Josie’s

Just across the street from the Princess Theatre in downtown Decatur, Alabama, Josie’s has built a following on Mediterranean food, a full bar, and weekend live music in a storefront at 109 2nd Ave NE. Owners Christy and John Wheat opened the restaurant after Christy spent years running Simp McGhee’s, the Bank Street seafood institution she took over in 2005 after rising through the ranks there from server to manager and, finally, owner, a restaurant founded in 1986 by Jenny Lind and Robert Riddle. John’s path to Mediterranean cooking came by way of the audio and video industry; his work at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy sparked an interest in the region’s food that eventually became Josie’s.

The name itself has a story. Christy has said it came to her while running errands and hearing the Steely Dan song “Josie” on the radio, and the two liked how the name’s meaning, roughly “may Jehovah add” or “addition to the family,” fit their hopes for the restaurant and their own growing family of ventures downtown. It also happens to tie back to John’s name, a small detail that made the choice feel inevitable once they landed on it.

The kitchen builds its Mediterranean menu around tapas, small plates meant for sharing across a table rather than a single entree apiece, a format the restaurant treats as central to how it wants guests to eat together. Dough for flatbreads and other dishes is made in house daily, and the kitchen sources ingredients from local farmers where it can, folding all of that into a menu split across separate Main, Tapas, Drink, and Brunch offerings. Beyond those printed pages, the restaurant runs daily specials built around fresh seasonal ingredients, the kind of dish a server is more likely to describe table-side than to find on a laminated card.

Food at Josie’s leans into Mediterranean staples with a Southern restaurant’s sense of hospitality, and the bar carries a full lineup of cocktails, wine, and beer to match. Happy hour runs Tuesday through Friday from 3 to 6 p.m., a stretch of the afternoon when the bar fills with a mix of after-work regulars and theatre-goers getting an early start before a show across the street. Live music takes over on weekends, with the restaurant posting each week’s artist to its Facebook page rather than locking in a fixed lineup months in advance, which keeps the room feeling a little more spontaneous than a venue with a rigid concert calendar.

Sunday brunch is its own event, running from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. with a Bloody Mary bar, a Brunch Punch, and mimosas priced at a dollar twenty-five, the kind of value that has made Sunday one of Josie’s busiest mornings. The brunch menu alone spans three separate pages, longer than the weekday lineup and a sign of how much Josie’s leans into its Sunday crowd. The rest of the week, the kitchen and bar run later than most downtown spots: Wednesday and Thursday hours stretch to midnight, and Friday and Saturday keep the doors open until 1 a.m., a rarity in a city where much of downtown closes well before then. Monday is the only day Josie’s is closed entirely.

The restaurant sits inside the stretch of downtown Decatur built up along 2nd Avenue and Bank Street, an area lined with brick storefronts from the city’s railroad era and now filled with restaurants, bars, and the restored Princess Theatre. For visitors catching a show, Josie’s proximity makes it a natural stop before or after, and the late weekend hours mean there’s no rush to finish dinner before curtain. Locals treat it more as a rotating destination: happy hour on a Tuesday, live music on a Friday, brunch on a Sunday, each visit built around a different part of what Josie’s does. Josie’s has become one of the anchors that gives downtown Decatur its after-dark energy, run by two owners whose paths to it, through a Bank Street seafood house and a European sporting event, could not have been more different.