The Southern Sunday dinner, that long, unhurried meal where extended family crowds around a table loaded with platters, has been a fixture of life in Alabama for generations. At The Hope Farm in Fairhope, Executive Chef Adam Stephens set out to bring that tradition back with a twist: a monthly Sunday Supper where strangers sit down together, pass dishes family-style and leave as friends. A March 2024 edition, built around an Aloha theme, showed how the concept works.
A Tradition Born After the Quarantine
Chef Adam traces the inspiration for Sunday Suppers to the long isolation of the pandemic. The Hope Farm opened in 2020 and had to completely rework its operating plan to accommodate COVID-19 restrictions. As life returned to normal, the restaurant leaned back into what its owners, Robert Evans and his son, Bentley Evans, had always intended it to be: a gathering place.
“We wanted to reinvigorate the idea of socializing, meeting new people, and bringing back the tradition of family-style Sunday dinner. Over good food, you make new friends,” Chef Adam said.
The idea evolved from an earlier concept. “Our first thought was to do an Around the World in 80 Dishes, taking the lead from all the places and cuisines we’ve experienced in our travels,” he said. “That became our segue into Sunday Suppers. We felt like this was what Fairhope lacked and Fairhope needed. We wanted more social engagements centered around good comfort food with more involvement between guests.”
It Started With Grandmother’s Fried Chicken
The first Sunday Supper was held in mid-January 2023, and it began with something deeply personal: Chef Adam’s grandmother’s recipe for fried chicken. The format was simple. Guests would mix and mingle over a cocktail, meet new people and then sit down to a family-style dinner in a relaxed, social atmosphere.
The menu changes monthly and is often shaped by the season and by the chef’s recent travels. “We usually decide the menu based on the season and the food we experience while traveling,” he said. Around the March 2024 supper, Chef Adam said he was heading to Cuba next, hinting that a Latin-inspired menu might follow.
An Evening in The Barn
Sunday Suppers are held in The Barn, the newest addition to The Hope Farm’s collection of dining spaces. For the Aloha-themed evening, Alana, who served as host and server and whose family lives in Hawaii, helped Chef Adam create the menu. Assistant General Manager Raleigh Swan greeted guests and tended bar.
Guests were seated at one of two long dinner tables set with place cards and printed menus. As others arrived, introductions were made and a Royal Hawaiian Mai Tai was served in a tall ceramic glass decorated with images of ancient petroglyphs, the stone carvings Native Hawaiians etched centuries ago. Several drink options were available, and the cocktail hour doubled as the time to get acquainted with tablemates.
The mix of people around one table that night illustrated the concept well: a couple from Pensacola, a mother and daughter who had relocated from Michigan, and a local couple who are fourth-generation Fairhopers. The latter had attended Sunday Supper several times and made a habit of marking their calendars for the next one each month.
The Aloha Menu
Chef Adam opened with three dishes served family-style:
- Crispy Fried Short Ribs, spicy and rich.
- Shoyu Chicken Sliders, a nod to the soy-sauce chicken that is a staple of Hawaii’s home cooking and plate lunches.
- Tuna Poke Tacos with pineapple relish, sushi ginger and jalapeño over a bed of avocado, the crowd favorite of the night.
Poke, the Hawaiian dish of seasoned raw fish, has become popular on mainland menus in recent years, and serving it in a taco shell gave the dish a playful Gulf Coast spin.
The main courses included:
- Kalua Pork, shredded, inspired by the traditional Hawaiian method of slow-roasting a whole pig in an underground oven known as an imu.
- Hawaiian Fried Rice.
- Loco Moco, the Hawaiian comfort-food classic that pairs a hamburger patty with a fried egg, served here as a beef and pork burger on a bun topped with a fried egg.
- Sides of macaroni and cheese and sushi rice.
In keeping with the family-dinner theme, all of the courses arrived at the table at once and were passed around as guests talked and got to know one another. Dessert was Chocolate Haupia Pie, built on haupia, the coconut milk pudding that is a fixture of Hawaiian gatherings. Additional cocktails and a selection of wines were available for an extra charge. Guests went home happy and full, many carrying to-go boxes, some destined for hungry teenagers.
How Sunday Suppers Work
As described in 2024, the Sunday Supper format ran as follows:
- Held monthly on Sunday evenings from 6 to 9 p.m. in The Barn.
- Tickets purchased online or by calling The Hope Farm.
- A themed, family-style menu that changes each month.
- A social hour with cocktails before guests sit down at shared tables.
Anyone interested in attending should check directly with The Hope Farm for its current schedule, pricing and themes, since events and menus change.
More Than Supper at The Hope Farm
At the time, The Barn was open for breakfast and lunch, and The Hope Farm offered other ticketed events, including Art of Mixology cocktail classes as well as Chef Dinners and Wine Pairings. The restaurant encouraged guests to sign up for updates to hear about upcoming events.
The Hope Farm had also earned national attention as a James Beard Award semifinalist, one of the most respected honors in American dining. In early 2024, it announced plans to open a new restaurant concept in downtown Fairhope with Chef Bill Briand, formerly of Fisher’s in Orange Beach, who has himself been recognized by the James Beard Award committee several times.
Why a Shared Table Matters
What makes Sunday Supper distinctive is less any single dish than the format itself. In an era when many diners sit at small tables absorbed in their phones, the long communal table asks something different of guests: introduce yourself, pass the platter, ask where the people across from you are from. For newcomers who have moved to Baldwin County, for visitors from nearby Pensacola and for families who have lived in Fairhope for generations, it offers the same thing the old Sunday dinner always did, a reason to slow down and share a meal with the people around you.