Sometimes, the best plans are the ones that you don’t make in advance. For my lovely wife’s birthday week (it is a seven-day celebration) I asked her what she would like. Her answer was, “You know, I love to go thrifting…”. So, with the second snow apocalypse threatening for Atlanta (coming from the east, this time), we decided to head west, to Birmingham.

After three hours of her thrifting and me roaming music stores, it was time for a late lunch. So I pulled up my Alabama list (23 we hadn’t visited in B’ham, a few closed for lunch),I narrowed our choice to four categories, but a choice still was not made.

So I went onto Resy and made the call – Bayonet – recently awarded a Michelin bib gourmand and the sister restaurant to chef- owner Rob McDaniel’s Helen (the steakhouse next door – not open for lunch). After a failed attempt to park (the street parking out front had a 30 minute limit – thanks, ParkMobile), I rounded the block, parked at an honest-to-God meter and found my wife seated in the lovely lobby, pictured above.

We were seated between the bar and the sushi table / oyster bar, and looked thru the menu.

Seafood? In Birmingham? It does go against my general rule about the need for proximity to water for a seafood place. Having been named one of the 50 best new restaurants by the New York Times in 2025 and one of 31 best Southern restaurants by Garden n Gun last fall, I thought we might be safe.

We couldn’t decide on entrees, so we decided we’d go with some sides and one big dish. Every table in the place seemed to have the hand cut fries with garlic aioli on it, so we didn’t want to be left out. They came to the table piping hot and were crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. I was really tempted by the hamachi crudo, but the wasabi ponzu steered us away from that. And on to the

madai crudo, with coconut milk, apple, celery. My love does not care for raw fish. Hard stop. But she made it very clear, after a “taster” bite that half of it belonged to her! For the main, after seeing it served to the table behind us, we chose “the Situation”:

Oysters, smoked mussels, shrimp cocktail (with housemade cocktail sauce) & fish dip. The little eye droppers contained hot sauce and a vinegar sauce. And there was basket of warm potato chips just outside the picture.

Here’s the crazy thing. We really don’t like oysters. And I think I may have intentionally eaten mussels once. But the thought was “if we’re ever going to like these, I bet we’ll like them here”.

And we did – here’s a close up of the mussels, topped with mustard seeds, in a hot sauce.

We ate every bite. The fish dip, which was swordfish, tuna and hamachi was fantastic. And there was a long discussion between my bride and the server that this was the best cocktail sauce either of them had ever had.

We’re still not the biggest oyster fans. But fans of Bayonet? We’re singing their praises.