Month: February 2024

Top of the Class: The Hummingbird Way

What happens when a former Executive Chef for the State of Alabama opens a restaurant in the heart of Mobile’s Oakleigh Garden District? And not just any restaurant, an oyster bar. One that specializes in fresh catch and local produce.

A lot of things happen. A beloved old neighborhood gets a vibrant business, local fishermen and farmers have a market for their catch and produce, and Mobile gets one of the best seafood restaurants in the South. Jobs, culture, and a thousand beautiful nights are created. Everyone wins.

This is what Chef Jim Smith, owner of The Hummingbird Way, has done for the Port City. So it is that I found myself having dinner there back in early November, enjoying a flight of raw oysters and feeling more than a twinge of regional pride for Coastal Alabama’s culinary culture, when the bartender flipped the channel on the TV and … there we were.

“I’m here in Mobile, Alabama, in the Oakleigh Garden District,” chimed Guy Fieri’s familiar voice. A shot of the restaurant and the grand live oaks that line the neighborhood floated across the screen. Fieri is the host of the Food Network’s long-running hit-show “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” whose episodes on the Food Network have struck a chord with a national audience for almost two decades. His trademark spastic energy and no-collar vibe (think Sammy Hagar after the Red Rocker went blonde and you’ve got it) made for an odd mashup with the laconic nature of Mobile’s most historic neighborhood. It is as languorous as Fieri is not, but Fieri knows good food, and so it is no surprise that he has come here in search of America’s great eateries.

Read more from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS.

Salty pirates

Michael Williams and Kerry Mitchell were tired of not being heard. So they decided to do something about it. In February 2023, the husband-and-wife duo who runs Salty Pirates Seafood formed the Alabama Commercial Fishermen Association, a non-profit that represents the interests of fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers, and anyone else who works to put Gulf seafood on our table.

“One of the reasons we started this organization is so the fishermen can have a voice and know what’s going on in the commercial fishing community,” Kerry Mitchell tells me from the Salty Pirate dock in Dauphin Island. “If any resources do come down – grants, floodwater money, funds, things [seafood workers] never qualify for – we want an honest way to get this money out to fishermen.”

According to Mitchell, there has been disaster relief money floating around the past few years that local fishermen didn’t qualify for and should have, including COVID-relief and floodwater spillway disaster funds.

“A lot of the paperwork is so difficult, fishermen can’t fill it out,” Mitchell says. “For the COVID-funds, you had to show a loss for three years and the [oyster season] wasn’t open in 2018, so it was impossible to show a loss.”

Together, this husband and wife team works by day at Salty Pirates Seafood, a shrimping and wild oystering operation that sells directly from the dock, just off DeSoto Avenue near the Dauphin Island bridge. They are just one couple that works in Alabama’s seafood industry, but they could be any outfit that shrimps or fishes the waters of the Gulf and Mobile Bay.

Read more from Mobile Bayekeeper’s CURRENTS.