The Restaurant — An Assessment
Grace opened on Dauphin Street in 2022 and did something the street had been waiting for: it brought a proper rooftop bar, open to the sky, to downtown Mobile. The building matters. The main dining room seats more than a hundred, opens onto the street for an indoor-outdoor feel that is unusual in Alabama, and leads upward to the roof, where craft cocktails are served in the presence of the downtown Mobile skyline. The combination — serious cuisine at ground level, proper drinks above — is what a city like Mobile deserved and had not quite had before.
Chef Mark Strickland describes the approach as "casual meets fine dining," which in practice means that the service is attentive without being formal and the food is ambitious without being precious. The seasonal New American menu is where the kitchen's point of view becomes clear. Veal and goat-cheese-stuffed mushrooms for a starter. Pan-roasted duck breast executed with respect for the fat cap. Lamb shank osso bucco — slow-cooked, braised, fall-off-the-bone — that would be the headline dish at many higher-priced rooms. Crawfish mac & cheese, a dish that sounds like comfort food and arrives as something more considered.
The wine list is curated rather than encyclopaedic, and the cocktails on the rooftop are built with the kind of care that usually only shows up in the classic-cocktail-obsessed bars of bigger cities. Sunset drinks upstairs before dinner downstairs is the correct way to use the building, and reservations for the main dining room should be made well in advance for Friday and Saturday evenings.
The room reads as Mobile's answer to the question of what a contemporary celebration dinner should feel like in the 2020s: not stuffy, not trying too hard, not reaching for global trends, but genuinely polished and genuinely considered. Service is warm, pacing is patient, and the staff understand how to close out an evening so that the memory is of the room and the food rather than of the bill.