The word on Bayou Seafood Company was irresistible: A little place that didn’t look like much but offered exceptional bang for the buck on some of the best fried shrimp you could ask for.

Say no more. Soon, two intrepid culinary scouts were on their way to Bayou La Batre, where they promptly managed to drive right past Bayou Seafood on the first pass. It’s that easy to overlook: A yellow building that looks more like a house than a business.

“You see my sign out there? Don’t have one,” owner John Harbison would later say. “But you look at this parking lot.” You’re not going to find it empty.

There’s some seating on a screened-in front porch and not much more inside, where the tiny space allotted for use as a diner can accommodate about 20 people. It’s pretty obvious that the building was built for some other purpose.

We started off with one of the daily specials, a plate of cheese, bacon and ranch fries. Then we settled into places as one of the outside tables, which we found to be decorated with labels from long-gone seafood canneries, some in Mobile. Nice touch.

The experience fully lived up to our can’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover hopes. The appetizer ($7.99) was a humble dish but it was done right – a group-sized portion of crispy fries loaded with – but not drowned by — abundant toppings. A follow-up cup of gumbo boasted plenty of shrimp and crab in a dark, peppery roux.

Frankly, this reporter had had a meal at this point, but duty compelled him to plow forward and he did so with a fried shrimp and oyster platter. Platters range from $12.99 for catfish or spicy boiled shrimp to $18.99 for oysters to $28.99 for the top-of-the-line combo with shrimp, crab claws, oysters and fish. You get two sides, which include fries, spicy corn on the cob, spicy new potatoes, spicy sausage, coleslaw and potato salad.

You pay a small surcharge for the pick-two option but it was worth it in this case: It took a couple of bites to polish off each of the piping-hot shrimp and the oysters were cooked just-so, with a thin, crisp batter around a still-moist interior. They weren’t kidding about the spicy new potatoes, either: They were sprinkled with fire-colored crab boil seasoning. Half the plate went home for later.

Though the menu was small, my companion struggled with his choice, going back and forth between the “All-American Cheeseburger” and the Shrimp Burger. Given the fact that he could throw a rock and hit a shrimp boat from where he was standing, he chose the shrimp burger with the standard side of fries.

The shrimp burger ($9.99) was a standard hamburger bun overflowing with fat, juicy fried shrimp and all the usual burger fixings – purple onion, tomato, mayo and lettuce. My companion reported that it was utterly delightful.

(Note: There’s also a Crab Burger that puts a crab cake on a bun with mayo, lettuce, tomato and purple onion, and a selection of po’boys if you want to go a more conventional route. For the record, the cheeseburger is a double-decker guaranteed to leave you with no guilt about ordering the only non-seafood entree.)

After this great first impression, a second visit provided a chance to get the full story from Harbison.

Though Harbison grew up in the Bayou, his thoughts didn’t turn to opening a food truck or a restaurant until 2018, he said. At that point he was making a good living as a construction foreman but was thinking it might be time for a change of pace.

“All my family’s from down here and been in the seafood business for years,” he said. “I mean, even in high school I caught oysters alongside my daddy, who was a preacher. He was a preacher and a fisherman.” Kinfolks own and operate Anna’s Seafood, a wholesaler in Coden, and from some of them he got a lead on a restaurant whose operators might be looking to sell.

Harbison said the yellow building at 13450 N. Wintzell Ave. had originally been built as a produce and seafood market, which kind of explains the layout, and the next owners had shifted it more into restaurant operation. By early 2019, he and his wife Shena had sealed a deal to take over.

Soon Harbison was in the kitchen and business was taking off. It turned out Harbison had a knack both for food and for community. As one example, consider an item you might notice on the menu: The “Fisherman’s Delight” daily special presented “In memory of Mr. John Crawford Jr.”

“Miss Mary and Mr. John Crawford, we probably hadn’t been in business two weeks and they started coming in every day,” Harbison said. “At least three to four times a week, they were coming in.”

Crawford had retired after working in the design department at Austal USA. He and his wife loved the food and became friends as much as customers. “Me and him got close enough where he’d come in and come to the back and talk to me. She’d bring cakes on our birthdays and stuff,” Harbison said. “Me and Mr. John, we’d go fishin’ in the bayou late at night after I got off work.”

That came to an end during the pandemic. COVID-19 sent to Crawford to the hospital, Harbison said, and heart trouble ended his life. Harbison said he was struck by the number of younger Austal employees who turned out for Crawford’s funeral. “He was one of them people that didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” Harbison said. “He was actually buried with a Bayou Seafood Company hat on.”

Miss Mary remains a family friend, he said, and Mr. John’s entrée of choice will remain on the menu as long as Harbison has any say in the matter. It’s a heck of a tribute. For $12.99 you get a pound of large boiled shrimp with “none of that sprinkle stuff,” sausage and slaw. Even without the usual dusting of crab boil, the shrimp have a sinus-clearing kick.

Harbison said that the rising cost of supplies hasn’t let him keep prices quite as low as he’d have liked. “My goal when I started this place was to try to feed a family of four for under $50,” he said. “Times don’t let that happen.”

But in other ways, he’s been able to stick to a distinctive vision for what Bayou Seafood Co. should be. That starts with an insistence on nearly 100% American ingredients.

“Nothing here ever has a chemical in it. Nothing here is ever from a different country other than snow crab, which, we can’t help that,” he said. “Sometimes they’re Canadian, sometimes they’re Norwegian, it just depends.”

As you’d hope, the lion’s share of his seafood comes straight off local docks. “We’ve got several boats that actually unload to us,” he said.

To him, he said, transparency is important. He thinks shrimp flash-frozen aboard the ship that caught them – in contrast to shrimp kept on ice until the ship unloads them – are as good as fresh. But he’s not one to gloss over the difference.

“We don’t hide it, where most folks say hey, this is a fresh shrimp. Uh-uh,” he said. “You ask, we tell. You want to see my invoices, we’ll show ‘em. You want to see where it comes from, we’ll show you where it came from.”

His philosophy on portion size is just as straightforward. “Look, I’m a big guy,” he said. “If that plate will fill me up, it’s going to fill the average man up.” So he’s the benchmark. “We don’t want nobody to leave hungry, we don’t want nobody to leave dissatisfied,” he said.

Harbison also drew a line when it came to the schedule, putting family first. As a general rule of thumb, Bayou Seafood is closed Tuesdays and Sundays, open from 10:30 or 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. other days. But it pays to keep an eye on the restaurant’s Facebook page for holiday hours, special offerings, and regular Sunday fundraisers for the Theodore High School cheerleaders. On those occasions, Harbison donates the food and his daughter and her teammates work shifts out front, with “every single red cent” going to the team.

Maintaining a good home life is one reason Bayou Seafood closes at 6 p.m. Another is that Harbison employs high-schoolers and doesn’t want anyone’s grades to suffer because they had to work late.

“We want to make sure that it’s fair to her,” Harbison said of his daughter. “So when we lock the door at the end of the day — It belongs to us, so we can lock the door. If we want to go out of town, we go out of town. We post it on Facebook, we post it on the door, and everybody’s understanding about it.”

“We can turn the dial up and we can turn the dial down,” he said.

You don’t have to know much about the restaurant business to know how rare that is. That said, it’s quite possible Harbison will be turning the dial up in the future. He and his wife have acquired another building as well as a food trailer, he said – and his plans for those outlets are not seafood-centric.

In the meantime, Bayou Seafood Company will continue not to look like much from the inside. But as my fellow diner noted, he’s been to plenty of joints that were richly appointed and very comfortable, only to find the food sorely lacking.

Bayou Seafood has got it where it counts – on the plate.

Bayou Seafood Company is at 13450 N. Wintzell Ave. in Bayou La Batre. For regular updates on hours and specials, visit www.facebook.com/BayouSeafoodCompany. For information call 251-824-2248.