What Alabama actually orders
Alabama's plate splits along a north-south line. Birmingham and the mill towns of the Black Belt run on meat-and-threes: a protein, three vegetable sides, cornbread, and sweet tea, often under ten dollars at lunch. The Gulf Coast around Mobile and Bayou La Batre turns on Gulf shrimp, oysters, and West Indies salad, a crabmeat dish tied directly to the docks. North Alabama claims white barbecue sauce, the mayonnaise-and-vinegar dressing invented in Decatur and still argued over between Decatur and Huntsville pitmasters. Tuscaloosa and Auburn run a football-Saturday economy where wing counts and per-plate tabs triple on eight fall Saturdays. Fried catfish, raised in farm ponds near Greensboro, shows up statewide as a Friday staple tied to Baptist and Catholic fish-fry habits alike. Boiled peanuts sold from roadside stands mark late summer along rural highways. Price expectations stay conservative outside Birmingham's Pizitz Food Hall crowd and Huntsville, where Redstone Arsenal engineers support tabs closer to regional peer cities than the rest of the state. That split between meat-and-three economics and Huntsville's engineer-driven spending forces owners to run two menus of margin, and a fifty-cent side-item price move changes weekly cash on hand statewide.
