According to Tuscaloosa Thread, Charles Morgan hasn't opened a new restaurant concept in Tuscaloosa in fifteen years. The man behind Chuck's Fish and Five Tuscaloosa has expanded, refined, and defended his existing spots, but he hadn't launched something new in this city since long before this year's incoming freshmen were born. That changed this year, and the reason he gave for finally doing it again is worth sitting with.
Morgan said he had carried the idea for two decades, according to Tuscaloosa Thread: "College towns avoid recessions."
He's betting that logic on a corner most people driving down Greensboro Avenue already know by sight, directly across from the Bama Theatre. That bet, and a very different one happening three miles north on McFarland Boulevard, are the reason Tuscaloosa's restaurant map looks different this September than it did at the start of the year.
A downtown corner getting a fifteen-year wait
The project is called Slim's Pizzeria, and it's not a satellite of the original. Morgan is building it with photographer Miller Mobley, who opened the first Slim's in Mountain Brook's Crestline Village back in 2020, and Cris Eddings, whose mother Yoshie Eddings was Chuck's longtime sushi chef. Together they're converting a high-rise at 550 Greensboro Avenue into a 7,800-square-foot pizzeria with condos above it, a footprint more than four times the size of the 64-seat Birmingham original.
The location matters as much as the square footage. Tuscaloosa city leaders have been weighing whether to remove travel lanes on Greensboro Avenue to make the stretch more walkable, and Slim's is being built as if that decision has already gone one direction. A restaurant this size, with residential units stacked on top, isn't a drive-through bet. It's a bet that people will be parking once and staying on foot for an evening, which is a different kind of confidence than a lot of what else has opened around town this year.
A different bet up McFarland, with growth in Northport too
Head north on McFarland Boulevard and the story changes entirely. In late August, Raising Cane's cut the ribbon on a new location near DCH Regional Medical Center, hiring 160 employees for the opening, according to WBRC. Mayor Walt Maddox used the ceremony to point out that the site had been leveled by the 2011 tornado, and that the property owner rebuilding it, Robert Burkhalter, had spent a decade and a half bringing that stretch of road back.
Maddox said at the ribbon cutting, according to WBRC: "Robert and I are both Idlewood boys."
That's a fifteen-year rebuild story too, but it's the opposite kind of bet from Slim's. Cane's isn't asking anyone to park and stroll. It's filling a parcel that sat scarred for years with a format built for people driving between the hospital, their errands, and home. The McFarland corridor has picked up more of the same kind of growth this year, while Northport has a new opening too:
- Ameer's Kitchen opened its third Tuscaloosa location at 3615 McFarland Boulevard, in the space that used to be Jake's Soul Food, joining existing locations near campus on Seventh Avenue and on Greensboro Avenue itself.
- Beef O'Brady's confirmed a Tuscaloosa opening for later this year, adding a sports-dining format to a corridor that already includes Culver's and Golden Corral.
- Smoothie King opened its first Northport location at 2214 Lurleen B. Wallace Boulevard, its third in the county alongside existing spots on Veterans Memorial Parkway and Alabama 69 South.
None of this is downtown's slow, sit-down, walkable model. It's convenience-format growth on McFarland and in Northport, and it's happening in the same calendar year as the biggest sit-down restaurant investment downtown has seen in over a decade.
The recognition that caught up with what was already happening
Neither bet happened in a vacuum. This summer, The Local Palate named Tuscaloosa one of the South's top culinary towns, and the city's own Restaurant Week, branded Tuscalicious, ran its annual ten-day stretch with participants ranging from Side by Side Kitchen & Cocktails at the Embassy Suites downtown to Sitar of India and the Avenue Pub. That recognition wasn't really news to anyone who's been paying attention. It was an outside voice catching up to a pattern that was already visible on the ground: a food scene expanding in two directions at once, one aimed at people who want to park and stay a while, the other aimed at people who need something fast on the way to somewhere else.
What makes this year different from a normal year of restaurant turnover is that both directions are being built by people who are clearly playing a long game. Morgan isn't testing a pop-up. He's putting condos on top of his pizzeria. Burkhalter isn't leasing month to month. He's rebuilding a tornado-scarred property he's owned for fifteen years. These aren't quick flips. They're bets on where two very different kinds of Tuscaloosa life are headed, made by people who've been in this market long enough to know the difference.
What it actually changes for someone who already lives here
If you've lived in Tuscaloosa for a while, the practical shift is this: downtown is quietly becoming a place people go to stay, not just to pass through on a football Saturday, while McFarland Boulevard is solidifying into the corridor you use on the way to something else. That's not a value judgment on either strip. It's just a more accurate map than the one most of us have been carrying around, where "new restaurant" meant the same thing no matter which side of town it opened on.
It also means the next few openings are worth watching for what they signal, not just what they serve. A new sit-down concept downtown near Greensboro Avenue tells you something about how confident people are in that walkability push. A new drive-through format on McFarland tells you the medical and retail corridor keeps absorbing growth the way it has since the rebuild began. Two different appetites, two different investments, both landing in the same city in the same year.
Traci Taft keeps an eye on exactly this kind of shift, because it tends to show up in home values and buyer interest long before it shows up in a headline. If you're curious what a changing corridor like Greensboro Avenue or McFarland Boulevard means for a specific street or a specific home, Traci Taft is glad to walk through it with you.
