If you drove past the corner of North Alston Street and West Laurel Avenue last summer, you probably noticed the dark windows. The cow-print seats were still visible through the glass. The self-serve sauce bar sat untouched. Colt Grill BBQ & Spirits had opened in that historic Foley Bakery building in January 2025 with the kind of fanfare a fresh downtown restaurant gets, and by mid-July it was gone, its lights off and its future entirely unclear.
Eleven months later, the same corner is running a waitlist most nights. Half Shell Oyster House opened there on June 24, and the restaurant is already asking guests to add their name online before peak dinner hours rather than just walk in and hope.
That turnaround is the actual story here, more than any single menu item. A restaurant chain with six other Alabama locations looked at the mess left behind on that corner and decided it was still the best address in town. For anyone who lives near downtown Foley and watches its storefronts the way you watch a neighbor's yard, that says something worth sitting with.
What Actually Closed the Doors
Federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations, working alongside the Foley Police Department and several other agencies, entered Colt Grill around lunchtime on July 15, 2025, with a search warrant. The visit was part of a three-year, two-state investigation into money laundering, labor exploitation, and human smuggling tied to all five Colt Grill locations, four in Arizona and the one in Foley.
By that Wednesday, a federal grand jury in Phoenix had indicted four people, including Colt Grill owners Robert and Brenda Clouston, on conspiracy charges related to bringing, transporting, and harboring workers without legal status. The Foley restaurant itself wasn't named in the specific charges, but it was listed among the five locations tied to the Cloustons' ownership, and it closed for good the same day agents arrived. Foley's building owner was left with a freshly renovated historic space and no tenant.
That's not the kind of story any downtown wants attached to a new restaurant. But it's also not the end of the story, which is exactly why it's worth telling.
Eleven Months, Then an Oyster Bar
Half Shell Oyster House didn't stumble into that corner by accident. The chain started in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 2008 and has since built out locations across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Before Foley, it already had six Alabama restaurants running in Spanish Fort, Mobile, Cullman, Pelham, Trussville, and Tuscaloosa. This is a company that knows exactly what it takes to fill seats in this state, and it chose the one building in Foley that had just generated a federal news cycle.
The space itself is part of the appeal. The building dates to 1925 as the original Foley Bakery, and the city had already invested in preserving it before Colt Grill ever moved in. Half Shell's team leaned into that history rather than gutting it, keeping the bones of the old bakery visible while building out a New Orleans-leaning dining room. The current menu runs from chargrilled oysters and seafood gumbo to a ribeye and a cinnamon roll bread pudding for dessert, and it's open for lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch with daily happy hour.
Here's the short version of what that one address has been through in under two years:
- January 2025: Colt Grill BBQ & Spirits opens in the renovated 1925 Foley Bakery building.
- July 15, 2025: Federal agents raid the location as part of a two-state investigation. The restaurant closes immediately and never reopens.
- Late July 2025 through early summer 2026: The building sits empty while Gulf Coast Restaurant Group, Half Shell's parent company, works out a lease. Half Shell's own press materials had originally targeted an "early 2026" opening.
- June 24, 2026: Half Shell Oyster House opens on the same corner, its seventh Alabama location, several months later than first planned.
"We are excited to be coming to downtown Foley," said Brian Raspberry, vice president of commercial development for Gulf Coast Restaurant Group, when the lease was announced.
"We believe that Foley's vibrant downtown and strong sense of community make it the perfect home for Half Shell Oyster House as the city continues to grow."
That's a company with six other Alabama locations already open telling you where it thinks the growth is happening next.
The Rest of Downtown Never Stopped Moving
What's easy to miss in a story about one restaurant's fall and another's arrival is that nothing else downtown paused while it happened. Foley Main Street's Third Thursdays, the monthly evening stroll where shops stay open late from 5 to 7 p.m. with specials and drawings, kept running the entire time Colt Grill's storefront sat dark. This month's edition, an Arrr-gust Adventure theme, filled the sidewalks on August 20, and Main Street already has a Walk This Way 80s-themed 5K and block party on the calendar for mid-September. Neither of those depended on whether the corner at Alston and Laurel had a tenant.
Downtown also picked up a visible upgrade this year that had nothing to do with restaurants: seven new crosswalk murals, part of a project the city framed as connecting art with pedestrian safety. It's a small thing individually, but it's the kind of investment a city makes when it expects foot traffic to keep growing, not when it's worried about an empty storefront on the corner.
Put those pieces together and the pattern is clearer than any single opening or closing. Downtown Foley's draw isn't riding on one restaurant's survival. It's the recurring Third Thursday crowd, the murals, the historic buildings the city has already chosen to preserve, and a Main Street organization that keeps programming events on a monthly clock regardless of who's leasing which building. That's the kind of foundation that let a six-location Alabama chain look at a location with a very public, very recent legal mess attached to it and sign the lease anyway.
What Else Changed Around Town This Year
A few blocks away from all of this, Foley picked up a Cook Out on South McKenzie Street in late April, adding another late-night option outside the downtown core. Meanwhile, Foley's Winn-Dixie closed at the end of 2025, part of a round of closures that also hit locations in Fairhope and Mobile, which means one longtime grocery anchor left the same year downtown gained a destination restaurant. Over at OWA, the Lake OWA Fountain Show is back for the season with synchronized water, light, and music running on the hour, and Groovy Goat's Thursday night karaoke has become a reliable midweek plan for families who want something low-key.
None of these are connected to each other in any official sense. But together they describe a town that's absorbing change on multiple fronts at once, gaining in some places and losing in others, without any single business or building carrying the whole story.
The Takeaway If You Live Near Downtown
The specific lesson from the Alston and Laurel corner isn't about oysters, and it isn't really about Colt Grill either. It's that a storefront going dark in downtown Foley right now doesn't mean it's staying that way. A building with real history, in a district with monthly foot traffic already built into its calendar, is worth the wait to the kind of tenant who can afford to be patient. If you've been wondering about a space that's sat empty on your own regular walk through downtown, the last two years on this one corner suggest the answer is usually just a matter of time.
Gerald Tipton spent fifteen years running restaurants on the Gulf Coast before moving into real estate, so watching a dining scene rebuild itself storefront by storefront isn't background noise, it's familiar territory. If you're curious about what a specific corner of Foley or the wider Eastern Shore looks like right now, from a downtown lease to a waterfront lot, Let's Connect with the team at Tipton Realty Group.
