Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Lauren Turner is the manager at Habitat Feed and Social.
Most restaurant menus are sorted by course. Habitat Feed & Social sorts its by terrain.
The signature restaurant at the Grand Bohemian Hotel on Lane Park Road builds its menu around the habitats that produce Alabama’s food: grassland, wetland and the rest of the state’s improbable ecological range. It is the rare restaurant concept where the name is doing actual work rather than decoration.
“Each habitat represents something unique,” said Lauren Turner, who has managed the restaurant for the past year. “That’s the whole idea behind the menu: regional flavor, fresh ingredients and letting the ingredient tell you where it came from.”
Alabama is one of the most biodiverse states in the country, a fact that tends to get more attention from biologists than from chefs. Habitat’s kitchen takes it as an organizing principle: grassland for the beef and grazing country, wetland for the Gulf and the river systems and so on down the menu. The through line is regional sourcing and seasonal cooking rather than any single culinary tradition.
THE ROOFTOP
The other half of the operation is upstairs. Habitat’s rooftop terrace looks out over Mountain Brook, and it does a great deal of work for a single space: cocktails at sunset, anniversary dinners, birthday parties, a table of friends who came for happy hour and stayed for dinner.
“We have something for everyone,” Turner said. “You can celebrate a birthday or an anniversary here, you can have a fine dining experience, or you can come up for happy hour and just enjoy the view. It’s the same space, and it works for all of it.”
That range is deliberate. A hotel restaurant has to serve guests coming down for breakfast at 7 a.m. and a table booked three weeks out for a 40th birthday, and Habitat’s answer has been to lean into the setting rather than pick a lane.
Happy hour runs Monday through Friday, 3 to 6 p.m., with small bites and specials on beer, wine and cocktails. On Thursdays, live music plays on the patio — a standing weekly draw that has become one of the restaurant’s better-known offerings among people who have never eaten a full dinner there.
BLEND YOUR OWN, THEN CORK IT
Two programs set Habitat apart from the rest of Mountain Brook’s dining scene, and neither of them involves sitting at a table.
The first is wine blending. Guests work through a set of varietals, build a blend to their own taste, and leave with four bottles of it — corked, labeled and theirs. It has become a fixture for bachelorette parties, corporate outings and couples looking for something to do that isn’t dinner and a movie, and it makes use of one of the more unusual amenities the Grand Bohemian brand carries from property to property.
The second is the cooking school. Chef Josh Towey runs a rotating slate of six or seven classes, hands-on and small enough that people actually cook rather than watch. The perennial favorite is the pasta class — the one Turner says fills first and the one people come back for.
“People want to learn to make perfect pasta,” she said. “That class sells out every time.”
Between the two programs, the restaurant has quietly become a place people visit for an evening’s activity as well as a meal.
GETTING THERE
Habitat serves breakfast daily from 7 to 11 a.m., brunch on weekends from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., lunch Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and dinner nightly beginning at 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The bar opens at 10 a.m. daily and runs to 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends.
Habitat Feed & Social is located at the Grand Bohemian Hotel, 2655 Lane Park Road. Call 205-414-0505 or visit habitatfeedandsocial.com for more information.
