Good Monday morning and welcome to day two of Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, where we are spending time with Bo Hicks, the owner of Druid City Brewing Company and Ell's Kitchen.

Each day this week, the Thread and Visit Tuscaloosa will highlight the city’s most in-demand dining locations and the hands that prepare our finest food in features published every morning.

Hungry for more? Over 30 participating eateries are also offering unique items or special discounts on their most popular orders all week long! Learn more and get connected at the Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week website now.


FROM RAISING HELL TO LIFTING A TENTPOLE FOR COMMUNITY

At the heart of Tuscaloosa's Druid City Brewing Company and their still-new Ell's Kitchen, you'll find a commitment to service - serving customers, of course, but serving employees, too, and the broader community as well.

That may be because of how much founder Bo Hicks owes to the service industry - a Birmingham native whose family moved to Brookwood before he was 10, Hicks said his first work in serving food and bartending helped him avoid making a living underground.

"I grew up there in the county, went to Brookwood High School and I decided that as noble as a profession as coal mining is - and I mean that honestly, without sarcasm - it wasn't for me," Hicks said.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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So instead of a job with Walter Energy, Hicks was off to Shelton State after high school, where he said he half-planned to become a history teacher before he dropped out to, in his words, join bands, raise hell and play video games.

Live music led Hicks to the bar scene, and soon enough he was slinging drinks at Egan's on the Strip, working late nights amid the now-closed dive bar's dim lights, thick smoke and loud music.

After a few years, though, Hicks came to realize that like long days mining metallurgical coal, long nights bartending came with their own tolls to pay.

He transitioned to working daytime hours at Manna Grocery, where he was when the grassroots Free the Hops movement sparked a flurry of changes to Alabama law governing the brewing of beer.

By 2012, lawmakers had voted to allow the sale of stronger brews, legalized taprooms and OK'd larger bottles for beer.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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Hicks and his late business partner decided to pool resources and open Tuscaloosa's first modern brewery before someone lamer beat them to the punch.

"We decided that somebody was going to want to open a brewery in Tuscaloosa just to market themselves as being close to the University," Hicks said. "But we wanted to be more than that, wanted to be a tentpole of community and for creative minds in town."

The duo got busy and sold their first beer in October 2012, debuting it at a now-near-mythical secret show at Egan's featuring Brittany Howard and the Alabama Shakes.

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CHARTING NEW TERRITORY IN A NEW SPACE

Fast forward 12 years and a lot has changed at DCBC - they partnered in 2019 with Huntsville's Straight to Ale Brewing and soon after began working seriously on expanding into a new and much larger space in the same shopping center they've always occupied.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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Then Roberts tragically died last February, just before the brewery re-opened in the new building.

The new square footage allowed Hicks to introduce the Moon Room, a small but groovy venue for karaoke, comedy and aspiring musicians which is a huge step up from their space for live entertainment at the original taproom.

It also meant last summer, Hicks was able to open Ell's Kitchen, where he and Tyler Marshall cook up simple plates to complement the beers on offer in the taproom.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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"It didn't make sense to build a 10,000-foot production facility, but it did make sense to get into a bigger space and then also offer some food in addition to our 'liquid bread,'" Hicks said. "Ell's Kitchen is named in honor of Elliott because if there's anything that man loved, it was to eat. Tyler helps me run it, and we love that it's another outlet to get creative, come up with something and implement those new ideas."

"WHAT IF WE TRIED THIS?"

Hicks said opening a restaurant inside the brewery has been an exciting challenge and a tightrope exercise in deciding what's worth making by hand and what's better being bought. Ell's incorporates Alabama Conecuh Sausage, for instance, so Hicks and co. don't have to make links by hand and end up charging $20 for a plate of meat.

That doesn't mean Hicks is cutting corners, though - the other proteins served at Ell's Kitchen are cooked in a Shirley Fabrication smoker made right here in Tuscaloosa over hickory and pecan wood the staff splits from logs in the parking lot.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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Hicks said it's been a great year since opening the Kitchen because it provides many new avenues for service.

Not everyone likes beer, for instance, and Hicks said the restaurant serves those patrons something to enjoy and gives them a way to support DCBC during a show or comedy night. It's also a new creative outlet for Hicks, Marshall and the rest of the staff as well as a growing revenue stream.

COVID and the inflation it has driven have prevented Hicks from doing everything he wants in the space, but that doesn't mean they aren't having a good time.

"We haven't been able to execute quite the grandiose plans we have cooked up for Ell's Kitchen, but that's fun in its way," he said. "Our limited equipment gives us just another way to be creative. So many of our best ideas have been born out of saying, 'Hey, what if we tried this?'"

Marshall recently came to Hicks and said while sleeping, he had a dream about creating a pizza.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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It featured a cheesy base, not a tomato sauce, plus ground meat and sliced pickles, finished with a yellow mustard drizzle - a kind of cheeseburger pizza.

Hicks greenlit the idea, and Marshall's dream pizza will be available at Ell's Kitchen during Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, featuring reduced Conecuh instead of beef.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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AN EXCLAMATION POINT ON THE TUSCALOOSA EXPERIENCE

Hicks said when he and Elliot opened the brewery, he didn't even know if it would support him enough to leave his job at Manna.

More than a decade later, he's built something special and undeniably Tuscaloosan at Druid City. The wooden bartop was pulled from Alberta's Leland Lanes after the bowling alley closed, the logo features the iconic crescent of the Moon Winx Lodge and the "Sistine Chukker" adorns the ceiling.

"I still derive a lot of joy from being an interesting place in Tuscaloosa and being a welcoming place, " Hicks said. "In addition to our awesome regulars, you get to meet a lot of neat people who are traveling and want to stop at a brewery. Hopefully, we put an exclamation point on their experience here in Tuscaloosa."

And it's more than the decor. The brewery is a community hub that hosts trivia nights, karaoke is coming soon and live music rocks the Moon Room often, even if that part of the business is break-even at best.

'A place where you're getting a guarantee, where you know the staff will take care of you and people are going to listen to you, that can be a godsend when it's a Wednesday night and you've got 500 miles between stops and there's this place in the middle," Hicks said. "Having played in bands and toured, I want to be that place for folks, even when it's a deficit. I think it's almost a community service."

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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Hicks said he isn't sure what the future holds or how long he'll be this hands-on at Druid City, but that as long as the doors are open it will be a welcoming place for the entire community.

"Just like anybody, there are days I ask myself 'Man, do I want to do this today?'" Hicks said. "But I think my personality type is a giver, and when I see people get genuinely delighted that they can pick out and spin a record, play some classic video games or get a surprise hearing live music - that's still really cool. That's gratifying."

Druid City Brewing and Ell's Kitchen are located in Parkview at 70114th Street. They open at 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, for lunch at 11 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. on Sundays. In addition to a wide selection of craft beers, they now offer sandwiches, tacos, pizzas, nachos and more at Ell's.

(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
(Stephen Dethrage | Tuscaloosa Thread)
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During Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, Ell's Kitchen is offering a variation on their Eldridge sandwich featuring smoked pulled pork, house-made pimento cheese, and sliced pickles served hot from a panini press.


This profile is the second in a series as part of Visit Tuscaloosa's Restaurant Week 2024, which is presented this year by UA Online.

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