Zazu Gastropub

Zazu Gastropub occupies a storefront on South 8th Street in downtown Opelika, Alabama, a block off the restored commercial core that anchors the city’s dining scene. The restaurant and bar builds its approach around scratch cooking drawn from comfort food traditions across the United States and beyond, served in a room that splits the difference between a neighborhood bar and a proper dinner reservation. The kitchen describes its own approach directly: “We make everything from scratch that we can, and we use as much local produce as possible.”

The kitchen leans on local sourcing where it can, working with partners including Opelika Grows, Alabama Seafood Co., and Oakview Farms Granary to keep ingredients close to home. That relationship shows up on a menu that shifts with lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch service, each offered as its own separate menu rather than a single all-day list, a structure that lets the kitchen tighten its focus at each meal rather than spreading thin across the whole day. Lunch runs Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 4:45 p.m., when the dinner menu takes over through close.

A dedicated beer menu sits alongside the food program, giving Zazu a genuine bar identity rather than treating drinks as an afterthought to the kitchen. The gastropub format, food-forward but unmistakably a bar as much as a restaurant, makes it a natural fit for a group split between people who want a full meal and people who came mainly to drink, without either side feeling like a compromise. The full menu is also available for carryout during regular operating hours, for anyone who would rather bring the kitchen’s cooking home, and the restaurant takes reservations directly through its website for anyone who prefers to plan a visit rather than walk in.

Service runs Tuesday through Saturday, with lunch in the late morning into early afternoon and dinner picking up at 5 p.m. and running through close. Sundays flip the format entirely, with brunch running from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. and the kitchen closed the rest of the day. Mondays are closed altogether, giving the small downtown kitchen a full day to reset before the week’s lunch and dinner runs begin again.

The South 8th Street location puts Zazu within easy walking distance of Opelika’s other downtown restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries, making it an easy stop for anyone spending a full afternoon or evening wandering the historic district. The restaurant has been recognized locally as a Diner’s Choice award recipient and maintains ties to the area’s farmers market network, a reflection of the kind of steady, repeat-visit following a scratch kitchen builds over time in a small city where regulars matter more than foot traffic. Its separate lunch, dinner, and brunch menus also mean a diner can visit repeatedly over the course of a week and rarely see the same list twice.

South 8th Street sits just off the historic core that grew up around Opelika’s rail lines, chartered as a city in 1854 once the Montgomery and West Point Railroad Company began routing cotton traffic through town. The commercial buildings along that corridor, restored gradually over the past two decades, now house most of the restaurants and shops that make up the walkable downtown, and Zazu’s storefront is part of that same wave of reinvestment. Opelika today serves as the seat of Lee County, part of the Auburn-Opelika metropolitan area, a role that has helped support the kind of steady weekday lunch and weekend dinner business a scratch kitchen like Zazu depends on.

For visitors looking for a downtown Opelika stop that covers both a real meal and a proper drink, Zazu Gastropub remains one of the more dependable options on South 8th Street, equally suited to a lingering Sunday brunch or a weeknight beer at the bar.