Guy Fieri missed out on some good food Friday night, as friends, family and patrons of the crew at Roosters gathered to watch a new episode of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” featuring the Dauphin Street taco restaurant.

The build-your-own nacho and sandwich bar, featuring among other things some insanely good brisket, might have been a given. But the savory “boudin king cake” illustrated that owner Frankie Little was operating on a different level – which in turn helps explain how Roosters became one of six Mobile-area restaurants being featured on “DDD” this season.

The full-house crowd in Roosters clapped and cheered repeatedly as they saw Little, other restaurant staff, and in some cases themselves on the big screen with Fieri. Meanwhile, the food itself was the main attraction for Fieri and guest Fred LeBlanc, lead drummer for New Orleans band Cowboy Mouth, as they sampled the surf-and-turf burrito and the Torta De Carnitas sandwich.

The latter seemed to be a particular hit. “Can I live here?” asked LeBlanc. “You’re doing all the right things,” said Fieri, praising the dish for its depth of flavor and presentation.

(He’s right, if you were wondering. Much of the menu at Roosters is in more familiar formats: tacos, burritos, nachos. The Torta De Carnitas is a version of the Torta Ahogada, or “drowned” sandwich. It augments braised, flattop-seared pork with picked red onion, black bean puree, cilantro and queso franco and is served with the halves standing in a bowl of red ranchero sauce. It’s like a hearty Latin American cousin to the French dip. Pro tip: the big flavor of the sandwich makes even Zapp’s chips seem like a very pale and generic side, so go with the jalapeno slaw.)

Speaking prior to the viewing party, Little recently took time to describe how the episode came to be.

He opened Roosters almost seven years ago, after working for years in a variety of restaurant settings. There was never any doubt in his mind that the focus would be on Latin American flavors. He attributes his lifelong love of the cuisine in large part to some early influences. He grew up on a farm in Foley next to his grandmother, who’d grown up partly in Central America as the daughter of an American businessman who spend much of his life there. “And so, growing up with her on the farm, she cooked plantains, things like that, that there were probably weren’t too many farm boys in Alabama in the ‘80s eating plantains and things like that,” he said.

His family also had a close relationship with a Mexican family down the street, with the two groups exchanging various goods and services. Thanks to those ties, fresh tamales were a part of the family tradition.

“So I was very interested in Spanish culture from a young age because of that, because between my grandmother and the family down the street,” he said. “I was interested in the food and the culture.” In a “vagabond” phase of life after high school he lived in Texas and California and traveled into Mexico. It all taught him that Latin American cuisine was far richer than the stereotype.

“I just realized that like Mexican food is not what I thought it was,” he said. “What I thought it was from around here is more like Tex Mex or standard kind of basic Mexican where everything’s covered in cheese. When I first went to Mexico, I realized that is completely wrong. It is almost the opposite of that. Fresh. Everything is very vibrant and fresh and not just a plate of melted cheese and beans, you know.”

He and his wife, Faye Mahan, also spent significant time in Costa Rica, he said. So, all in all, there was never a question about what kind of restaurant he would open, when the time came to launch his own venture.

Looking back, he laughs about the steep learning curve involved in starting a business rather than working for one. There were some teething problems, he said. For example, he launched with counter service, then very rapidly realized he’d have to offer table service. On a more subtle level, his Torta Ahogada initially was a slow seller. Eventually he realized that’s because nobody knew how to pronounce it or what it meant. Once he changed the name, he said, it became much more popular.

“Opened, quickly realized I was in way over my head,” said Little. “I remember the week after we opened, I saw Chris from Noble South on the sidewalk. [That’s Chris Rainosek, whose venue also recently was showcased by Fieri.] I went up to him and I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me how hard this was gonna be? Why?’ He was laughing, like ‘Man you’ve gotta learn on your own.’ … But we got through, we made it through. This January will be our seven-year anniversary.”

Little said that based on his conversation with a producer, he thinks Food Network may have approached as many as 70 area restaurants as they began planning their visit to Lower Alabama. Maybe half responded. Little said that as he’s developed a new job as a financial planner, he’s been able to delegate most of the day-to-day restaurant operations, and he figures that might have made it easier for him to spot the potential of a vague, seemingly random email.

“It didn’t say anything about Triple-D or about Guy or anything like that,” said Little. “It was very generic.” But he thought it might be “DDD,” so he responded.

Those who did respond were evaluated on some strict criteria, he said. “You kind of have to check all the boxes,” he said. A featured venue can have two locations, but the show doesn’t do chains, he said. Most of the menu has to be made from scratch. The venue has to be more than a year old, and there has to be a good story. “And so, we checked all those boxes,” he said.

“The next phase was a phone interview that was scheduled for two hours and ended up being three hours,” Little said, “and it went in a deep dive into the menu.” Item by item, he went over the steps for making everything. That discussion narrowed it down to six recipes that would be included in a proposal submitted to Fieri. For each of the six, Little had to go into exhaustive detail.

“I had to show them the recipe for all six dishes,” said Little. “Not only the recipes but the process how it’s done, how it’s cooked, what temperature, for how long, what equipment we use. We had to take pictures of all the equipment, take pictures of me and any staff that was going to be involved. Pictures of the restaurant, the kitchen, they want to know how it’s laid out. … Hours and hours and hours of work on this.”

“And then I should mention in this equation is Panini Pete,” said Little. “Because they’re buddies, he definitely put a good word in for the places, the people he likes.” (Mobile-area restaurateur Pete Blohme has worked with Fieri on a variety of projects.)

Another angle: Fieri has done a lot to support veterans’ causes. Little thinks it might have caught his eye that Roosters honors, Little’s brother, the late Lt. Col. Mark Stratton, who died in Afghanistan in 2009. In fact, he said, Fieri recently matched a donation that Roosters made to a veteran-specific cause.

Little believes that twelve venues were finalists, with Fieri making the final decision on the six chosen. He was on pins and needles for a couple of weeks before learning Roosters was among them. But from there, things moved quickly: Filming started just a couple of weeks after that, leaving not a lot of time to spruce the place up.

“We bought new equipment, we did deep cleaning,” said Little. “We painted some walls, we got some new decorations.”

Like other local restaurateurs who’ve been featured on the show, Little said “DDD” is a well-oiled machine. There’s one day of filming without Fieri, where producers get footage of all the steps in the process of making a dish. “That was a long day and it was very tedious,” he said.

“They do that so that when [Fieri] shows up it can be loose because they want him to be unpredictable,” said Little. The conversations you see in the finished production aren’t rehearsed.

“They had it dialed and they did not play,” he said. “They’ve been doing it for 15 years. … They’re super dialed-in and they have seen it all.”

Working with Fieri watching was “kind of a blur,” Little said. But the payoff came when Fieri and LeBlanc tasted the sandwich, he said. They’d enjoyed the surf-and-turf burrito, Little said, but the Torta seemed to stop them in their tracks.

“He took a bite and then kept eating and it was like, it was like awkwardly quiet,” said Little. “It was just him and Fred eating the sandwich with me standing there staring at him and there was, you know, the crew was there and then my staff, you know, you got 20 people in the room watching, 15-20 people, and it was just this awkward silence and I was like, well, ‘I guess this is a good thing, he’s eating it.’ He doesn’t say anything. He just keeps eating.”

“And then he went out and, I’m not sure who he was getting this for, but he came back and he’s like, let me get one of those sandwiches to go. And we’re like, ‘Yes, sir.’ So we boxed one up, handed it to him, he took it outside and I don’t know who he gave it to.” Then “Stretch” Rumaner, a pal of Fieri came in. “He was like, ‘Dude, Guy says I need to try this sandwich.’ So obviously he went out and like told him about it. So we made him one, he sat at the table over there and just devoured it. And so I was like, you know, that’s a pretty good sign.”

The show leaves little doubt about Fieri’s takeaways. “This dunked sandwich into the hot tomato sauce is the bomb, right?” he asks a patron. And to Little, he says: “I love the attitude, your authenticity, you are who you are.”

Whatever lift in business the show might provide, Roosters is ready for. But Little isn’t standing still. One thing he’s excited about, he said, is that he’s arranged for his tortilla supplier – Tortilleria E&H in Daphne – to start using heirloom cornmeal from Bayou Cora Farms in Baldwin County. That’s the same cornmeal Rainosek used in the Noble South cornbread spotlighted by “DDD,” and Little said it will bring a whole new dimension to the Roosters menu.

He’s also developing plans to franchise Roosters. He’s hoping to have a franchise package ready early in 2024. It’s something that had already been in the works, but the exposure that comes with a “DDD” showcase makes this seem like the opportune moment.

“If we’re gonna do it, now it’s the time,” he said. “You know, strike while the iron’s hot.”

Roosters is the fourth area restaurant featured in this season of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” after The Noble South, Southwood Kitchen and The Hummingbird Way. Another will be featured in the episode “Flavor Explosion,” premiering Dec. 8; it’s “a rockin’ food truck [that] is dishing up next-level tacos. An episode after that will feature “a family-run barbecue joint [that] is putting out a bomb Boss Burger with a side of rib candy and a stellar smoked brisket sandwich.”

Though Food Network has not officially revealed the identities of those two spots, the former is Front Yard Tacos, which recently went public with the news. And the references to a Boss Burger and rib candy indicate that the latter is Meat Boss.