Alabama

10 Alabama restaurant chains that began as mom-and-pop shops

Published

1 year ago

August 7, 2024

10 Alabama restaurant chains that began as mom-and-pop shops

Almost everybody has a favorite fast-food chain – a place to grab a quick burger for lunch or a drive-thru taco late at night.

While national brands abound to satisfy your cravings, Alabama has its fair share of homegrown chains, most of which started as small, independent “mom-and-pop” shops before branching out.

As part of our Beautiful Alabama summer project, we’ve put together this list of 10 such Alabama chain restaurants, all of which began in the state and many of which remain in the same family.

(Note: For this story, we did not include barbecue restaurant chains, which belong in a category unto themselves.)

Foosackly’s, famous for its fried chicken fingers, originated in Mobile in 2000 and now has 14 locations in Alabama and two in Florida. (Ben Flanagan / AL.com)Ben Flanagan

Foosackly’s

How it started: Co-founders Will Fusaiotti and Eric Brechtel, who went to LSU together, partnered to open their first Foosackly’s chicken tenders restaurant on University Boulevard in Mobile in April 2000. The chain’s unusual name was inspired by Fusaiotti’s hard-to-pronounce last name, and Fusaiotti figured “Foosackly’s” rolled off the tongue much better.

How it’s going: Although most of its 16 locations are concentrated in the Mobile and Baldwin County area, Foosackly’s has expanded into Tuscaloosa and Auburn, as well as neighboring Pensacola, Fla.

More info: foosacklys.net

Guthrie’s

How it started: In 1965, Hal Guthrie opened a drive-in restaurant in the Winston County town of Haleyville, but it wasn’t until 13 years later that Guthrie began serving the fried chicken fingers and signature dipping sauce for which his family would become famous. In 1982, Hal and Melissa Guthrie’s oldest son, Chris, who was a student at Auburn University at the time, talked his dad into helping him open a Guthrie’s in the Loveliest Village on the Plains.

How it’s going: Guthrie’s, which is headquartered in Auburn, now has nearly 50 locations in nine states – mostly in the Southeast but as far away as Idaho and Ohio.

More info: guthrieschicken.com.

Guthrie’s celebrates a golden anniversary

Hero Doughnuts & Buns

How it started: Birmingham chef Wil Drake debuted his French brioche pastry-style Hero Doughnuts at a pop-up event at Seasick Records in 2016 and opened his first brick-and-mortar location in Homewood the following year.

How it’s going: After partnering with the Pihakis Restaurant Group, Hero has rebranded as Hero Doughnuts & Buns and expanded its menu to include not just doughnuts but also chicken sandwiches and one of the best cheeseburgers around. Hero now has nine locations in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

More info: eatahero.com.

Jack's Restaurants — Jack’s Family Restaurants, which began in Homewood in 1960, has grown to include almost 200 locations in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee. (Photo courtesy of Jack’s Family Restaurants; used with permission)

Jack’s Family Restaurants

How it started: Jack’s goes back, back, back to 1960 when founder and Birmingham burger king Jack Caddell, inspired by the growth of the McDonald’s chain, opened the first Jack’s Hamburgers in downtown Homewood.

How it’s going: Now known as Jack’s Family Restaurants but still headquartered in Homewood, the fast-food chain has grown to about 200 locations in big cities and small towns throughout Alabama and neighboring states Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

More info: eatatjacks.com.

Milo’s

How it started: Founder Milo Carlton, who served as an Army mess cook during World War II, and his wife, Beatrice, or “Mama Bea” to those who knew her best, opened their mom-and-pop burger shop in Birmingham’s Norwood neighborhood in 1946. Thirty-seven years later, the first Milo’s franchise opened near the UAB campus on Birmingham’s Southside.

How it’s going: Under the leadership of CEO Tom Dekle, the Milo’s brand — beloved for its burgers with pickles, onions and that magic sauce — has grown to include 23 locations around Alabama – mainly in the Birmingham metro area but also in Auburn, Montgomery, Jasper and Tuscaloosa.

More info: miloshamburgers.com.

The story behind Alabama’s famous Milo’s hamburger sauce

Sneaky Pete’s

How it started: Pete Graphos – from the legendary Graphos hot dog family that included his brothers Jimmy and Sammy — opened the original Sneaky Pete’s hot dog shop on Birmingham’s Southside in 1966. His brothers later joined him in the business before branching out on their own. At one time, Graphos operated 24 Sneaky Pete’s locations before selling the business in 1986.

How it’s going: Sneaky Pete’s, which is still based in Birmingham, has about 30 locations around Central Alabama, most of those in gas station convenience stores. Also, Sneaky Pete’s Hot Dog Sauce is available online and at grocery stores around the state.

More info: sneakypetes.com.

Taco Casa

How it started: Rod Wilkin, a Kansas native who came to Tuscaloosa to play football for the legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant in the late 1960s, followed up on his dream of starting a Mexican fast-food restaurant and founded Taco Casa in 1974, opening the original location on 10th Avenue, near what is now Central High School. The little restaurant “under the biggest cactus in town” fast became a favorite of University of Alabama students.

How it’s going: Wilkin and his three sons (Rod II, Ben and Brett) and his son-in-law (Shannon Formby) continue the Taco Casa tradition 50 years later. That original location has long since closed, but Taco Casa has six stores in Tuscaloosa and Northport and a seventh in the Wildwood Centre in Homewood.

More info: tacocasa.com.

An Alabama tradition: Tuscaloosa’s Taco Casa

Taco Mama

How it started: Will Haver — who also owns Otey Tavern’s, a neighborhood bar and grill in Mountain Brook’s Crestline Village — opened his first Taco Mama not far from Otey’s in 2011. He had no plans to open a second one. But all that quickly changed.

How it’s going: After word got around about Taco Mama’s hearty burritos, tart margaritas and fun, family-friendly vibe, Haver started branching out all over Birmingham and throughout Alabama. Taco Mama is now up to 27 locations, including restaurants in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

More info: tacomamaonline.com.

Taco Mama started in Alabama and became a Southern sensation

Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe

How it started: Inspired by the small cafes they discovered on a trip to Greece, chef Keith Richards and his wife, Amy, opened the original Taziki’s Mediterranean Café in Birmingham’s Shops of the Colonnade in 1998.

How it’s going: From that one café, Taziki’s has grown far and wide to include about 90 locations in 16 states. Also, in 2015, Taziki’s became the first national franchise to receive the United States Healthful Food Council’s REAL Certification, which recognizes restaurants that go the extra step to serve their customers meals with nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables and whole grains; that emphasize local and organic ingredients; and that serve meals that are made from scratch using healthy cooking methods and a minimum of processed foods.

More info: tazikis.com.

Urban Cookhouse

How it started: The husband-and-wife team of David and Andrea Snyder started Urban Cookhouse – a “buy local, eat urban” fast-casual concept that emphasized wood-smoked meats and Alabama-grown produce – in downtown Homewood in 2011.

How it’s going: The Snyders still buy from many of the same farmers and makers they started with – including strawberries and heirloom tomatoes from Harvest Farm in Cullman County and orange rolls from Millie Ray’s in Birmingham – but Urban Cookhouse, which now has nine locations, has expanded beyond the Birmingham metro area into Cullman, Tuscaloosa, Huntsville and Nashville.

More info: urbancookhouse.com.

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Alabama

2026 Alabama Gymnastics Season Preview

Published

7 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

TUSCALOOSA, Ala.— Ashley Johnston is entering her “senior season” as the Alabama gymnastics head coach at her alma mater. Of course, there is no such thing in coaching, but Johnston feels like she’s gotten to grow up alongside the Crimson Tide’s current senior class as both have spent four years in Tuscaloosa.

“We do always talk about how our senior class, we’re all seniors together as this is my fourth year now,” Johnston said. “And our senior class, we’ve grown, we’ve tweaked the recipe. We’ve really had a variety of experiences over the last three years, now going into our fourth.”

Alabama’s 2025 season ended in the NCAA semifinals. The Crimson Tide is looking to make it back to the finals for the first time since 2017. The road to get back there starts Friday at Clemson.

“We have to treat every meet like we’re competing against our own standard as we want to be a final four team in the country,” Johnston said. “That journey started in August. So this is just one more opportunity to practice being what we want to do this year.”

Schedule

The Alabama schedule features 11 opponents ranked in the preseason top-25, including the top-three teams (Oklahoma, LSU and Florida.) Week in and week out, the Crimson Tide will be competing against the best teams in the nation, which will prepare it for what it will face in postseason play.

Alabama will face the eight other SEC gymnastics teams at least once each in a dual meet format starting at Florida on Jan. 16 and wrapping up at home against Georgia on March 13. The Tide will travel to Norman to face defending national champion Oklahoma on Feb. 6. The first home meet is Jan. 23 against Missouri.

Clemson, Oregon State, North Carolina and Illinois make up the non-conference slate. Alabama will face North Carolina as part of a tri-meet with LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on March 1. Two days prior, the Tide will face LSU in a regular season dual meet.

There are two times this regular season where Alabama will compete on both Friday and Sunday of the same weekend. Johnston likes to do this to get the team prepared for the quick turnaround that happens between competitions during the NCAA postseason. The Tide will be well prepared for the gauntlet it could face in the postseason with the type of schedule it has in the regular season.

Roster

Alabama’s available roster is comprised of one graduate (Jordyn Paradise), three seniors (Gabby Gladieux, Natalia Pawlak and Rachel Rybicki) three juniors (Chloe LaCoursiere, Gabby Ladanyi and Jamison Sears), four sophomores (Love Birt, Ryan Fuller, Kylee Kvamme and Paityn Walker) and five “trailblazer” freshmen (Jasmine Cawley, Noella Marshall, McKenzie Matters, Azaraya Ra-Akbar and Derin Tanriyasukur.) Corinne Bunagan and Karis German will miss the entire season with injuries.

“These freshmen are trailblazers,” Walker said. “They’re like veterans, and I’m so proud of them and how they have come out of their shell.”

Paradise is returning from an injury that kept her out all of last season and will bring a veteran presence to the vault and uneven bars lineup. Birt also returns from injury and will make her Crimson Tide debut this season. The other sophomores are all coming off strong freshmen seasons and will look to continue making an impact for the Crimson Tide in 2026.

LaCoursiere, Cawley and Ra-Akbar are all names to watch for the all-around competition alongside Gladieux of course. Gladieux has been a steady contributor on all four events since her freshmen campaign. The senior has stepped into an even bigger leadership role heading into her final year.

“I think what I’m most excited about for Gabby is not just how she’s leading herself, but how she is leading others,” Johnston said. “I’ve been really excited to see how she has really broken through her own struggles and things that she has been trying to break down the walls of trying to be perfect all the time. I think learning how to be authentically herself, and by being authentically herself, she has really been an incredible role model for the rest of our team. So how that plays out on competition night is not just her worried about her own performances but her really looking around, leaning in and helping to bring in others— learning what it’s like to compete in a really fierce way. She is a fierce competitor, but I think she’s really grown to be able to look around and meet the needs of her teammates, and that’s what being a great team leader is all about.”

Outlook

Over and over this offseason, Johnston has emphasized that there will a lot of new routines in Alabama’s lineups from both new faces and returners. The Crimson Tide is ranked No. 8 in the preseason coaches poll and has a great mix of fresh talent and experienced depth.

It isn’t finals or bust for Alabama this season. Johnston has been building the program in a steady direction, but a Final Four appearance would go a long way. The SEC is always a challenge, now more than ever with parity from top to bottom. Johnston doesn’t want her team to be average, but she wants them to compete their average week after week to have ultimate success.

“I think this team has worked relentlessly to make sure they’re capitalizing on every half tenth, every possible way that they can increase their scoring potential,” she said. “This team’s talented. They’re excited. They’ve worked so incredibly hard, and I’m just excited for each of their stories to break through in their own unique and special way.”

Friday night

Alabama will open the season at Clemson on Friday at 6 p.m. on ACC Network Extra. The Tigers are relatively new on the college gymnastics scene, only having a program since 2024. Clemson did not score higher than a 196.575 all of last season, but the Tigers are under new direction with first-year co-head coaches Justin Howell and Elisabeth Crandall-Howell.

This will be the first meeting between the two programs. Clemson traveled to Tuscaloosa last year for NCAA regionals, but the Tigers were not in the same session as Alabama and finished fourth in their session. The Tide should be the higher-scoring team on Friday night, but Johnston is more focused on learning how ready her team is.

“Clemson is going to be a great kind of litmus test for that,” Johnston said. “While they’re not an SEC competitor, their environment certainly is similar to what an SEC environment is going to look like. It’s going to be a sold-out crowd. I know they sold out tickets early when this meet was announced, so I think it’s going to be a really energetic, exciting environment.

“We’re going to be able to see how quickly our athletes are going to be able to adapt to the different feelings that they’re going to have. They’re going to be a little nervous, they’re gonna be a little stressed, they’re gonna want to be perfect…I’m most interested in seeing how they’re going to handle it, but at the same time, I trust that they’re going to handle it well. This team has worked really hard on handling hard moments where I think that’s our superpower. I think our strength as a team is that we’re able to step into the hardest moments and trust and know that we can get it done.”

Alabama defensive back officially declares for 2026 NFL draft

Published

19 hours ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

Alabama defensive back officially declares for 2026 NFL draft

Jones transferred to Alabama from Wake Forrest prior to the 2024 campaign.

Alabama defensive back DaShawn Jones has officially declared for the 2026 NFL draft.

A senior out of Baltimore, Maryland, Jones was an excellent rotational piece in the Alabama secondary throughout the 2025 campaign. Jones joined the Crimson Tide in 2024 after transferring in from Wake Forrest, and the defensive back took full advantage of the opportunities he was given and thrived in Tuscaloosa as a result. The former three-star prospect recorded 11 solo tackles and one interception this season, as the playmaker will now turn his attention towards the NFL draft in April.

Jones was ranked as the No. 137 cornerback and the No. 1551 overall player from the class of 2021, per the 247Sports Composite rankings, prior to attending Wake Forest to begin his collegiate career. The talented defensive back played far above his expectations over the course of his college career, as the former Demon Deacon was a solid contributor during his time at both Wake Forrest and Alabama.

Jones could quickly prove to be an excellent pick up for any team that choses to draft him, as the promising playmaker’s time in Tuscaloosa officially comes to an end.

Contact/Follow us @RollTideWire on X, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Alabama news, notes and opinion.

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Alabama

May they see your driver license?: Down in Alabama

Published

1 day ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

May they see your driver license?: Down in Alabama

Driver license, please

A case we followed here in 2022 has found its way to the Alabama Supreme Court.

AL.com’s Sarah Whites-Koditschek reports that the question is whether Alabama Police officers can demand to see people’s driver licenses or other IDs if they have probable cause.

In 2022, Childersburg Police answered a call about somebody on the property of people who were not home. The man, Michael Jennings, said he was watering flowers for his neighbors. The officers told him to provide an ID. He would only give his name as “Pastor Jennings” and refused to provide identification. Eventually the officers arrested him on a charge of obstructing government operations.

Attorney Ed Haden is representing the city and a group of police officers. He argued before the justices that state law gives officers with probable cause the authority to identify people, and that means a full name verified by identification.

Jennings attorney Henry Daniels argued the opposite, telling the justices that “Entitlement to live one’s life free from unwarranted interference by law enforcement or other governmental entities is fundamental to liberty.”

How low can you go?

Alabama’s preliminary, seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for December came in at a low 2.7% and was accompanied by record-breaking employment totals, reports AL.com’s Heather Gann.

Alabama Department of Workforce Secretary Greg Reed announced the figures on Wednesday.

Records fell for the number of people counted as employed and wage and salary employment. The difference between those two stats is that “wage and salary employment” doesn’t include a few types of workers such as the self-employed.

Alabama’s 2.7% rate was down from 3.3% in November ’24. And it was tracking well below the national rate.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.6%. That’s low, historically speaking, but the highest it’s been since September 2021.

RIP, songwriter Jim McBride

Huntsville native, country-music songwriter and Alabama Music Hall of Famer Jim McBride has passed away, reports AL.com’s Patrick Darrington.

McBride, who was from Huntsville, wrote or co-wrote No. 1s such as Johnny Lee’s “Bet Your Heart on Me” and Waylon Jennings’ very last chart-topper, “Rose in Paradise.”

With legends such as Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and George Jones cutting his songs, he became a Nashville mainstay himself during the 1980s. In the country-music business, a lot of figures like McBride aren’t the household names of the recording artists, but the smart recording artists are going to gravitate to somebody who can take a song or a hook or an idea and turn it into something that might hit. So the songwriters become famous inside the industry and many of them are like family to the Opry stars and in high demand for late-night guitar pulls. We had another one — Bobby Tomberlin — on the podcast on Sept. 12, and he told some great stories about that life.

Well, one of those smart recording artists who wound up in McBride’s orbit in the late ’80s was a fresh-faced Alan Jackson. Their songwriter partnership produced the No. 1 songs “Someday” and CMA Single and Song of the year “Chattahoochee” as well as many others, including the Top 5s “Chasing That Neon Rainbow” and “(Who Says) You Can’t Have it All.”

That alone is a career.

Jim McBride was 78 years old.

Quoting

“To all our ICE agents in Minnesota and across the country: if you are violently attacked, SHOOT BACK.”

U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, in a response to a woman’s being shot and killed in Minnesota on Wednesday after she allegedly tried to drive her SUV into an immigration officer.

By the Numbers

60%

That’s the percentage of Alabamians in an AL.com survey that said they expect to spend more on housing or rental costs this year compared to 2025.

Born on This Date

In 1977, actress Amber Benson of Birmingham.

The podcast

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