I’ll admit it made me sad to go all the way to Gulf Shores for lunch and not order seafood. But at least I got to drown my sorrows (and my country-fried steak) in gravy.

See, back in May, Southern Living offered its recommendations for “The Best Places to Eat in Gulf Shores, Alabama,” and two of the places stood out to my eye. Where most were big, high-volume places clearly built to capitalize on the tourist market, two were old-school, family owned restaurants that had stayed the course while modern-day Gulf Shores rose around them.

I tried out one of them, Mikee’s Seafood, during the Hangout Music Fest, and found it to be a quiet, cool haven where the fried shrimp and oyster plate came with more shrimp than I cared to eat. But the other place had closed for the festival, which was practically on its doorstep.

So I here I was on a random weekday a few weeks later, on a mission to check out DeSoto’s Seafood Kitchen. In the meantime, I’d studied its unique place in the local landscape. DeSoto’s has been around for a long time, and it’s racked up a lot of local-favorite awards over the years. But even though it has “seafood” in the name, and even though it’s in easy walking distance of Gulf Shores’ main public beach, it’s well-known (in part) for food that’s not beachy at all. If you’re at the beach and looking for a good old meat-and-two, blue-plate special, DeSoto’s has you covered.

The advertised lunch special on this given day was beef tips over rice, and it was tempting. But then, so were a lot of the other down-home options: chicken Creole, pork chops, country ham. Even the vegetable plate was appealing, since it lets you choose four items from a list of sides that includes sweet potato casserole, black-eyed peas, fried okra, turnip greens, au gratin potatoes and more.

I ordered a cup of gumbo while I settled in and thought it over. Paying $8 for a cup of gumbo isn’t exactly thrifty, but it’s not an unusual price point these days. This came served in an actual coffee cup, so it got points on presentation as well on flavor, which was excellent. And it was chock-full of shrimp that were still crisp, not cooked to mush.

Nearby in the upstairs dining room, a table full of folks talked about the ins and outs of towing RVs. Vacationers. A family with small kids took another table. Probably vacationers. But the majority of the people in the room were tradesmen taking their lunch break – and that alone has a lot to say about the value a place offers.

I went with the country-fried steak and two sides; like most of the lunch specials it was $11.50. The steak was tender, ample for a lunch portion, and better yet, the creamy gravy came on the side. Maybe you like your country fried steak drowning in the stuff, maybe you just want a dab. It’s nice to be given control over your personal gravy situation. A side of lima beans impressed me with its savory, smoky flavor; the other side, fried green tomatoes, provided a crisp, slightly tart counterpoint.

In short, I quit whining to myself about the shrimp po-boy or fried flounder plate I wasn’t having. I was content, which is just what you want from this type of meal.

Later, I sat down with co-owner Rosemary Steele to get the lowdown on the longevity and enduring appeal of DeSoto’s. She and her husband Chris have owned the place for going on 24 years, but the restaurant’s story goes back even farther. “I ate here as a kid,” she said.

She grew up in Gulf Shores and had no expectation of going into the restaurant business. She said her future husband grew up in Mobile but spent summers at the beach, getting an early start in the business.

“My husband grew up in the restaurant business down here, his grandfather [Dale McMath] had one of the first five-star restaurants down here,” she said. “It was called Perdido Pass. A lot of our recipes, especially on our night menu, are from him growing up with his grandpa, his grandpa’s restaurant. Perdido Pass was very well known.”

Years later, Rosemary and Chris Steele found themselves at a turning point. They’d moved to Atlanta after college, and he had been working as a corporate restaurant manager. But they were starting a family and they wanted to move back closer to kin in coastal Alabama. Also, she said, “We learned in Atlanta the corporate life wasn’t for us.”

Now, well, they’re pretty far from the corporate life. And nothing drives that home like the tough decision to overstaff through the off-season slump.

“We joke around in the wintertime,” Rosemary Clarke said. “If you went by corporate rules and how your numbers are supposed to be and all these things, we’d be fired. But our employees mean more to us than labor costs in the winter. Making sure they can pay their bills. Because you know what? I need these people in the summer when we’re getting murdered. I need to have skilled people who know how to operate. And it’s worth it for us to take the hit a little bit in the off-season.”

And there’s some insight into why DeSoto’s is still going strong, more than two decades after they took over. It’s partly about the service, which means catering both to the seasonal surge of one-time visitors and to the locals and long-term visitors who return repeatedly, even multiple times a week in some cases.

“We have a line at the door pretty much every day of our regular locals,” she said. “At lot of the times in the morning, especially if the line is real long, we open up and just let everybody filter in and then we bring them menus and silverware. Half of them don’t need a menu because they know what they’re going to get. And a quarter of that already have their drinks, their bread and their side salad the way they like them on the table, because it saves the server time.”

She rattled off examples, ticking off what tables certain regulars liked to sit at, what beverage they’d want, what salad dressing.

“Dinner’s a totally different beast, this time of year,” she said. Waits can run to an hour and a half, two hours. It’s a chronic complaint for locals that they can’t find a place to go eat dinner without running into that kind of traffic. So the Clarkes have invested in an online system that’ll not only predict wait times, it’ll send you reminders about when you need to get on the list to eat at the time you want.

“It’s kind of expensive,” she said. “But It’s hot and the waits are long and your kids are tired and hungry and we’re trying to make it as easy as we can for everybody. And for our regulars to be able to get in too.”

Service would only go so far if the food wasn’t good. And what Clarke is really proud of, she said, is how much effort goes into the food.

“If people understood how much time that we’re here in the morning before our doors are open, prepping and preparing fresh food. Hours before we’re open,” she said. “Not just unboxing stuff. Really making sweet potato casserole, making macaroni and cheese, making au gratin potatoes, getting those green beans on the stove, getting those lima beans on the stove, seasoning them, all of that is done before we open the doors. In the summer, people are here at 5:30 in the morning.”

Fresh produce comes in daily, and prep work is a major effort. “We go through about two cases of green tomatoes a day,” she said. On this particular morning, the prep list had included about 20 gallons of sweet potato casserole, to be held ready and then baked in smaller batches as needed.

The Clarkes’ aversion to ready-made food service items, and their preference for hand-prepped, house-made everything, doesn’t come cheap in terms of ingredients or labor. But it does create efficiencies here and there. Hand-cutting ham creates leftover bits. So does trimming the bacon that wraps the stuffed shrimp. That meat gets used as a seasoning in some of the sides, which is why those lima beans had that smoky flavor.

Lunch is value-oriented. Dinner provides a more upscale seafood menu. Clarke said some of the restaurant’s signature items are the shrimp and pasta marsala, the fried parmesan fish special on Fridays, the panéed fresh catch. But there are still alternatives, such as the Hawaiian ribeye and the Jamaican jerk chicken. “There’s always someone who doesn’t like seafood or is allergic to seafood,” Clarke said. “Or if you’re tired of seafood, you’ve been here a week and you’ve had all the shrimp you can hold.”

“I’m proud of the amount of fresh food that we put out a day and have so many repeat customers,” she said. “For our little restaurant that we are, compared to some of these monster restaurants, we really care about putting out quality food.

“Chris and I, we could have a 400 or 500-seat restaurant,” she said. It’s not unusual for them to get offers to partner on a higher-volume venue, she said, but “Greed is never a reason to make a business decision. We’ve got a good life, we’ve got a good crew, we can manage it and we can keep an eye on it.”

For her, there’s a direct connection between the hands-on effort and the repeat business.

“They know that Chris and I are here, and that we care, and that we’re really making our food,” she said. “It’s not coming straight off the truck.”

“We haven’t been doing this for this long to not care about it,” she said.

DeSoto’s Seafood Kitchen is at 138 W. 1st Ave. in Gulf Shores. For menus and other information, visit desotosseafoodkitchen.com.

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