The Landing offers great food and fun by the boatload on Alabama’s Lake Martin
FOH. BOH. In food-service lingo, that means “front of house” and “back of house” – the customer-facing side and the creative food team behind them.
At The Landing at Parker Creek, that means Herb Winches and Chef Torrey Hall – and a fun, delicious time for tens of thousands of seasonal visitors to this restaurant on beautiful Lake Martin.
The Landing at Parker Creek is a dining destination on Alabama’s Lake Martin from Alabama News Center on Vimeo.
Winches, familiar to many from his nearly 40 years as a television sports anchor and radio broadcaster in Birmingham, found his second act at The Landing, which he and his wife, Betty, built in 2015.
“When I retired from broadcasting, I was 67 years old,” Winches says. “I saw this beautiful property here, and I told my wife, ‘I’m not ready to retire. I still have a lot of energy.’ And she said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I’d like to do a restaurant and try to bring people to the west side of the lake,’ and her reaction was, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ Because I knew nothing about it when I started The Landing.”
Undeterred, he had two shipping containers specially constructed in Atlanta, brought them over and started building his dream around them.
What he created is a family friendly, destination-dining experience – accessible by both car and boat (there are 38 slips). Set on a 3-acre point, the restaurant is a breezy series of pavilions with lovely lake views and an expansive lawn with games and umbrella-topped tables; there’s even a white-sand beach for the kids. It’s all arranged around a kitchen and bar – made from those shipping containers.
The sunsets here are reason enough to sit and stay for a while. The space was designed especially for that. “I wanted to make sure that people sitting at the bar can look at our beautiful sunset in the evening,” Winches says.
Chef Torrey Hall gives people lots of other delicious reasons to visit.
Winches describes Hall as “a godsend.” He says, “He is truly a five-star chef. He is just amazing. … I’ve had such a great relationship with him. We’ve been together six years, and he’s been a big part of our success.”
Chef Hall says he and Winches are “a good combo.” He says Winches “can remember every single person who comes in here … thousands of names. And I just do good food and control the chaos because it gets chaotic here.”
But outside the container kitchen, it’s easy to relax amid the casual lake vibe.
The festive bar container is open on both sides to serve the weekend crowds who come for the ice-cold regional craft beers on tap including The Landing Lager, created for the place by Hi-Wire Brewing of Birmingham. There is a thoughtful list of wines including some cabs specially chosen by Winches and Betty. Lake Martin Lemonade was created here, as was the watermelon-based Summer Splash cocktail. The margaritas are popular, and The Landing’s Bushwacker is regionally famous.
The atmosphere at The Landing is casual, but the food leans toward fine.
Chef Hall grew up in Kailua-Kona on the west coast of Hawaii (the Big Island). He discovered his passion for cooking at a very young age when he tried pizza for the first time and found it to be a remarkably tasty departure from the tofu his vegetarian mother usually cooked for him.
At just 14 years old, Hall began working as a line cook at a deli in Kona. He learned speed while working at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Then he trained at the Culinary Institute in San Francisco and honed his craft at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Maui and Vivace at the Four Seasons Hotel Aviara before taking a role as the Creative Chef at Pacific Coast Grill in Cardiff, California. He cooked for The Rolling Stones and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Along the way, he met a woman who called Auburn home, and that’s how he ended up in Alabama.
At The Landing, Chef Hall combines his background of Pacific beach cuisine with traditional Southern foods and Gulf-fresh seafood. He says he’d never heard of grits before coming here but quickly realized that if you add cheese to them, all is well.
The inventive menu changes all the time. Chef Hall says, “My cuisine is like a little San Diego-Mexican with Hawaiian roots, and I play with Southern food and switch it up a little.”
That means buttermilk-marinated fried chicken tacos or scallops and cheese grits with a smoked bacon-bell pepper sauce and tapenade on top served with creamed spinach. He makes a Parmesan-crusted black grouper with a bruschetta topping that is served with truffle and roasted garlic mashed potatoes and prosciutto-wrapped asparagus. Chef Hall says he sources his fresh proteins from Evans Meats & Seafood. “It’s always perfect.”
Thursday and Friday nights are for specials, but the busy weekends see a creative regular menu with truffle fries, shrimp wontons, cheese curds, lobster and crab guacamole, the bestselling mahi-mahi sandwich and the equally popular filet sliders – the crusts of the filets caramelized with blackened seasoning and topped with jack cheese, fried onions and served with a side of horseradish sauce. “We do some amazing sushi,” Hall says. “I have a lobster dynamite dish that’s insane. I create really good sushi.”
Chef Hall’s attention to detail reflects a deep spiritual connection to his food.
“I think every chef has a food soul,” he says. “So, if you put out something bad – and you know it’s not good – you lose your chef’s soul. Some people are higher on the chain than others.” It’s something he learned a long time ago, this respect for the food, for the process.
Hall strives for height on that chain, so he cooks from his soul. That means putting out quality dishes that taste good and make people happy.
“I know it’s good,” he says. “You have to be confident about that. You’ve got to know your stuff is good. Everything I make, I taste. Everything we put out. … All my cooks are soldiers, they are soldiers back there,” he says, adding that this is the hardest restaurant he’s ever worked in. “It’s hot, and it’s so busy. Any given day, there’s 100 people in line. There will be people all the way to the dock waiting to order.”
The Landing is open four days a week – Thursday through Sunday for a season that lasts about 85 days. They begin in mid-April and close out the season with a big cornhole tournament on Labor Day. A typical weekend sees 3,500 to 4,000 customers.
During the off-season, Chef Hall runs a food truck, Sword & Skillet, and a wine bar called Cerulean, which he built himself in midtown Auburn. He does everything from tailgates to private dinners. “I do wine dinners out of the food truck,” Chef Hall says. “It’s kind of cool. It’s like a deconstructed restaurant.”
Winches also has a side business, and it has turned his pretty point on the lake into a destination of another sort. In 2017, he added a tiny-home community just steps away from his popular restaurant. Guests can “play outdoors and stay in style.” Eagles Landing provides vacation rentals for those wishing to experience a Lake Martin getaway. The one-bedroom cabins, with a two-bunk- bed alcove, feature a private screened porch, a boat slip and a grill. “They have been a tremendous success,” Winches says. “They stay full.” He also has a luxury, two-bedroom treehouse for rent, and it stays full, too.
Winches worked with Alabama Power (Lake Martin is one of the company’s reservoirs, created primarily to provide customers with hydroelectric power) for all of the developments and had praise for the process of bringing the restaurant and other projects to life.
He says people are always asking him to open another Landing location on the other side of the lake. He tells them: “If I were 50, I’d be over there tomorrow, but I’m 74 and I ain’t going anywhere.” He gets asked to sell The Landing all the time.
“Every summer, somebody will come to me and say, ‘What would it take?’ And I say, ‘What am I going to do?’ Because my philosophy is very simple, and I tell young people this when I go places and they ask me to speak: I tell young people to ‘get up every day with a purpose,’ and that’s what I do. I get up every day with a purpose. My purpose is to make people happy here, and I think we’ve accomplished that.
“I’m very fortunate, and I know I am. I’m very lucky to be at the right place at the right time and that has a lot to do with it,” he says.
“I love what I do, and I love people. I’ve always been a people person.”
8300 Parker Creek Marina Road
Equality, Alabama 36026
(205) 410-6091
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Hours:
Thursday 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sunday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
To get there by car: Take Alabama Highway 9 North or South to Equality, Alabama, and turn on County Road 2 and follow the signs for six miles to Parker Creek Marina.
Susan Swagler has written about food and restaurants for more than three decades, much of that time as a trusted restaurant critic. She shares food, books, travel and more at www.savor.blog. Susan is a founding member and past president of the Birmingham chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier International, a philanthropic organization of women leaders in food, wine and hospitality whose members are among Birmingham’s top women in food.