When fire tore through Ed’s Seafood Shed on the Causeway in September 2021, it would have been easy to write off the beloved restaurant as another casualty of bad luck. Instead, nearly two years later, the Shed reopened on the hill in Spanish Fort — remodeled, expanded, and doing twice the business of the original — completing one of the most satisfying comeback stories on the Eastern Shore dining scene.
The new Ed’s Seafood Shed occupies the former Beef O’Brady’s space at 6450 U.S. 90, at the intersection of Highways 98 and 90, just up the hill from the Causeway site where the restaurant spent its first two decades. The building was remodeled from the ground up, with garage doors installed to throw the room open on nice days and patio seating out front. A mural by artist Hannah Legg covers one wall, depicting the restaurant’s old Causeway home — a nod to the location regulars still miss. Sharp-eyed diners can even spot a few smoke-damaged artifacts that survived the fire, rescued from the ruins and installed like the restaurant’s own museum pieces.
From Ed and Barbara’s dream to the Causeway’s gathering place
The original Ed’s Seafood Shed was the dream of Ed and Barbara Bridges, who came to the restaurant business after other careers and opened the Causeway restaurant in 2000 at 3382 Battleship Parkway. It quickly became known for gumbo, all-you-can-eat fried mullet, free coleslaw with every meal, and fried seafood cooked what the founders called the old Mobile way. Its perch over Mobile Bay — with docks, breezes, and the drive out the Causeway that comes with it — made it as much a destination as a restaurant, part of a Causeway tradition that runs back through decades of roadhouses and fish camps strung along the two-lane between Mobile and the Eastern Shore.
By 2018, however, the business had fallen on tough times. The Causeway is hard on buildings; salt air, storms, and floods take a beating on anything at the water’s edge, and the facility was showing its age. That’s when “Panini” Pete Blohme and Nick DiMario — the restaurateurs behind Panini Pete’s in downtown Fairhope, Squid Ink in downtown Mobile, and Sunset Pointe at the Fly Creek Marina — stepped in under their PP Hospitality Group banner. They purchased the property and the brand in 2018, gave themselves two years to turn it around or rebrand, and chose revival: they updated the facility, added a covering to shade the patio, refreshed the bar, kept what worked, and brought the staff along with them. Profits doubled.
The fire
Then came the morning of September 19, 2021. A fire — suspected to be electrical, not a kitchen fire — engulfed the building before staff arrived, drawing units from Mobile, Spanish Fort, and Daphne as flames billowed over Battleship Parkway. Miraculously, nobody was hurt. The kitchen staff hadn’t come in yet, and even the restaurant’s resident pet turtles survived. But inside, as Blohme put it, it looked like a bomb had gone off: tables set for the Sunday brunch crowd sat among blackened walls and ash under a pierced roof.
The partners promised the Shed would return — “bigger, better, stronger,” DiMario said at the time. The company rotated the roughly fifty displaced employees into its other venues, and for a while the plan was to rebuild the Causeway site as a new concept called Fire on the Causeway, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the blaze. But when the numbers for bringing the old building up to modern code finally landed, rebuilding didn’t make economic sense. “When we bought the old Ed’s Seafood Shed, we purchased the property and the brand,” DiMario said later. “We made an operational decision to relocate.” The Causeway property went on the market, and the brand moved up the hill.
Ed’s 2.0
The new location opened in April 2023, a year and a half after the fire, and the phrase DiMario uses for it is “the 2.0 version of Ed’s — bigger and better.” The menu carries all the old favorites: the famous free cole slaw, gumbo, cheese grits dressed with a splash of gumbo jus, hearty southern greens, fried green tomatoes topped with crawfish sauce, Conecuh fries, and the fried seafood platters cooked the old way. The po’boys — shrimp, oyster, or the combination — remain the centerpiece, alongside weekend breakfast service and a happy hour that quickly earned its own following. Diners still find the crab bisque, the shrimp tacos, and the hushpuppies that made the Causeway location a destination, now served in a room that opens to the breeze through its garage doors.
Some of the charm is deliberate. The original Ed’s had a ramshackle, waterlogged charisma that a strip-mall storefront couldn’t replicate on its own, so the owners transported what they could: artifacts that survived the fire, the mural of the old building, and, of course, the turtles. For years, a signature bit of Causeway showmanship involved bringing the resident turtles out to race — a small spectacle that delighted families and became one of those odd traditions regulars defend like heirlooms. All three made it through the fire unharmed, and today Swim Shady, Turt Reynolds, and Shrimpy Bigs occupy a spacious tank in the new dining room, presiding over the tables like mascots who have seen everything.
Business has run at roughly twice the level of the old location since the reopening — a function of visibility, parking, and a rebuilt menu that kept everything people drove out of their way for. The restaurant has also embedded itself in Spanish Fort civic life, with the owners appearing at school events and hosting fundraisers, an investment DiMario describes as making sure Ed’s is around for another twenty-five years and beyond.
The people behind the plates
DiMario, who serves as operating partner and has worked alongside Blohme for the better part of a decade, talks about the business in terms of a philosophy he calls the four Ps: people, product, professionalism, and profit. The restaurant is run as a learning environment for staff who want to build careers in food service — a philosophy that traces back to the Causeway days, when the partners bought the old Ed’s and embraced all of its longtime employees. Kitchen veterans like Miss Mel, who had been at Ed’s from the beginning and prepared everything from the famous collards to the turnip greens, carried the recipes forward until her retirement, which the team celebrated with a party at Moe’s BBQ in Daphne. Of the entire Causeway-era staff, server Prairie Filgo made the move to the new location — a living thread between the two eras of the restaurant.
The emphasis on people extends to the community that rallied around the restaurant after the fire. When the building burned, the outpouring from customers — who bought gift cards, showed up at the other PP Hospitality restaurants, and generally refused to let the Shed disappear — is something the partners still cite when they talk about why they rebuilt the brand rather than letting it go.
What’s next: the yacht club
The Shed’s revival set up the next chapter: a waterfront restaurant at the Lake Forest Yacht Club in Daphne, next to the neighborhood’s new boat ramp, with docks redone to match. DiMarco has described the concept as roughly 7,000 square feet with live music, misters for the Gulf Coast summers, and a menu that offers their take on fare from around the world — a step beyond the Shed’s seafood focus and a return to the water for a brand born on the Causeway.
Meanwhile, the old Causeway property remains in the group’s hands, its future an open question that Blohme has joked about with a landlord’s pragmatism: “Somebody smarter than us will figure out what to do with it.” And the mascot, at least in spirit, carries on — Eddie, the restaurant’s 12-foot fiberglass alligator, vanished in a post-fire theft that the owners half-seriously memorialized on T-shirts, but the turtle trio of Swim Shady, Turt Reynolds, and Shrimpy Bigs now holds court in a spacious tank at the new location, the oldest surviving employees of the whole operation.
Sixty-plus years after Ed and Barbara Bridges lit the fryers on the Causeway, the name Ed’s Seafood Shed is again doing what it always did: feeding the Eastern Shore gumbo, greens, and fried seafood with a side of hospitality. The address changed. Everything else came through the fire.