“The difference between stepping stones and stumbling blocks is how you use them.” Mark White says it like a man who has tripped over plenty of both. Long before he became the operator behind a string of Moe’s Original BBQ restaurants in Mobile and Baldwin counties, White was a sports-obsessed kid from Birmingham who survived a shattered leg, dropped out of high school, talked his way into culinary school and ended up tending a log-fire smoker on a corner in Colorado ski country. His early road to Moe’s Original BBQ is a story of setbacks that turned into a career.
White told that story from his new Moe’s Original BBQ complex on Bayfront Park Drive in Daphne, a roughly 15,000-square-foot building next door to the old house where his Daphne restaurant first opened. The new building was designed to bring together lessons from his five Alabama locations in Orange Beach, Foley, Daphne, Downtown Mobile and West Mobile at Airport Boulevard and University Boulevard. But to understand how he got there, White goes back to the beginning.
A Birmingham Kid Who Went to School for Sports
White grew up in Birmingham, where he attended Briarwood Christian School and his parents taught Sunday school. He was an athlete early on, making the varsity baseball team at Briarwood as an eighth grader and playing on both the offensive and defensive lines in football. He later transferred to Hoover High School, where he kept playing sports.
He is honest that academics were not his priority. “I went to school to play sports,” he said.
Music entered his life at 15, when he attended a two-day Grateful Dead concert at the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center. That show started a musical journey that led him to follow Widespread Panic and the Allman Brothers Band, jam-band touring acts whose loyal fan bases often traveled from city to city. The music would stay with him, shaping everything from where he moved to how he later ran his restaurants.
Oklahoma, a Broken Leg and a Hard Decision
In his sophomore year, against his parents’ preferences, White moved to Norman, Oklahoma, to live with his uncle. There, he was around horses, learned to bow hunt and earned spending money stringing barbed wire on fence posts. He played football and baseball in Norman, where coaches made him a defensive back because of his size. About 10 players from that team, he recalled, went on to Division I college football programs.
He enjoyed Oklahoma, especially the time with his uncle, but he missed his friends and eventually returned to Birmingham and Hoover High. Not long after, he went to a Hank Williams Jr. and Lynyrd Skynyrd concert at Oak Mountain Amphitheatre in Pelham. A huge fight broke out and rolled like a wave across the hillside lawn seating. The crowd fell on top of him from behind, and when it was over, his left leg was broken so badly that the bone was sticking through the skin.
“It was the best of the ‘good ole boys’ fight,” he said. “That set me back a while.”
He spent four weeks in the hospital with four screws and a rod in his leg. His teachers brought him schoolwork, and he kept his grades at A’s and B’s. Then he developed a staph infection that required emergency surgery and several more weeks in the hospital. The rod and screws were removed, and he ended up in a wheelchair. Because he had missed so much school, he was told he would have to repeat the 11th grade.
“I was devastated,” White said. “I convinced my parents to let me drop out of school. I promised I would earn my GED and go to college. I was in school for the sports anyway, but I didn’t want to repeat the 11th grade.”
A GED, the Mountains and a Path to Culinary School
White kept his promise. He earned his GED while living with his girlfriend’s family in Mountain Brook and attended Jefferson State Community College for his freshman year. He recovered well enough to play American Legion baseball. When his girlfriend, also a music lover, was accepted to Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, he followed her there.
“I fell in love with the mountains,” he said. “I spent a lot of time mountain biking and on the rivers.”
Food had always been part of his life. His first job, at age 14, was at Fuddruckers, where he started in the dish pit and was moved to the kitchen after his first shift. He also worked at Armand’s Restaurant and Ralph & Kacoo’s. Living with his girlfriend’s family, he did most of the grilling and cooking, and it was her mother who suggested culinary school.
“I didn’t even know what that was,” White said. “I found out you could make money being a chef.”
He applied for grants and loans, saved his money and paid his own way through Johnson & Wales University’s culinary program, earning his degree from what is now its College of Food Innovation & Technology at the school’s former Charleston, South Carolina, campus. The university later consolidated its Southern operations in Charlotte.
Two Jobs at a Time in Charleston and Vail
White describes himself as a grinder. “I’m a two-job-at-once kind of guy,” he said. After culinary school, he worked at two long-established Charleston restaurants, Magnolia’s Uptown/Down South and Hank’s Seafood. “I worked three straight months without a day off. Not one,” he said.
When a friend moved to Vail, Colorado, and offered him a spare room, White followed, partly by way of Widespread Panic tour dates. “I chased Widespread concerts to Vail and worked two jobs when I landed,” he said. One was at La Tour, an upscale French bistro. The other was at Gore Range Brewery in Edwards, Colorado, which has since closed. “About 15 or so people from Alabama worked at the Brewery, so I was comfortable with the language,” he joked.
Colorado brought another setback when White broke his collarbone snowboarding, an injury that required three more surgeries with plates and screws. It also brought him the partners who would change his life.
How Moe’s Original BBQ Was Born
In Vail, White met Mike Fernandez, Jeff Kennedy and Ben Gilbert, friends from the University of Alabama who had moved to Colorado after graduation to ski. Fernandez had learned to smoke meats working alongside Moses Day at Indian Hills Country Club in Tuscaloosa. He had also tinkered with smoking pork butts at the Train Station, a bar that needed to serve food to secure its liquor license. The restaurant’s name honors Day. After Day’s death, Fernandez enrolled in Johnson & Wales’ culinary program in Colorado.
After earning his degree, Fernandez stayed in Vail cooking in restaurants. Gilbert was cooking at the Grouse Mountain Grill in Beaver Creek, and Kennedy had fallen in love with the service industry while working at the Coyote Cafe. The three noticed that the many Southerners living in Vail had no Southern food to eat. So they scoured junkyards for parts, built their own smoker and started selling barbecue to job sites. Moe’s Original BBQ was born.
The next step was a concession trailer on a corner in Edwards. White, then just 21, started helping out. When the partners rented a kitchen in Minturn, Colorado, to expand, he quit the brewery and went to work full time for Moe’s.
“It was a logistical nightmare,” White said. “There were lots of moving parts, and we were running all over town. They quickly put me on the log fire smoker. I was the first guy they hired, and I never quit. The four of us knew everyone in Vail, met lots of musicians, and started opening other locations and doing a lot of catering.”
Eventually, White reached the top of the pay scale and began looking for a new mountain location he could run and own a piece of. Then his father died after a long illness, and White decided to move back to Alabama to be closer to his family. That decision set the stage for the first Moe’s outside Colorado, in Orange Beach, and the Gulf Coast restaurants that followed.
Lessons Carried Into the New Daphne Store
White’s view of the restaurant business is shaped by those years of long shifts. “It takes a lot of work to run a restaurant business. The rewards come after putting in the time. There’s no other way around it. You have to be present,” he said.
A quote from legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant hangs in the new Daphne store: “If you believe in yourself, have dedication and pride, and never quit, you’ll be a winner. The price of victory is high, but so are the rewards.”
In spring 2025, White laid out his plan for the move next door. After hosting an Easter egg hunt at the old building on the Saturday before Easter, the crew would shut the original restaurant down, clean the equipment and begin moving into the new complex, with a goal of a soft opening around April 25 and little fanfare until the operation was on solid footing.
For a man who once hauled homemade smokers around Colorado and learned to cook in a friend’s family kitchen, it was a fitting milestone. And, as White likes to point out, it came from the same road that once seemed to be falling apart beneath him. In the words of the Robert Earl Keen song he admires, “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.”