It is just a burger, served from a roadside shack. But oh, the details.

The bun. They didn’t just warm it up, they toasted it to the point where there’s a distinct crispness to the shell. You feel your teeth break through it on the way in and you wonder why everybody doesn’t do it this way. The patty in the middle, cooked medium, pops with fresh flavor and juiciness. Turns out that the beef isn’t just ground in-house, it’s done twice a day. Like the way the crust is toasted, that’s a detail that pays off way beyond the effort.

This is the Bella Burger, so the stuff in between the patty and the bun is mushrooms, Swiss cheese, fried onion strings, garlic mayo. It’s crazy: These mushrooms have flavor, they’re not just lumps lurking amid the cheese. The fried onions provide some crunch. There’s something in the mix that seems to provide a little more tang than the garlic mayo alone could possibly account for.

Made with a 5-oz. patty, the burger didn’t seem huge at first glance. But it lasts, because you have to slow down and savor every bite.

Y’all, we need to talk about the Shoals Shack.

Earlier this year, Southern Living ranked it among the “15 Best Roadside Restaurants in the South,” which is some pretty tall talk. Two Alabama establishments made the cut. One is a long-established landmark right off I-65. If you haven’t stopped there, odds are good you’ve at least seen the billboards and thought about it. The Shoals Shack, by contrast, is genuinely obscure. It opened about three years ago in St. Florian, a tiny town outside Florence. The name is accurate: It’s barely bigger than a food truck, and it literally sits in the parking lot of a Big Star supermarket.

Having driven past it, you might not be surprised to hear you can get a decent burger there. You probably wouldn’t bet that you can walk up to the window and get a wildly good Ahi Tuna and Avocado Appetizer, but you can. (Tender tuna seared rare, a bit of ponzu sauce and toasted sesame oil on the dish underneath the slices of fish and avocado, which are artistically topped with sesame seeds and scallions, pickled ginger on the side, big enough to be a perfectly fine entrée for one, for – are you kidding? — $7.99.)

The menu is big for a place this small. There are burgers, po’boys and other sandwiches, salads, plenty of vegetarian options. Want a taco? You can choose from braised beef, cool ranch mahi, blackened shrimp, ground beef and fried eggplant. (The eggplant and mahi are fine, the braised beef is divine.) And then there are the specials. Peel ‘n’ eat shrimp? Shrimp and grits? Come on in. Wait, you can’t come on in. Come on up, then, and order, and go back to your car and wait for your name to be called. There are two picnic tables if you opt to dine in, with a fine view of the Big Star parking lot and traffic on Lauderdale County Road 47.

The ambition on display in the menu tells you there’s a story here. And it’s one that starts during the pandemic. Jennifer Tester and B.J. Harris were living in Florida but came up to Florence to spend some time with her parents. They didn’t really have plans to open a business. But the shack somehow caught Harris’ eye. “It was empty, abandoned for a while, I think,” he said. “It was pretty rough shape. I went and talked to the landlord.”

“He was super supportive right away,” said Tester. “Like, ‘Yeah, let’s check it out.’”

“I think that was in June of 2020 and he came home and got me to come look at it,” said Tester. “Middle of COVID, we’re up here, kinda just hanging out with my parents, they had just retired. We owned a home in Florida, we weren’t really wanting to go back there at that moment, because of how bad COVID was down there. He said, ‘Let’s just take this risk. What’s the worst that can happen?’ And we cleaned it up and were open by August.”

“I think it was like, six weeks or something,” said Harris.

“I don’t even know how it happened,” said Tester. “I really don’t. That’s all we were doing. We were kind of renovating it during the day and then working on recipes, on the menu, at night and just doing that every day. And my parents helped us a lot.”

“I think back, set up was like a blur,” said Harris. “We started posting stuff to get people, like, aware of what we were doing.”

As for the menu, keeping it basic was never an option.

“We wanted to do food we wanted,” said Tester. “We wanted to do food that we like to eat.”

“We get bored really easily,” said Harris.

“We have high standards for food,” said Tester. “We’ve lived in Chicago, we’ve lived in Florida, we’ve traveled a lot. We love food. And Florence didn’t really have a lot of variety. And not a lot of fresh, not a lot of vegetarian.”

Tester said she didn’t want the Shack to be a place where vegetarian diners had to settle for a salad. So you get options. The Tofu Deluxe builds a burger around panko-crusted tofu. The Tofu Genoa does the same for the Chicken Genoa sandwich, a hearty pressed sandwich made with pecan pesto, grilled tomato and red onion. You can get the same treatment for any other sandwich including “Ryan’s Firebird,” which normally has Nashville-style hot chicken under ghost pepper cheese, grilled jalapeno and other goodies.

“We wanted them to be able to get a greasy burger too, you know what I mean? Like, a big old fried piece of tofu with Nashville hot on it or whatever they want to do and, you know, have that same experience and not always feel like they were just having to eat healthy, raw vegetables or something.”

When the shop was ready, Harris and Tester opened up the windows without any fanfare, just to see what would happen. The first customer to randomly show up ordered a Bella Burger – probably because Tester recommended it, it being her personal favorite. A little while after leaving with his burger, he came back.

“We’re the only two in the building,” said Tester. “We just opened by ourselves and we’re like, ‘Oh my God, why is he coming back?’ What is wrong?’”

He bought two more. The next customer, a little while later, had already heard about the mushroom burger. It spread like wildfire from there. “We learned really fast how quick word of mouth is here,” said Tester. “And we were very grateful it was good word of mouth.”

It should be noted that there are other burger options that appear to be worthy of close investigation. There’s the basic Shoals Shack Burger for $6.50 and a double called the Shark Attack Burger for $11.50. The Sugar and Spice Burger ($9.50) features ghost pepper cheese, grilled jalapeno, sweet & spicy bacon, Nashville hot mayo and cayenne onion strings. The Black and Bleu ($8.50) comes with bleu cheese, blackberry jam, bacon and baby greens. The Big Easy Burger ($8.99) is topped with Cajun garlic butter shrimp and remoulade.

Business appears to be booming. Even during the slow parts of the afternoon, you’ll find a steady trickle of customers coming to the Shack, many of them on a first-name basis with the operators. “Regulars freaking make this place,” said Tester. “Oh my God, they’re amazing.”

They’ve learned that the specials tend to be worth a try. Like the shrimp & grits: The sauce is heavy on tomato and roasted-pepper flavor, a departure from the heavy, creamy, cheese-slathered norm. Tester and Harris said things like that come from collaboration.

“Most of the stuff, we just hash it out,” said Harris.

“He says something, I say something, we just go back and forth,” said Tester. “We’re really big on texture and, I would say, garnishes and things like that, because to me, those last little things you add at the end are what really elevate what you’re eating. The fresh scallion [for example]. I make the cheesy grits, he makes the red sauce. Well, other people make it now too, because they’ve learned the recipes.”

You’ll find as many as five people at work inside the Shack, which raises the age-old question of expansion. What might be next? A bigger brick-and-mortar location? A second Shack perched on some other county road?

Nope.

They’re still making improvements to the original Shack, adding restrooms and maybe some more seating.

“We did just buy a food truck,” said Tester. “I mean, it’s nothing, it’s a blank slate right now. But we want to start doing different events … So that’s something new on the horizon.”

“We like baby steps,” said Tester. “We like keeping our quality of life. Like, we give it our all when we’re here and then when we’re not here we can just be, you know what I mean?”

“We’re trying to make the best food we can,” they said, Tester finishing a sentenced Harris started. “We’ll definitely be keeping it creative,” she said. “We enjoy that. We enjoy the reactions when we do different specials and we’re not sure how people are gonna take it. And then when they love it, it’s like, so exciting.”

“And then they’re yelling at us because they can’t get it again,” said Harris.

“That is true,” said Tester.

But that’s okay. In fact, as the sign up front says, “It’s all good.” No false advertising there.

“Yeah, we put our heart and soul into it,” said Tester.

The Shoals Shack is at 4675 Lauderdale 47 in St. Florian, Ala. For menus and online ordering, visit www.theshoalsshack.com. For updates on daily specials, visit www.facebook.com/theshoalsshack/.