Drive the length of Wintzell Avenue on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and you'll see what you always see: a few trucks parked outside seafood houses, gulls working the shrimp docks, maybe a shipyard crane swinging steel against the sky. Nothing about the street announces that two of the things happening on it right now have a reach most of Bayou La Batre never stops to think about. One business on this road is putting oysters on tasting menus that food writers cross state lines to review. Another is building vessels under a federal defense contract worth more than a billion dollars. Neither one looks like much from a car window, and neither one keeps hours that make it easy to notice.
That's the part worth sitting with. The two things this town is most known for outside its own limits are also two of the easiest things in town to miss.
The Counter That Keeps Bankers' Hours
Murder Point Oysters has become one of the more talked-about names in Gulf seafood over the last several years, the kind of brand chefs mention by name on menus rather than just listing "local oysters." The Zirlott family behind it comes from five generations of shrimpers and fishermen who shifted into oyster farming, working a twelve-acre lease in the open bay west of town. Lane Zirlott, who runs the operation, expected to harvest more than five million oysters in 2026, a scale that's part of why the name shows up on menus far from Mobile County.
None of that changes what happens if you actually want to walk up and buy some. The retail counter at 13640 N. Wintzell Avenue is open a total of 22 hours a week.
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Wednesday | 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. |
| Thursday | 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. |
| Friday | 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. |
| Saturday | 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. |
Twenty-two hours. That's the entire weekly window to buy, in person, the same oysters showing up on menus a thousand miles from Bayou La Batre.
Closed Sunday through Tuesday, no exceptions posted. If you've been meaning to grab a bag for a Saturday cookout and you're used to running errands in the afternoon, you've probably missed it more than once without realizing the counter was ever open that morning at all.
A Coast Guard Contractor, Down the Road from a Burger Stand
A few minutes from that same stretch of Wintzell Avenue sits a 32-acre shipyard with more than 1,700 feet of waterfront, five steel fabrication buildings, and a 660-ton Travelift capable of pulling vessels well over a hundred feet out of the water. The yard changed hands in early 2024, when Birdon America, the U.S. arm of an Australian shipbuilding group, acquired it from Metal Shark Boats. The acquisition was tied directly to the U.S. Coast Guard's Waterways Commerce Cutter program, a contract worth an estimated $1.187 billion across 27 vessels, and Birdon brought the yard's existing workforce over as part of the deal.
This isn't new territory for the block. Bayou La Batre's shipyards have quietly built things that ended up far outside Alabama for decades. Steiner Ship Yard constructed the pitch-black hull used as the Black Pearl prop ship for the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels in 2005, sailed out of the bayou to the Caribbean for filming. The FV Cornelia Marie, the boat made famous on Deadliest Catch, was built here in 1989. None of that history gets much airtime locally, because the same road that houses a federal shipbuilding contract also houses Bayou Grill, a burger-and-ice-cream stand, and a Waffle House that keeps the same hours it always has. The scale of what's happening a few hundred yards apart rarely lines up in anyone's head.
A Mile Inland, a Smaller Fix That Took Three Years
Not everything worth knowing about this town runs through Wintzell Avenue. A mile or so off the water, on Irvington Bayou La Batre Highway, sits Oddfellows Cemetery, one of the older burial grounds in this part of the county. For years, erosion had left the internal roads crumbling badly enough that getting a hearse through for a funeral service was a real problem, not a hypothetical one.
That changed this spring. In April 2026, after a project that took nearly three years to fund and complete, the cemetery held a community appreciation ceremony to mark finished roadwork, made possible by a $40,000 grant secured with help from Senator David Sessions, Representative Chip Brown, Mobile County Commissioner Randall Dueitt, and Bayou La Batre Councilman George Ramirez. It's a small project by dollar figure next to a shipyard defense contract, but it's the kind of fix that matters at exactly the scale most people live at: can a family get to a loved one's grave without the ground giving way underneath them.
What's Actually on the Table
Strip away the "Seafood Capital of Alabama" branding for a second and look at what the city's own restaurant list actually shows. Yes, there's Bayou Catalina and The Lighthouse for seafood plates, and Bayou Seafood Company on Wintzell for fresh market catch. But the roster running through town also includes Phnom Penh Fusion, China King, Kain's Mexican Grill, Captain Frank's Smoke Shack, and Southern Shells, alongside the diner standby SoMo Cafe and the burger-and-ice-cream counter at Bayou Grill. Three licensed food trucks round it out: Lith's Asian Cuisine, JoJo's Wings, and Shaved Ice Paradise, each running its own schedule around town rather than a fixed storefront.
It's a wider spread than the postcard version of a fishing village usually gets credit for, built by families who've been feeding this town for a long time, one plate at a time, without much reason to advertise beyond word of mouth.
The One Weekend It All Overlaps
There's exactly one point in the year when these separate threads actually meet. Every May, St. Margaret Catholic Church hosts the Blessing of the Fleet, now in its 77th year, where decorated boats built or repaired at yards like the one Birdon now runs get blessed at the dock, a gumbo cook-off draws cooks from the same kitchens that run the town's diners and food trucks, and a 5K called Blessing on the Bayou kicks the weekend off before the boat parade closes it out. For one weekend, the shipyard, the seafood houses, and the church calendar all show up in the same place at the same time.
The other fifty-one weeks, they run in parallel, mostly unnoticed by the people who drive past all three every day. The oyster counter that supplies national tasting menus keeps a 22-hour week. The shipyard building federal cutters shares a road with a Waffle House that's been serving the same menu for years. A cemetery that took three years and a handful of elected officials to fix sits a mile inland, invisible from the water. None of it announces itself. That's mostly the point.
If you've lived here long enough to have opinions about which seafood house does the better po'boy, or you're weighing what your own piece of this town might be worth these days, Jordan Doole and the team at Coldwell Banker Smith Homes work this same stretch of Mobile County and know it past the branding. Get Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk.
