Published On: 11.03.24 | 

By: Amber Sutton

Perennial restaurant opens in Montgomery with a community focus

Perennial, a new restaurant in Montgomery serving a monthly menu of dishes made from locally sourced ingredients, opened in August. (Hillary Hudson / Perennial)

Perennial, a new restaurant that opened in August in Montgomery, is looking to bring a menu of dishes made with locally sourced ingredients to the capital city and prove everything has a purpose in the process.

Owner Deanne Allegro, a nutrition professor in the kinesiology department at Auburn University at Montgomery as well as a registered dietitian, said she was first inspired to use her knowledge to open a restaurant that worked with local farms and providers after witnessing the delays in food production during the pandemic.

“I’ve always worked in the field of food and nutrition,” Allegro said. “I talk a lot about how I feel the food systems should work to support people within a community, and when the pandemic hit and we saw disruptions in the food supply, I just decided that I wanted to stop talking and try to do some of these things.”

Allegro said she spent more than a year interviewing farmers and visiting farms throughout the state to learn more about the ups and downs of restaurants using local vendors, from the perspective of the restaurateurs as well as the farmers, in order to create a system for Perennial where everyone could work together in the menu’s creation.

“Perennial revolves more around a sense of community,” Allegro said. “We come up with the menu collectively with our farmers because we do everything. We don’t work with Sysco or U.S. Foods or anything like that. We work directly with the places where we get our food. Over time, we will evolve as we begin to discover more things and learn to create more things in the kitchen together.”

Perennial’s Deanne Allegro works closely with farmers in developing her menus, which vary monthly and seasonally. (Hillary Hudson / Perennial)

A recent menu included dishes like Gulf shrimp and zucchini kabobs, grilled watermelon, chicken pot pies and peach cobbler sundaes, made with ingredients from 16 providers like Dixon Family Farms in Clanton, Magic City Mushrooms in Birmingham, Working Cows Dairy in Slocomb and Sugar Hills Farm in Verbena.

And though Perennial’s menu offerings vary monthly or seasonally based on what’s available, a few signature items, including its cornmeal biscuits, which feature sprouted flour from To Your Health Sprouted Flour Co. in Fitzpatrick, and fermented sodas, for which Allegro makes syrup using fruits and herbs provided by Lost Creek Herbs in Prattville, remain up for grabs year-round.

“Our signature would be the cornmeal biscuits,” Allegro said. “We spent a year developing the recipe because, you know, cornmeal is a big thing in the South and biscuits are a big thing, too.”

The food isn’t the only thing about Perennial that’s garnered some attention, though. The century-old building where it resides near the heart of Montgomery’s Old Cloverdale neighborhood also has piqued many diners’ interest. Allegro said she purchased the structure on Mulberry Street that would eventually house the restaurant in 2021 and spent the following years remodeling the space, doing many of the renovations herself with such a strong focus on repurposing that she never even needed a trash bin throughout the process.

“Everything in the place is repurposed, even like the fencing on the outside,” Allegro said. “I took a wall down, but I didn’t tear it down. I dismantled it and reused the wood paneling that was on the wall to build out my service station. When I took some plaster down, I saved all the last pieces in the back, and I turned that into art in one of the bathrooms. So it was all really intentionally put together as well.”

Owner Deanne Allegro did many of the renovations to the Perennial restaurant herself over a period of three years. (Hillary Hudson / Perennial)

Allegro said the response has been positive and many people within the community have been supportive of Perennial and proven that there’s a collective effort to make more locally sourced food available in Montgomery.

“A lot of people in the area are trying to make a living doing this,” said Allegro. “There is a way to do it and support the people working with food within the community wanting to provide quality food, so why not work together to do that?”

Perennial, at 1914 Mulberry St., is open for dinner Wednesday through Saturday, and you can view the menu on its Facebook page as well as its website.

This story was previously published by This is Alabama. Want to read more good news about Alabama? Sign up for the This is Alabama newsletter here.