Downtown Birmingham diners will soon have a new lunch option.

Bayonet, the new raw bar and seafood-focused restaurant from celebrated Alabama chef Rob McDaniel and his wife, Emily, will start opening for lunch beginning Thursday, May 1.

The restaurant — at 2015 Second Ave. North, next door to the McDaniels’ first restaurant, Helen — has offered happy hour and dinner service since opening in March.

Beginning on Thursday, Bayonet will offer continuous service from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.

The lunch options will change frequently, but highlights will include:

Egg Salad Sando with chives and caviar.

Dry-Aged Tuna Tartare with matsutake garum and potato chips.

Tuna Burger with whole-grain mustard, lemon aioli and fries.

Swordfish Reuben with caraway slaw, Triple Crown Sauce and fries.

Cobia Schnitzel with gribiche and piparra peppers.

Also beginning Thursday, Bayonet will start accepting reservations for both lunch and dinner service. Guests may make reservations through Resy. Walk-ins will still be welcome.

From raw oysters to black grouper

Located in the historic Berry Building, the Bayonet space boasts 17-foot ceilings, a custom-built raw bar, subway tile trim, and commissioned artwork from Birmingham chef and artist Roscoe Hall.

The restaurant’s name refers to the Spanish bayonet plant, a resilient evergreen with white, bell-shaped flowers and long, sharp-tipped leaves that “symbolizes strength, protection, endurance, growth and resilience . . . a lot of things that we represent as a restaurant,” Rob McDaniel said in an earlier interview with AL.com.

Bayonet’s raw bar showcases oysters from the Alabama and Florida Gulf Coasts and from North Carolina to New Brunswick, Canada, along the Atlantic Coast.

Other current selections include seafood gumbo, firefly squid and black grouper.

A Haleyville native and Auburn University graduate, Rob McDaniel attended the New England Culinary Institute and worked under Chris Hastings at Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham and Drew Robinson at Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q before becoming the founding executive chef at SpringHouse restaurant near Lake Martin in 2009.

After a decade at SpringHouse, McDaniel and his wife moved to the Birmingham metro area to open Helen in August 2020.

Emily McDaniel is the hospitality director and co-owner for both Helen and Bayonet.

During his time at SpringHouse, McDaniel was a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: South for five consecutive years.

In 2024, as the executive chef at Helen, he was selected as a James Beard semifinalist for the sixth time.

Bayonet is at 2015 Second Ave. North in Birmingham, Ala. The phone is 205-829-1899. For more information, go here.