Other People's Lists: The National Press Keeps Finding Our Coast

Dockside Guide started as a list on a restaurant napkin: every stop between Mobile Bay and Perdido Key worth the run by water- Dive bars to fine dining. So I pay attention when somebody else publishes a list. This week, three of them came across my desk with our coast on them. This post is a little off the chart for Docklines, and you'll need a car for some of these stops. But the brand is EAT · BOAT · STAY, and the eating on this coast is getting noticed by people who don't live here.

Start with the one nobody outside Mobile saw coming. Huckberry, the outfitter out of Austin, ranked the 50 best dive bars in America. Its No. 1 isn't in New Orleans or Texas. It's Callaghan's Irish Social Club, on a corner lined with cottages in Mobile's Oakleigh Garden District. Woodrow Callaghan opened it in 1946 as a grill for the working man, in a port city just coming off its wartime shipbuilding boom. It was members-only back then. You rang a buzzer to get in, and regulars carried their own door keys. J.T. Thompson bought it in 2002 and turned the tiny front room into a stage that headliners came up through. Some of them still come back. Locals call it Oakleigh Town Hall. Order the LA Burger, which has a patty made partly from Conecuh sausage. Callaghan's made Southern Living's list too.

Southern Living's 25 legendary Southern dive bars includes two you can reach by boat. The Flora-Bama opened as a lounge and package store on August 1, 1964, straddling the Alabama–Florida line. A fire pushed back the Fourth of July opening, and Ted Tampary and his sons opened a month late. Joe Gilchrist bought it in 1978. Hurricane Ivan tore it up in 2004, and it was rebuilt by people who refused to leave. The Interstate Mullet Toss has been sending fish over the state line since 1985. Southern Living readers had already voted it Alabama's Best Dive Bar in the magazine's 2024 South's Best awards. The bar's mailing address is in Florida, which tells you how the state line works out there. To get there by water, drop a hook off the beach and tender in. You can also tie up at the Flora-Bama Yacht Club, across the street on Old River.

Pirate's Cove sits in Josephine, where Robert's Bayou meets Arnica Bay. The buildings date to about 1935, when a Civilian Conservation Corps camp housed the crews building the Intracoastal Waterway. The name comes from a local story that Admiral Raphael Semmes ran shallow-draft boats up Robert's Bayou to shake the bigger ships chasing him. Paul Helmuth and Elsa Mueller bought the place in December 1956, and the Mueller family still runs it three generations later. Southern Living points to the Bushwackers, the cheeseburgers and the dogs running loose on the beach. I'd add the boats pulled up on the sand. It's in our guide for a reason.

Then there's the big one. On September 16, The New York Times named Little Bird in Fairhope one of its 50 favorite restaurants in America for 2026. Only one other Alabama restaurant made the list: Perennial in Montgomery. Critic Ryan Sutton led with the gumbo. Around the Bay, gumbo usually leans on tomato. Little Bird's is a dark-roux, Louisiana Cajun pot. Chef Bill Briand opened the restaurant at 404 Oak Avenue in June 2025 and named it for his late mother, Virginia Eileen Briand. The name Eileen comes from the Gaelic for "little bird." Boaters already know his cooking. Briand spent ten years running the kitchen at Fisher's at Orange Beach Marina and was a James Beard semifinalist five times. Soul Grown and Mobile Bay Now have the full story. Order the West Indies crab salad with preserved lemon, and save room for the buttermilk pie in the courtyard.

Those three lists aren't the only ones. In Mobile, Chef Jim Smith of The Hummingbird Way was a 2026 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef: South, and The Local Palate put the restaurant in its 2026 Alabama guide. Smith knows the water better than most chefs. He's a former executive chef for the State of Alabama, chaired the Alabama Seafood Commission for seven years and sits on the board of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. His raw bar shucks six oysters a day, and at least two of them come from Alabama waters. Also in Mobile, The Noble South earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand in the guide's first American South selection last November. It was the only restaurant in Mobile or Baldwin County among Alabama's 15 picks. In Orange Beach, CoastAL sits right on the sand and is co-owned by the Flora-Bama's Cam Price. It was a finalist for USA Today 10Best's 2026 Readers' Choice award for Best Waterfront Restaurant. Barometer Waterfront Grille, on Canal Road, came in ninth on 10Best's list of best new restaurants.

Here's one I'm watching. The River Shack property under the Dog River Bridge has been dark since December. Word on the water is that it comes back this spring as a farm-to-table, boat-to-table place. The talk is fresh food, nothing fancy, a place you idle up to. Nothing has been announced, and I won't pretend otherwise. But Dog River is one of Mobile's great boating neighborhoods, and it deserves a table on the water again. I hope this one's true.

One of my absolute favorites doesn't show up on anybody's list, and I found it with my nose. I was fishing Lower Perdido Bay for redfish and specks, and we ran back up past Pirate's Cove toward the boat launch. The whole way, we could smell somebody frying chicken, and a lot of it. Once the boat was on the trailer, we drove around following the smell as it got stronger. It led us to Camp Dixie. We walked in and asked if the chicken was for sale to the public. It was. I've been going back for 16 or 18 years now. I mark the dates on my calendar and make sure I'm down in that part of the county after church.

Camp Dixie sits on Perdido Bay in Josephine. It has been a Lutheran camp since 1952, when laymen from five Gulf Coast congregations founded it. One of those congregations was St. Mark's in Elberta, the town German settlers built. Hurricane Sally cost the camp trees and a roof in 2020, and it kept going. On select Sundays from 11 AM to 2 PM, the volunteers put on a fried chicken dinner fundraiser. You get fried chicken with green beans, corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, coleslaw, dessert and a drink. It's $15 for adults and $8 for kids under 12, and the take-out line sells eight pieces for $15. You can eat in the dining hall or outside over the bay. Come by car, or pull the boat up, wade in and carry your plate back out. There are two dinners left this year: Sunday, October 11 and Sunday, November 8. The volunteers are the best part, and the chicken is a close second. Pirate's Cove is a short run away if you want to make a day of it.

That's this week's list, and now I want yours. If there's a place on this coast you think belongs on somebody's list, drop me a line. It can be on the water or a short drive from it. I'll put it in The Dispatch or go see it myself.