A little diner outside Mobile will serve you an award-winning burger, and it turns out that’s just the beginning of the surprises. How would you like to follow that with a few bites of baklava? Or come back for the only-in-America gyro biscuit or breakfast burrito?

Welcome to the Shipyard Café, a spot that turned some heads during last fall’s Mobtown Burger Week challenge. Start a conversation about who serves the best burgers in Mobile and plenty of established local favorites will come up. But Restore Mobile’s annual fundraiser was won by a smashburger food truck, followed by two restaurants in Chickasaw.

The Shipyard Café, at the intersection of U.S. 43 and South Craft Highway, came in second with a Bacon Honey Melt featuring bacon, onion bacon jam and sweet honey barbecue sauce. Three Little Birds Smokehouse, just a bit farther north along 43, came in third. Two out of three podium spots is quite an impressive showing for Chickasaw, a city of about 6,500 sandwiched (if you’ll pardon the expression) between Mobile, Prichard and Saraland.

A visit to the café confirms that its strong showing was no fluke. The burger comes in a variety of options, starting with the basic cheeseburger for $8.95 or a double for $9.95. You can add a fried egg to any burg for 50 cents and you totally should: Anyone who sees you eating it will be reminded of the old joke, “I won’t tell anyone if I win the lottery, but there will be signs.”

This is a burger made with craftsmanship, right down to the way the bun is toasted. The flavor is excellent: When I told manager Mostafa Giddu that a colleague and I couldn’t quite figure out what the secret seasoning was, he laughed and said there is no secret seasoning – the flavor comes from a rigorous approach to the quality of the beef, using the correct fat content, emphasizing consistency in the kitchen and not rushing things.

“A lot of places they recommend you to let the meat sit and rest,” Giddu said. “So we let our burgers rest, get some love in them so they hold on that flavor and that juice. It also has a lot to do with the accuracy of the cook, which just has a lot to do with the timing.”

The same sort of care went into that Mobtown Burger Week production. Giddu said he caramelized a mix of white onions and shallots via a slow-cooking approach that took four hours a day. A dash of cinnamon brought out the natural sweetness of the onions to such a degree that some people thought he’d sweetened them with honey.

“Food is quality, okay?” he said. “As somebody that cares about food, I don’t only take it as a business, I take it personally because it’s something that I would eat, and it concerns my health and it concerns my family’s health as well, and the people that I see every day.”

The café serves a menu big on Gulf Coast standards: burgers, po-boys, wings, seafood plates. My companion on a lunch visit sampled the fried shrimp po-boy ($12.50 for the combo) and said it was excellent, but what blew us away the most was the appetizer portion of hummus with chopped gyro meat ($8.95). We didn’t go in expecting to find hummus on the menu, but this was simply some of the creamiest, tastiest hummus we’d ever had.

The Shipyard Café was founded by Kal Gadha. Giddu has managed it for close to a decade now, and the hummus is one of many touches that reflect both his background and his persistence. He’s from Libya, originally, so home cooking means a mix of North African, Greek, Italian and French influences. “So that’s where the love of the food and passion in the food come from,” he said.

At 32 he’s lived all over the place and worked a wide variety of jobs, including cooking in New Orleans, and has a degree from Spring Hill College. He’s willing to let his eclectic background inform the menu, even if it would be easier to stick to burgers and wings and fried shrimp.

“It took us five years just to establish selling maybe two pounds of hummus a week,” he said. “Currently, right now, we go through five pounds in a day or two, easily. So yeah, it was a long way coming.

“It’s the same with the gyro,” he said. “We never gave up on it, so we keep it on the menu. I like the shawarma and falafel and the rest of the stuff. We also tried a Greek bowl and some other things too, but it was so hard to highlight them to the customers at that time. Hopefully in the future we do a spin back and bring some of those old items back again.”

The breakfast menu, like the lunch and dinner slate, mixes standards with a few surprises. Yes, you can get your bacon and sausage and eggs in biscuit or burrito or platter form. But the gyro-egg-and-cheese biscuit ($6.95) puts a whole different spin on a familiar handful. The gyro burrito ($8.95) ups the ante considerably, adding tasty sauteed potatoes to the mix for an even more flavorful, and much more substantial, portion.

It’s not just a gimmick. Certainly not to Giddu. Louisiana has something unique in Creole cuisine, south Florida draws on Caribbean influences. To him, Southern cuisine has the potential to be that distinctive and have that kind of drawing power.

“Here in the South, you know, small entrepreneurs, we just try to hang in there, create our own, hoping one day we just continue that journey to elevate and make a name to ourselves,” he said. “Even knowing that we choose location like a Chickasaw instead of being in Mobile or downtown or Saraland, which is massively growing right now, we still maintain staying here because we want to be known for our own self.”

Persistence has helped get the word out, and breaks like Mobtown Burger Week don’t hurt. Giddu said DoorDash has been a huge boon for the café, helping it develop its online takeout operations.

“We kind of took our time curating the clientele base that we’re at right now and and it’s crazy,” he said. “Sixty percent of my clients, my daily clients, the regular returns, they’re from Saraland.”

“I’m so grateful,” he said. “Honestly, we encounter a lot of good people out here who motivate us to keep on being who we are. We get a lot of support from the locals and we’re so grateful for that as well.

“Unlike the differences when it comes to food, there is no difference between me and you,” he said. “We all alike, we all eat food. So that’s what we like the most is, hey, that smile, that customer walking out the door satisfied, that’s the goal of the day. That’s how I make my day, every day.”

The Shipyard Café is at 101 Telegraph Road in Chickasaw. For more information, visit shipyardcafe.com.