The Sonny’s on Schillinger Road has a history in west Mobile, and for a while it was not a happy one. Our anonymous dining correspondent, visiting again in the spring of 2008, found a restaurant that had recovered from it.
Sonny’s is one of many franchise locations of a barbecue chain roughly 40 years old, founded in Gainesville, Fla. The chain grew out of the North Florida smokehouse tradition — pork-centric, oak-smoked and sweet-sauced — and spread across the Southeast as a franchise operation that let individual owners run their own pits under a shared menu. Our critic had eaten at a number of them — several in Florida, one in Baton Rouge — and had always come away satisfied. That made the first visit to the Schillinger Road location, about five years earlier, all the more deflating.
The bad years
Expecting a better-than-average meal, he did not get one. He tried the restaurant a few more times, with the same disappointment each visit, and eventually stopped going altogether. Apparently, he was not alone in that decision. The location shuttered.
The pattern is a familiar one in franchised barbecue. The brand can guarantee the recipes, the supply chain and the menu, but it cannot guarantee the pit master, the wood or the attention — and barbecue is less forgiving of inattention than almost any other food. A hamburger survives an indifferent cook; a brisket or a rack of ribs does not. When a Sonny’s works, it is because someone in the kitchen is minding the smoke; when it fails, no amount of yellow signage rescues it.
It later reopened under new management, and our critic decided to give it one more try. The turnaround, he wrote, was dramatic. He now drops in at least once a month and has not been disappointed since. That sort of redemption is rarer than it should be in the restaurant business, where a failed location usually stays failed, the franchise sign comes down, and the building cycles through a series of replacement tenants. The Schillinger Road Sonny’s got a second act instead, and the correspondent’s repeat visits — his habit of a monthly meal there — amount to the most meaningful endorsement a critic can make: he came back, and kept coming back.
The ribs, the sides and the bread
On this most recent visit he ordered the Sweet and Smokey Ribs. They arrived lean, meaty and tender, with what he described as a very delicious smoked flavor — not the best ribs he has ever eaten, he was careful to say, but a considerable improvement on the ribs served at a certain establishment on Old Shell Road, where he had eaten a few weeks earlier.
The distinction he draws — very good versus the best — is the honest vocabulary of a critic who has eaten widely. Sweet and smoky is the house style: the ribs carry the chain’s sweet sauce in balance with the smoke rather than buried under it, and the lean cut suggests the pork is cooked through without being pushed to shreds. Lean, in barbecue, is a compliment earned through timing; overcooked pork ribs go dry and chalky, and the fact that these arrived lean and meaty without sacrificing tenderness says the pit was being watched.
For sides he chose a baked sweet potato and fried okra. The sweet potato was very good. The okra was not, and he offered a piece of direction rather than a critique: for fried okra, go to Mama’s.
The garlic bread, he allowed, is very good, though he tries to stay away from too much bread. “It’s a carb thing.”
The remark is delivered with the shrug of a diner who knows his own weaknesses. Garlic bread alongside a barbecue plate is a Sonny’s tradition — part of the chain’s North Florida identity, where the plate arrives with bread better suited to sopping sauce than to serving as an afterthought. The critic’s discipline in limiting himself is perhaps the highest praise: the bread was good enough that abstaining took effort.
A standard set in Baton Rouge
Our critic’s rib benchmark is not in Mobile. It is at TJ Ribs in Baton Rouge, at I-10 and Acadian, which he recommends as an easy stopover for anyone traveling west — baby backs with a wonderfully distinct taste that fall off the bone. The location matters: I-10 and Acadian sits directly on the route Mobile travelers take toward Baton Rouge, New Orleans and points west, making the restaurant a practical detour rather than a pilgrimage.
Sonny’s serves baby backs as well, and they are good, he said. Just not as good. The comparison is instructive rather than unfair. Baby backs are the premium cut — shorter, leaner and more tender than spareribs — and they reward both careful smoking and quality sourcing. A chain location can reach very good; a landmark Louisiana smokehouse with decades of reputation can reach memorable. The critic is simply honest about the distance between the two, and Mobile benefits more from knowing there is a better rack two hours west than from a local review inflated for the occasion.
The menu runs across pork, beef and chicken, and Sonny’s also offers catfish and shrimp. Our critic prefers the pork and the chicken, and stated a rule he does not intend to break: he would not consider ordering a seafood entrée at a barbecue restaurant.
The rule reflects a reasonable theory of specialization. A Gulf Coast barbecue joint that lists catfish and shrimp is responding to its market — this is, after all, a region where fried seafood is nearly a food group — but the smoker and the fryer are different disciplines. A kitchen that excels at twelve-hour pork has no special claim to oysters. The critic’s position is that a diner at a barbecue restaurant ought to order what the restaurant exists to cook, and the corollary is that the restaurant ought to cook it better than anyone in town can.
Chicken deserves its mention. It is the least glamorous item on any barbecue menu and the easiest to ruin — white meat crosses from juicy to sawdust in minutes — so a restaurant that turns out good smoked chicken is demonstrating the same pit-side vigilance that the ribs displayed. The critic’s preference for pork and chicken over beef tracks the chain’s identity: Sonny’s built its name on pork, and its beef, while serviceable, has never been the point.
The larger complaint
Behind the review sat a familiar grievance. “As a rule, there is a dearth of very good barbecue establishments in Mobile,” our critic wrote, and Sonny’s does not violate that rule. It is not a destination. It is, however, well worth an occasional visit — and he noted two things about it that he plainly valued as much as the smoke ring on the ribs.
It is clean. And one does not have to stand in line to place an order, a practice he dismissed with a pun he could not resist: standing in line, to him, is “the pits.”
The two observations are less trivial than they sound. Cleanliness is the first filter any experienced diner applies to a barbecue operation, where open pits, grease and long holding times create real risk. And the absence of a line is a genuine amenity in a city where the best-regarded barbecue — such as it is — has historically been served at counter-order spots where the queue is part of the ritual. The critic would rather be seated than initiated.
The verdict was a qualified one, delivered by a diner who likes good barbecue and has not found much of it in this city. Sonny’s, he concluded, “is about as good as it gets around here” — which is either a compliment to the restaurant or an indictment of the town, depending on where one sits.
The double meaning is the review’s real point. A franchise location on Schillinger Road holding the title of Mobile’s best suggests not that the restaurant has failed, but that the city’s barbecue scene has — a Gulf Coast port with deep Southern roots that has never developed the smokehouse culture of its neighbors to the east, west and north. Mobile has the wood, the pork and the appetite. What it has lacked, in the critic’s judgment, is enough pit masters willing to tend them.
How this review works
Our restaurant critic dined at his own expense, remained anonymous to the staff, and reviewed only restaurants he visits in the ordinary course of life. The method is deliberately unglamorous. An anonymous diner who pays full price gets the same plate, the same service and the same wait as anyone else — no comped tasting menus, no kitchen warnings, no special handling. And because he writes only about places he would eat anyway, the review is a record of lived experience rather than a survey of every opening in town.
The approach also explains the review’s patience with Sonny’s. The critic had written the Schillinger Road location off years ago, as any reasonable diner would have. What earned the restaurant its redemption was not a press release or a remodel announcement but months of consistent monthly visits that produced consistent meals. In a city short on great barbecue, consistency — even at the level of very good rather than unforgettable — is the standard that matters, and it is the standard this review applies.
For west Mobile diners, the practical guidance is unchanged by any of the analysis: order the Sweet and Smokey Ribs, take the sweet potato, skip the okra, ration the garlic bread, and if the road trip west is ever on the calendar, remember the benchmark at I-10 and Acadian. The rest — the carb guilt, the seafood rule, the pun about lines — is simply what it sounds like when a man who takes barbecue seriously finds the best plate available in his own city.