If you’re looking for an old-school Gulf Coast seafood restaurant, Bayou La Batre seems like a logical place to look: It’s a community where “fresh off the boat” is a baseline expectation, not an abstract concept.

Your search may well lead you to Catalina Restaurant, which is as old-school as they come. Its roots go back to 1965, when local entrepreneur Ora Johnson and his wife Gwen launched their most successful venture in a building that had previously been Johnson’s gas station in Coden.

When a Press-Register reporter visited in 1996, the restaurant was an established local landmark that had expanded quite a bit over the course of 30-plus years. Sister restaurants had opened in Mobile and Pascagoula. The Johnson family didn’t just cook and serve the seafood; they also caught a lot of it themselves on two family-owned trawlers.

There have been hard times too: The 92-foot Jacqueline Diane, which Ora Johnson had helped build in his own shipyard before getting into the restaurant business, sank off Louisiana at the end of 1999. The surge from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina destroyed the original restaurant, forcing staff to shift to the Mobile and Pascagoula locations. After Ora Johnson’s death in 2012, the family downsized the operation and 10 years after Katrina, brought it home to a new location in Bayou La Batre. Jimmy Cobb, husband of Ora and Gwen’s daughter Kathy, said a former Schambeau’s supermarket was “the perfect little spot to open back up.”

(Read all the stories from our Unsung Alabama series.)

It’s not hard to see why: The location is in the heart of Bayou La Batre, easily accessible to workers at nearby seafood processing plants and shipyards. But it’s also on Ala. 188, which carries tourist traffic bound for Dauphin Island.

With 15 years under its belt, the new place doesn’t feel like a new place. You get the sense that the décor of nautical bric-a-brac was accrued over a period of years, some of it perhaps from nearby docks, rather than put up all at once in accordance with some interior design plan. The layout makes it feel smaller than it is. You might recognize folks representing the local seafood industry among the clientele, and that’s a good sign.

The menu is straightforward. There’s usually a blue-plate special: half a ribeye with loaded mashed potatoes and snap beans, to pick one recent example, or sausage and shrimp jambalaya with cream-style corn and baby green limas.

“We do that for the working-class shipyard workers and stuff like that,” said Cobb. “They don’t have a lot of time to eat, so you have try to have something ready for them.”

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The main attraction is shrimp, oysters, catfish and crab, all of which probably will be fried unless you make a point of asking for it to be grilled, blackened, broiled or baked. The logical way to start is with some gumbo. Catalina’s isn’t cheap, at $11.99 for a cup. But the shrimp in it are bigger than what you usually find in gumbo these days, and the reddish broth has a freshness that drives home just how close you are to the waterfront.

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The seafood dinner selection does offer good variety: It includes Steamed Royal Reds ($25.99 with corn and new potatoes); Snow Crab Legs ($31.99, ditto); Crab Cakes ($23.99); Whole Flounder ($29.99, or stuffed for $39.99); and Crabmeat au Gratin ($24.99). Alternatives include burgers, po-boys, steaks and chicken tenders.

The “half-and-half” section offers more options. Popcorn shrimp and catfish? Oysters and crab claws? Fantail shrimp and oysters? Assuming you aren’t ready to go whole hog with the Seafood Platter ($29.99), this is likely where you’ll end up. And it’s a good place to be.

I opted for fantail shrimp and oysters ($23.99), while my dining companion went all in on oysters ($22.99). It was a good call, either way: The shrimp were large and firm and the oysters were fresh and juicy.

If you go deep into Coden-Bayou La Batre lore, the restaurant originally took its name from Ora and Gwen Johnson’s three daughters, Jane, Kathy and Zephia Alena: It was called Jane’s KatAlena.

The unusual spelling didn’t survive popular usage: People just called it Catalina, and eventually the owners went along with that. In some old listings you’ll find it as “Catalina Jane.” But there’s no California connection. (Jane died in 2022, four years after her mother.)

It’s still very much a family business: “Zephia makes the crab cakes, I make the gumbo,” said Cobb. His wife, Kathy, also plays a major part in operating the restaurant, and Cobb said the staff includes more nieces and nephews than he can name.

My companion and I were too full to conduct a follow-up investigation of Catalina’s Sweet Side and Ice Cream Parlor. For the record, it’s a newer sister business on the other side of the building. Primarily an ice-cream parlor, it has its own burger-joint menu and blue plate specials, with a rotation that includes mullet and grits, shrimp spaghetti and more.

“We opened that about two years ago,” said Cobb. “And the reason we did that is that when we first started in ‘65, we were an ice cream-hamburger joint. So we had a little bit of experience there, and we just thought it’d be a good addition. The spot came open for us.”

When you’ve been around for 50 years, the line between doing something new and bringing back something from the past can be a fine distinction. Now that’s old-school.

Catalina is at 14060 S. Wintzell Ave. in Bayou La Batre. For updates on daily specials, visit www.facebook.com/catalinabayou and the Facebook page for Catalina’s Sweet Side.