Part I of this story ended with Mark White leaving the mountains of Colorado for Alabama, following the death of his father and a heart set on family. Part II is what happened next: how a barbecue company born in a Vail junkyard took root on the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast, weathered an oil spill and a pandemic, and grew into a new 15,000-square-foot home in Daphne.
White frames the whole journey with a question he now asks himself: how many people have you helped along the way? By the end of his story, the answer is measured in employees, musicians, cleanup crews, and first responders fed through a pandemic, and it is a much bigger number than barbecue alone would suggest.
Orange Beach, on a Shoestring
In 2006, fresh from Vail, White found a barbecue joint in Orange Beach that had not survived Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina, the one-two punch that flattened the Alabama coast in 2004 and 2005. Together with the three original Moe’s partners, Mike Fernandez, Ben Gilbert, and Jeff Kennedy, he purchased the equipment and leased the building where Porky’s BBQ had once stood.
“Orange Beach was the first Moe’s Original BBQ store outside our little fairytale in Colorado,” White says. The partners gave him a 25 percent stake, and the opening budget was so thin the kitchen’s backbone was a residential four-burner electric coil burner, with wings fried in a crawfish pot on the back porch. Friends came in to help keep the place running. Orange Beach, with only a couple of thousand permanent residents at the time, responded by eating at Moe’s often. The food was good, people liked it, and the first Gulf Coast store worked.
Life did not stop being an adventure. On April 25, 2009, White married his wife Angie, whom he had first met in Colorado. The couple kept their house in Vail, and Angie still gets 30 days of skiing every year, a standing trade that tells you the Colorado chapter never really closed.
An Old House With a Past on Bayfront Park Road
The Daphne store began, like several good things in this story, with Angie’s eye. She spotted an old house on Bayfront Park Road with a for sale sign sticking out of piles of live oak leaves. “The first time I saw it, it had that vibe and feel of an old BBQ joint,” White says. A previous owner had started to build a restaurant and run into trouble, so White bought it and finished the job. It opened in 2009.
The neighborhood, called Edgewater Heights, has its own deep history as an old African American waterfront community on a dirt road. Its matriarch, known to everyone as Big Mama, lived in the house that is now Moe’s and cared for the neighborhood, watching children and hosting fish fries. Local lore adds a few flourishes, including a little moonshine that may have changed hands out back and, the rumor goes, a room or two available by the hour in a small structure at the rear. White did not open the store for the history, but the history turned out to suit him.
He is often asked why he chose an obscure, not-well-traveled location. His answer is that the food is consistent, the price is right, and they ran it like a saloon. Music has always been part of his life, and he started booking great blues acts, citing the North Mississippi hill country cottonfield blues tradition that fed the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Allman Brothers. “We booked the bands that I wanted to see and hear,” he says, “but I had to adjust a lot over the years to serve our demographic.”
The Oil Spill and the Delta
When the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the Gulf in 2010, everything in Orange Beach stopped. “Life as we knew it was over,” White says. The stores did everything possible to keep going, worked as many side hustles as they could find, and fed many of the cleanup crews working the spill. In a strange way, the disaster also opened a door: it was while navigating that summer that White discovered the Mobile River Delta, the vast and little-known wilderness at the mouth of the Mobile Basin that scientists rank among the most biologically diverse regions in North America. He, Angie, and their 13-year-old son now live on Bay Minette Creek in Spanish Fort, as close to that water as a restaurateur can get.
Downtown Mobile, Where the Parties Live
All the Moe’s stores grew organically, and White’s did especially. His music knowledge earned him a seat on the Performing Arts Board at the Saenger Theater in Mobile, where Moe’s also catered events. There he met Tony Atchison, who owned a building on Dauphin Street, the space where Red or White now sits, and offered it to White. White loved it at first sight and offered to sign a lease on the spot, but another restaurant committed first. He sent Tony a gracious email instead, telling him he would have been the best tenant he ever had.
Tony, who knows everybody, made it up to him by introducing White to Wendall Quimby, who owned the property at Dauphin Street and Springhill Avenue where Moe’s downtown store now stands. The location sat on the Mardi Gras parade route and had room for both a restaurant and an event space in the back. “I leased it on the spot,” White says. The store has hosted every kind of party imaginable: reunions, business events, school events, receptions, birthday parties, bridesmaid parties. For several years it has been the top revenue store in the entire Moe’s Original BBQ system, an achievement White credits to “an incredible team and great partners.”
A Drive-Thru Saves the Day
White expanded into West Mobile and Foley at about the same time. The West Mobile building, a former fast food franchise, came with a drive-thru window, an accident of real estate that proved enormous when the pandemic hit. Customers could order and pick up safely without leaving their cars, while the sit-down stores had to improvise.
The pandemic-era program White devised became the company’s lifeline: customers could purchase a second meal to give to a first responder or essential worker, and whenever 20 meals accumulated, the store delivered them to a group. The idea caught on and was adopted by Moe’s locations throughout the system. “It kept us in business,” White says.
Betting on Bayfront Park
The new Daphne store is the product of patience and a bet on a neighborhood’s future. “Stark Irvine had a vision back in the day to revitalize this area around Bayfront Park,” White says. When he opened his original Daphne store, the street was dark and people told him the location was a terrible idea. As lots came up for sale, he bought them and stockpiled them. Then the city of Daphne embraced a revitalization plan for the area, adding a boardwalk, an amphitheater, paving, and widened streets to create a destination for outdoor entertainment, a recently completed beautification project that ran to around $15 million. When the original plan called for parallel parking because there was not enough land for perpendicular spaces, White donated 10 feet along his own frontage to the city, buying the neighborhood a lot more parking. Part of the redevelopment also involved acquiring the Thomas Medical Center near the Publix shopping center for renovation into the city’s new recreation center.
The new store itself has been three years in planning, and White finally got what he never had before: a building designed from scratch rather than retrofitted. It combines everything that worked across his five stores, with several large event spaces, a drive-thru window, covered outdoor seating on an open patio, a large efficient kitchen with abundant sinks and refrigeration, and two smokers so that a breakdown never stops the pits. Angie suggested adding a second-story bar and deck, so they did.
Leadership, Faith, and a Cup of Inspiration
White is candid about the detours. As a teenager he spent time at Bradford Health Services, which he calls “summer camp,” getting his life in order. “It was a good experience,” he says. “I learned to trust and have faith, and how to deal with the next bump in the road.” When he spoke about this interview, he was traveling home from his uncle’s funeral in Oklahoma, and reflective about how the road that once seemed to be pulled out from under him was, in hindsight, a foundation being laid. “Looking back 45 or 46 years later, I can see it now.”
When COVID arrived and everyone around him was panicking, White turned to podcasts by Dr. Kevin Elko, a nationally known sports psychologist, and listened every single week. Then he began sharing what he heard, sending a two-to-five-minute “Monday Morning Cup of Inspiration” message each week, first individually to friends, then to his 100 to 150 employees. “I figured, if I was hungry and thirsty, then other people were hungry and thirsty for some positivity, perspective, and encouragement, too.”
These days his role at Moe’s is less about cooking and more about leading and mentoring. “When you run a restaurant, you wear a lot of hats,” he says. “You are a dad, a big brother, a police officer, and a counselor. I want to help them be better humans, better leaders, better everything.” He loves the outdoors and wants to help young people, and he still wants to have fun, with one new ambition in particular: Sunday church services at the new store, the way they do at the Flora-Bama, “for all the non-perfect people like me.”
From a junkyard smoker in Vail to a two-story barbecue landmark on a revitalized Daphne waterfront, the story of Moe’s Original BBQ in Alabama is the story of a man who kept using the stumbling blocks as stepping stones, and who measures success now by who he can bring along with him.