“The Steer Burger is what brought this place back to life,” Marty Flowers tells me. “The Steer Burger is what really saved our family. I mean, it really is, to be honest with you.”

Flowers is talking about 1989, and the crazy thing is, that’s not even the beginning of the story of Rochelle’s Café & Deli. It’s a midpoint. To get to the beginning, you have to go all the way back to 1929, when L.R. Flowers, Marty’s great-grandfather, opened a grocery on a nearby corner, right along Spring Hill Avenue in Mobile’s Crichton area.

“Him and my great grandmother ran that grocery store and my grandfather inherited it when he came back from World War Two,” says Flowers. That was Mack Flowers Sr., who came to own a good bit of property in the area. He opened a small walk-up burger stand across the street. In the early ‘50s he sold that property and opened the building that would one day house Rochelle’s. In vintage photos the sign out front says “Mack’s Bar-B-Q.”

“When I tell you he built it himself, he drew it, designed it and hired helpers to help him build,” says Marty Flowers. “Originally this had curb hops and, you know, ice creams and milkshakes and it was the whole 1950s diner drive-in thing. I mean, the full-blown setup. And that’s when he started doing the Steer Burger. I don’t know where he came up with the name Steer Burger. He was creative too.”

At this point in the story, Marty Flowers and his mother, Rochelle Flowers, stop to discuss those early Steer Burgers. Marty reckons they were smaller, as burgers tended to be back in those days. But Rochelle, who was a kid at the time, says they came in two sizes, and she would know.

“We had a four-ounce size,” she says. “We had the eight-ounce. Because I would sit over in that cooler in the grocery store and run patties. He had a patty machine, and that was one of my jobs, sit in that cooler and freeze to death and run patties.”

The landscape changed across the ‘60s and ‘70s. The rise of fast food chains put pressure on mom-and-pop purveyors of burgers and ice cream. A big new supermarket rose nearby, anchored by a Delchamps supermarket, and that spelled the end of the old-school Flowers grocery store. After closing it, Mack Sr. turned it into a seafood restaurant called Mack’s Wheelhouse.

“At that point, this kind of took a back seat to the Wheelhouse, in the ‘70s,” says Marty Flowers. “My grandfather lost his interest in this and was really concentrating on that over there.”

As the city sprawled westward, the fortunes of Crichton’s business district declined, much as did downtown’s. Crichton’s return has been slower, though the trend has been positive in recent years: The stretch of Spring Hill Avenue between Mobile Street and I-65 as been perked up by a new Cefco gas station, a new fire station, new chain restaurants, and demolition of some older buildings. A big new car wash is under construction.

But things were pretty sparse in 1989. Marty was a kid and he knew family finances were tight. His parents, Rochelle and Mack Jr., had taken over the burger joint, which had been closed for a couple of years, and renamed it. They had the building and not much else. But they had a no-so-secret weapon.

“Like I said, the Steer Burger saved us,” he says. “Because people started talking about the burgers … they were all eight-ounce patties. And I mean, at that time, half a pound of hamburger meat on a hamburger was unheard of, you know, and people started talking to the next thing, you know, this place was packed out at lunch every day, you know, and back then they were closed at three o’clock every day.”

Here, his mother starts laughing, because she knows what’s coming.

“As a matter of fact, I got out of school at 2:30 and by that point they had cut everybody loose,” Marty continues. “So I left school and came straight here and I cleaned the whole restaurant by myself every day. She would help me out here and there a little bit. My dad sat right there in that booth and read the newspaper and waited for me to get done cleaning up. Every single day. And we were out of here.”

“She used to make the hamburger patties to order,” he says. “I mean, she had a bulk thing of hamburger meat in the sandwich board and as the orders came in, she would mash them out and put them on the grill.”

We’ve talked around those burgers long enough. Let’s look at one. It all starts with the basic Steer Burger: “8 oz. pure beef patty on a large seeded bun w/ lettuce, tomato, onion, mustard, ketchup & mayo,” a mere $8.95 with fries. They’re not kidding about the “large” part. Rochelle’s burgers are built around hand-made patties that are patted out wide, not thick, and seared on a flat-top that’s plainly visible behind the bar, and that’s one of the great old-school charms of Rochelle’s.

The menu lists 14 more options after the basic Steer Burger, and custom orders are welcome. You can get a Roquefort Steer, a Hickory Steer, a Chili Cheese Steer, a Mushroom Swiss Steer. Several of the options are double-deckers. I’ve only seen one person polish off a double, and he’s an Associated Press man. The “Mack Attack” features three half-pound patties with Swiss and American cheese for $16.95.

“Yes, we have guys who are coming here at lunchtime to eat a triple and go back to work,” says Marty Flowers. “And then we’ve got one lady that worked next door, she would come in here and get one and ask us to cut it into fours and she said she would eat it over three days.”

On this day, I go for the Garlic Cheese Steer (“stinkin’ with garlic and smothered in Swiss & American cheese with all the trimmings”) with onion rings. It’s fabulous. Half-pound patties are pretty commonplace these days but they’re usually built tall. The Steer Burger seems as wide as a hubcab, requiring both hands and some time. It’s simply a classic approach.

“We use good ground beef,” says Rochelle Flowers.

“Everybody says, ‘What do you season your meat with?’” says Marty Flowers. “Nothing. We don’t put anything on it. Take it out of the pack, weigh it up, mash it out and put it on the grill.” He pauses. “Now, I’ve been cooking Conecuh and bacon and everything else on the grill all morning, so it’s got a little bit of, you know, seasoning on it. But other than that, we don’t do nothing to it and, and I think that’s what makes it so good. People try too hard. People do way too much to a hamburger, you know, I mean, the ground beef should speak for itself.”

“A lot of people get frozen patties and you can tell the difference,” says Rochelle Flowers.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the way we heat our bread,” adds Marty Flowers, pointing out a bun warmer that looks like a piece of antique industrial equipment. They don’t even make them like that anymore, he says.

But for most customers, it’s about that slab of hot steel behind the bar. For many years that was one of the pleasures of visiting Rochelle’s. Even if you weren’t sitting at the bar, you had to look at it. It looked like something that had been pulled out of the USS Alabama when it was decommissioned. It was, in fact, the original grill from 1953. As you might imagine, its death a few years ago caused some consternation.

“It had a crack down the middle and we tried having it welded up, we tried everything and it would always open back up,” says Marty. “Well, it was above a burner. So it would drip grease on the burner and then catch on fire. You know, it became a safety hazard. We tried to keep it going but it got to where only we only had one burner that worked. So if you got busy during lunch and filled it up with burgers, it couldn’t recover.

“When we got that [new] grill and put it in, man, it was like everybody was freaking out,” he continues. “I mean, you ask my mom, they were like, ‘What are you gonna do with the burgers? Ain’t gonna taste the same.’”

It’s fine. The old one got scraped and cleaned and polished to a shine every night, so it’s not like residual flavor built up over the decades. The ritual of daily use that gave the old one its magic does the same for the new one – which doesn’t look all that new anymore, if we’re being honest.

Rochelle’s remains a family experience: Marty’s brother Alex is also very much involved, and these days you’re likely to see Marty’s wife Sandra running the grill. One or more of Marty’s five kids is likely to be on the scene at any given point as well. And the restaurant continues to bear whatever gets thrown its way. It was damaged by a tornado in December 2012, a precursor to the Christmas Day tornado that hit Midtown a week later. In December 2022, a driver being pursued by police crashed her car into the building one night. It was business more or less as usual the next day.

The depth of the place’s history is obvious in the décor and fixtures; there’s been no grand modernization. A friend and I sat at a tabletop covered with a map of the Louisiana passes where the Mississippi River runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Looking at a long finger of land, my companion said, “It doesn’t look like that anymore.” Granted, that’s a fragile, fickle landscape. But how often do you sit in a restaurant that’s been operating long enough for geography to change?

You never know when history will come in handy. Rochelle’s has a walk-up service window in front, a relic of its early car-hop days. Marty Flowers says they didn’t use it for 40 years, but it was a lifesaver during the Pandemic, allowing an easy pivot to carryout service.

Age and location make Rochelle’s easy to overlook. But Marty Flowers says the location also is a strength.

“I mean, the interstate’s right here, you got three major hospitals right here, you know, and a lot of our customers are people that don’t even live in Mobile, they just come here once a month to go to the doctor. All they see in Mobile is from the Exit 5 off-ramp to whatever hospital they’re going to, and they come back down Spring Hill Avenue and get on the interstate and go home and that’s it. We just happen to be right on that path, you know.”

And then there are the regulars, the people who come every week, or even every day, for breakfast or lunch or dinner. (Fish and grits is a big seller at breakfast. As for lunch and dinner, the menu goes far beyond burgers, including seafood, salads and blue-plate meals.)

“I mean, the generations of families that we have coming here is unbelievable,” said Marty Flowers. He says his wife is a wizard when it comes to remembering what people want.

“If she’s not here, they’ll leave,” he says. “She’s got a couple of guys in the afternoon the same way, they’ll walk in the door. My wife ain’t here. ‘When is she coming back?’ And I told one of them one day, I was like, ‘Well, I can fix it for you. How do you like it?’ He was like, ‘I don’t know, she does and she makes it the same way every time.’ I called her and I was like, ‘Hey, how do you make this guy’s burger?’”

“And she’s the same way with breakfast,” he says. “I can’t believe how much stuff she keeps in her head, but that’s what keeps people coming back when they come in the first time, you know?”

So. Come for the burger, and enjoy the history. Come back for the old-school service. They won’t Steer you wrong.

Rochelle’s is at 2906 Spring Hill Ave. Hours are 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Friday. For menus and updates, visit www.facebook.com/RoshellsCafeDiner.