First of a series

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – Restaurants are popping up all over Pleasure Island.

Rumors of the Bob Marley-themed restaurant continue to swirl as do rumors about New Orleans’ famed Acme Oyster House locating its next restaurant in Gulf Shores.

And nobody’s talking about a recent acquisition on West Beach Boulevard and West Third Avenue in Gulf Shores.

Councilman Steve Jones, a Realtor with Kaiser Realty in Gulf Shores, helped broker the sale.

“Across from our west pavilion there on the corner of Third and the beach road,” Jones said of the lot. “I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I know an architect is working on it.”

Well, there are some new restaurants we can tell you about and will tell you about in the coming weeks. First up is Bikini Wings located in the Publix Shopping Center in Orange Beach.

One thing Roger Beckley and his drivers from the Ride for 5 taxi service in Orange Beach hear are constant refrains of “where can we eat?”

“Probably our number one question we had for our customers aside from ‘can you take me home’ was ‘is there any place we can get something to eat after 10 o’clock at night?’” Beckley, the marketing director for new restaurant Bikini Wings said. “That’s where it started from.”

Beckley admits there are great restaurants in Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, but offerings after 10 p.m. are few. Which is the main reason his wife recently opened Bikini Wings in the Publix shopping center between Subway and Guthrie’s on Perdido Beach Boulevard. The restaurant is open from 10:30 a.m. to 3 a.m.

“Another question was is there any place we can kind of get regular food, no seafood because there’s plenty of places down here to get good seafood, but is there any place that we can just get a burger or chicken wings other than like a Hooters?” he said. “Tara and I had this idea probably six or eight months ago as we were riding people around and they kept asking was there anything to eat after we picked them up from the Bama or Live Bait. We had to tell them you can eat Waffle House or McDonald’s.”

Those are good restaurants, Beckley pointed out, but customers can eat at those places anytime in their home towns. He also gave a nod to the Keg on Canal Road which has been serving fabulous burgers for years.

“The Keg burger is world famous,” he said.

So the idea for Bikini Wings was hatched and the pair could start serving two customer bases: Late-night partiers who needed a ride and wanted something to eat.

Beckley is one of the principal owners in the taxi service, and his wife Tara Posey’s name is on the restaurant along with investor Preston Hughes, a plumbing contractor from Mobile.

“The customer demand/niche is in the market place because there wasn’t really anything to eat late night and most of the restaurants close down at 9:30 or 10 o’clock,” he said. “We’re open til 3 a.m.”

Being in the taxi business, Beckley and Posey have close relations with all the restaurants and bars in the area and also wanted to make sure they weren’t directly competing with businesses that help them do business.

“Our goal was to fill a niche market that was out there because you know we have a lot of friends at the Happy Harbor, O’Choppers and the Keg and all these other places and we didn’t want to really infringe upon them as much, but to give everybody another option,” he said. “Especially to be able to get something to eat late at night without trying to take away business from somebody else.”

He expects the late-night crowds he attracts will be workers from those other restaurants and bars after their shifts.

“We’re focusing on the service industry and giving them something to do,” he said. “So when they work their shift and finish their lunches and dinners they can actually come in here and listen to some music, relax, get some good food and not have to go into the tourist areas.”

Some nights Bikini Wings will have music or a DJ, but the focus will be on food. After opening on June 28, the restaurant has been going through some serious chicken.

“We’re probably right now selling 2,000 pounds of chicken a week,” he said. “Everything that we cook, pretty much everything we have to offer is fresh, not frozen.”

Starting with Maw-Maw’s fries.

“We hand cut our fries in house, they’re not processed,” he said. “They are actually soaked in brine saltwater overnight. That’s my grandmother’s recipe that’s why they’re called Maw-Maw’s fries.”

The wings are served in 10 flavors and in batches of 10. Beckley says there’s even a unique humus on the menu.

“We have butterbean humus with a deep-fried pita chip to use to dip with,” he said. “I hate butterbeans, but I love that humus. We’ve got a cheese ball that we use a pepper jelly as a spread for it. We have sweet potato fries that we cut ourselves. We coat them with a brown sugar.”

Beckley says the menu for the restaurant is the same one from a restaurant he and Posey owned in Maplesville. It fell victim to the recession when a plant in the small town shut down.

Bikini Wings is the old location of Arigato Grille and right next door to the taxi business office.

“It had everything already in it,” he said. “It was almost turn-key aside from a little paint and fixtures.”