On any given day around 10:30 in the morning, a line of hungry people forms outside a modest building at 552 North Section Street in Fairhope, waiting for the doors to open on a lunch they have been anticipating for years. The restaurant is Original Ben’s Jr. Bar-B-Que, a Fairhope barbecue landmark that has now been through more lives than most restaurants see in a century — and the newest one may be the best yet.
The story of Ben’s is the story of Fairhope’s appetite itself: a barbecue dynasty that stretches from Mobile’s Crichton neighborhood to the Causeway to a funky little shack on North Section Street that generations of Baldwin County families grew up on.
From Crichton to the Causeway
To understand Ben’s, you have to go back to the 1950s, when Ben Smith owned the namesake Ben’s barbecue joint in Mobile’s Crichton area. Kenny Lee of Spanish Fort learned the business from him and opened a Ben’s on the Causeway in the 1960s, where it fed travelers until Hurricane Frederic demolished it in 1979.
Lee’s son, Kenneth “Bubba” Lee, and his wife Rise carried the tradition inland, opening Ben’s Jr. in Fairhope in 1986. They ran it for 32 storied years — surviving a small fire in 2004 and decades of Eastern Shore growth — before closing shop and retiring at the end of 2018. For Fairhope, the closing was personal. “Everybody’s got a Ben’s story,” as one of the men who would revive it put it.
The Comeback
After the 2018 closing, the building sat dark through a protracted stretch of uncertainty. The revival began when Will Fusaiotti — co-founder of the thriving Mobile-based chicken finger chain Foosackly’s — and chef Jeremiah Matthews, who owns and operates Southwood Kitchen in Daphne, acquired the landmark with plans to bring it back. They survived COVID, refurbished the building to modern standards, and renovated the kitchen from the ground up. The new and improved Original Ben’s Jr. Bar-b-que opened in December 2023 under their co-ownership, with an expanded menu and more — and better — sides than the old Ben’s ever offered.
During the renovation period, Matthews admitted he was asked about Ben’s a minimum of 15 to 20 times a day. The wellspring of nostalgia at 552 N. Section Street ran that deep.
The Menu
The new Ben’s honors its barbecue lineage while broadening the menu. Sandwiches run from barbecue classics — brisket, pulled pork and smoked turkey breast — to chicken sandwiches in Cajun or original style, plus a range of burgers and the Ben’s Classic Club, loaded with turkey, ham and bacon, fully dressed. Kids’ offerings include a burger, pulled pork sandwich, chicken tenders, a smoked turkey sandwich, grilled cheese and mac ‘n cheese.
The combination platters can feed two light diners or one hearty construction worker: pulled pork butt, baby back ribs, chicken tenders, a prime brisket platter and hamburger steak. And the sides deserve their own billing — crispy, well-seasoned steak fries, mashed potatoes and gravy, mac ‘n cheese, potato salad, barbecue beans, coleslaw, a small green salad, and a cider-braised collard greens that ranks among the best sides on the Eastern Shore. You could make a meal of the sides alone.
Service That Shows
Great food is nothing without good staff, and Ben’s people deliver: attentive servers circulating the rooms, quick with orders and refills, making sure orders land right and customers leave smiling. The restaurant offers dine-in and take-out, with catering recently added for events and offices. Hours run 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week — generous hours in a stretch when many local restaurants have cut back.
Why Ben’s Matters
The revival of Ben’s Jr. matters beyond barbecue. Fairhope’s dining scene has changed rapidly in recent years, with beloved mainstays closing as costs rise, and a reopened Ben’s stands as a vote of confidence in the town’s older, funkier food traditions. The partners who brought it back understood what they had: not just a restaurant but a wellspring of nostalgia, a place where the town’s collective memory of smoked meat and sweet sauce lives.
For Bubba Lee’s generation of customers, the new Ben’s is a reunion. For newcomers to Fairhope, it is a chance to taste a piece of local history that older residents never stopped talking about. Either way, the ritual is the same: get in line before 11, order the barbecue with a side of the collards, and understand why a barbecue joint on North Section Street has been the comeback story of the year in one of Alabama’s most restaurant-mad towns.