Beulah Mae’s Southern Kitchen

On 1st Street Southwest in Alabaster, Beulah Mae’s Southern Kitchen serves Southern comfort food built around family recipes passed down through generations. The restaurant, which grew out of a food truck of the same name, is owned and operated by Ashia Montgomery, Glena Murray, Jaccolah Caffey, and Juliette Montgomery, who started the business in honor of their grandmother, whose kitchen the owners describe as the heart of their family.

The restaurant’s own account of its founding centers on preserving that grandmother’s legacy through food, and the menu reflects a commitment to traditional, scratch-made Southern cooking rather than shortcuts. The team describes their approach as using time-honored recipes and quality ingredients prepared the traditional way, with no shortcuts taken in the kitchen, a philosophy that shows up in the slow-cooked classics on the menu. The owners frame the concept in fairly direct terms, too: cooking rooted in heritage rather than trends, built around a space where tradition, creativity, and comfort meet.

Signature items include wings alongside a rotation of Southern entrees, cornbread, dressing, and yams, the kind of comfort food plate built around a protein and a set of sides that Southern cooking has run on for generations. The restaurant notes that Sundays bring a larger selection than the rest of the week, making a Sunday visit the fullest way to see what the kitchen can do across its whole menu rather than a trimmed-down weekday version. Rather than a full item-by-item listing broken out by section, the current menu lives on the restaurant’s website as a single image, which makes a phone call or a walk-in visit the most reliable way to confirm whether a specific plate is running on a given day.

The restaurant describes its dining room as having a hand-drawn, sketch-style decor, giving the space a distinct, photo-friendly look that sets it apart from a typical soul food counter. That attention to atmosphere, paired with the family history behind the recipes, gives Beulah Mae’s a personality that goes beyond just the plates coming out of the kitchen, closer to a family kitchen opened up to the public than a standard restaurant buildout. The business keeps that mobile history visible even after settling into its storefront, its Instagram handle still reads beulahmaesfoodtruck, a small nod to where the concept started before it had a permanent address.

The restaurant also keeps a Facebook page active alongside its Instagram account, sharing weekend hours, menu changes, and any updates on the Sunday selection for followers who want a heads-up before a Friday or Saturday visit.

Beulah Mae’s keeps a limited schedule compared to a typical full-service restaurant, open Friday afternoon through Sunday evening and closed Monday through Thursday, a rhythm more common to a family-run kitchen than a large operation. The restaurant offers dine-in seating with reservations taken by phone, along with takeout and catering for groups and special occasions, giving it flexibility beyond just walk-in dinner service.

For a city that has historically had a thin bench of independent Southern and soul food options, Beulah Mae’s fills a real gap, an Alabaster kitchen built and run by a family cooking from their own grandmother’s recipes rather than a franchised concept. The generous portions and made-from-scratch approach that the owners describe as central to the business have helped build a loyal following in the years since the original food truck expanded into its current Alabaster storefront, and the limited weekend schedule has, if anything, made a visit feel more like an occasion than a routine stop. Ultimately, the four owners describe the business as one built on family, culture, and community, a description that lines up with the weekend-only hours and the grandmother-inspired menu more than it would a standard full-week restaurant operation.