9 Restaurant Chains Alabamians Still Miss Years After They Closed

Britling Cafeteria opened its doors in downtown Birmingham in 1917, and Alabama spent much of the 20th century lining up behind a cafeteria tray.

Almost none of those cafeterias are still open.

Many of the chains that came after them are gone too.

These are the restaurant chains Alabamians still miss years after they closed.

1. Britling Cafeteria

Britling opened its first Birmingham, Alabama cafeteria in 1917, feeding downtown workers a hot lunch off a tray line for decades.

The chain never closed all at once.

Its downtown Birmingham locations shut down in the 1960s, and by the 1980s the remaining Britling locations had been converted into all-you-can-eat buffets. The last Birmingham-area spot, in Hoover, was sold and renamed Battle Buffet, which itself closed in the early 1990s.

The tray line finally stopped.

2. Morrison’s Cafeteria

Alabama’s other great cafeteria chain, Morrison’s, started three years after Britling, in a single Mobile storefront in 1920.

Founder J.A. Morrison grew it past 150 locations across the South.

Piccadilly bought the whole cafeteria division for $46 million in 1996 and converted most of it to the Piccadilly brand within a few years.

One Morrison’s still stands, back where it started in Mobile, run independently under the name that made it famous.

One tray line survived.

Why Alabama Had Two Cafeteria Chains at Once

Cafeterias answered a genuine need in Alabama’s growing cities during the 1910s and 1920s.

Downtown workers had thirty minutes for lunch and no time to wait on table service.

Both Britling and Morrison’s built their business on speed and price, not novelty.

That’s exactly why both survived for most of a century before casual dining finally caught up to them.

3. Darryl’s

The state once had numbered outposts of Darryl’s, a Southern chain that named every restaurant after a four-digit number instead of a city.

The Birmingham location traded under the name Darryl’s 1871, one of several Alabama restaurants that also included Huntsville, Mobile, and Montgomery.

The chain peaked at 36 restaurants across nine states before a string of ownership changes wore it down to a single location in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The state’s numbers all went dark.

4. Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine

Diners once ate dinner inside a fake silver mine at Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine in Birmingham, part of a chain that built each location like a Colorado mineshaft.

The Birmingham location closed for good in 1993, after a roof damaged in that year’s historic blizzard never reopened for business.

Nothing else looked like it.

5. Magic Pan

Alabama shoppers at Birmingham’s Brookwood Mall could once sit down for a crepe at The Magic Pan, a national chain that opened its Brookwood location in 1974.

Crepes were still a novelty in malls at the time.

The chain folded nationwide by 1995, and Brookwood’s location went with it.

Gone by 1995.

6. Steak and Ale

Alabama families marked birthdays and anniversaries at Steak and Ale for decades, one of roughly 280 locations the chain ran nationwide at its late-1980s peak.

The end came without warning.

Parent company S&A Restaurant Corp filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2008.

Every one of the 58 remaining Steak and Ale locations shut its doors on the same day, July 29.

The state’s locations closed with everyone else’s.

7. Howard Johnson’s

The state once had its share of Howard Johnson’s restaurants, part of a chain that ran hundreds of orange-roofed, sit-down locations across the country.

Alabama’s locations disappeared decades ago, long before the very last Howard Johnson’s restaurant anywhere in the country, in Lake George, New York, closed in June 2022.

Gone everywhere now.

8. Kenny Rogers Roasters

Alabama had a Kenny Rogers Roasters in Irondale, part of a rotisserie-chicken chain the country singer helped launch in 1991.

The company declared bankruptcy in 1998, and Irondale’s location closed years before that.

The last U.S. location anywhere didn’t shut its doors until 2011.

Alabama’s closed first.

Psst! How much do you know about Alabama’s restaurant history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.

Quiz

Alabama Restaurant History IQ

Answer these before you finish reading. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?

Question 1 of 8

What Southern cafeteria chain shared a corporate parent with Birmingham’s Britling?

9. Po' Folks

Alabama's Po' Folks locations, at least three of them in the Birmingham area alone, served down-home Southern plates off tables covered in butcher paper.

Hoover, Eastwood, and Bessemer each had one.

All three eventually closed.

The once-sprawling Southern chain is now down to a small handful of restaurants outside Alabama.

None of them local.

What Replaced Alabama's Old Favorites

The restaurant landscape didn't stay empty for long after these chains packed up.

Fast-casual concepts, built for a to-go order instead of a tray line, took over much of the real estate these older chains left behind.

Faster than a fork.

A cafeteria line that once took twenty minutes now moves in under five, and the tray itself has mostly disappeared along with the chains that built their business around it.

Not every Alabama tradition from that era vanished, though. A few restaurants adapted instead of closing, trading the tray line for a drive-through window and outlasting the chains that never made the switch.

Alabamians who miss the chains on this list can still find a version of that same slower, sit-down meal at a handful of small-town diners that never modernized at all.