Satsuma. Otherwise, the tweaks are subtle: a seasoning dust here, a restored menu item there. The building itself got no renovation it didn’t need; those two pentagonal towers of 12-inch steel I-beam that rise from the ground through the dining canopy roof date to the drive-in’s birth, and they announce, sixty years on, that the place intends to stay.
The Grove Hill branch
The growth announcement that got food lovers’ attention: the Brookses bought the old Dairy Bar location in Grove Hill, that town’s beloved little hamburger stand, and reopened it as Ed’s Dairy Bar — essentially a Grove Hill branch of the Jackson mother drive-in. Plans for the space called for vintage 1950s-style outdoor counter stools and a large poured concrete slab for patio dining, extending the drive-in experience to a second Clarke County town about twenty minutes up the road.
The move is ambitious but characteristically measured. When asked jokingly whether the next expansion might target the Atlanta airport, Julia’s deadpan “Really?” suggested the family intends to keep two drive-ins running well before it dreams about a third. Still, Justin has noted that about half the customer base already comes from out of town, and the drive from Mobile to Jackson is an easy one.
An institution that earned it
Ed’s has withstood a lot: five owners, economic volatility, plant closings in the region, COVID-19, and relentless competition from chains with bigger marketing budgets. What it never withstood was the temptation to fix something that wasn’t broken. The result is a place where couples still eat in their trucks — a sight that reminds the owners of their own date nights — and where the conversation topics are eternal: the extra-inning win, the straight-A report card, a son’s first deer.
Ed’s Drive-In is open seven days a week: 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, and 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. Pull in at 3018 College Avenue in Jackson, or call in an order to 251-246-3054 — a number locals note may be among the oldest phone numbers in continuous restaurant service in the county. And if you’re passing through Grove Hill, the branch is open too, same philosophy: nothing frozen, nothing rushed, nothing changed.