Wintzell's Oyster House

Wintzell’s is goofy but great. A Mobile institution since Oliver Wintzell opened it as a six-stool oyster bar in 1938, it has survived hurricanes and floods, rebuilt and expanded into a modern, comfortable seafood restaurant. It still has a glorious oyster bar where you can sit and knock ‘em back by the dozen; and it continues to keep score in the ongoing contest to see who can eat the most raw oysters in one hour. (Last we looked, the champ was Heather Andrews, who swallowed twenty-one-and-a-half dozen in 1997.) Its walls are plastered with thousands of little signs offering bons mots and politically incorrect rules of life put there by the late Mr. Wintzell, starting in the 1950s. For example: "When a wife looks high and low for her husband at a party, she usually finds him high."