Nate Oats hardly had time to get settled in before the newly hired Alabama basketball coach made his first trip to Bessemer’s Bright Star restaurant, where he was introduced to what has since become one of his favorite meals.
Snapper throats, the unsung treasure of the Gulf.
“If you haven’t been to the Bright Star and had their snapper throats, you’ve got to go,” Oats says. “‘Cause they’re unbelievable.”
Oats, who moved to Tuscaloosa from Buffalo nearly two years ago to reinvigorate the Crimson Tide hoops program, may be a recent convert, but he is just one of the many Bright Star regulars who’ve grown to appreciate the culinary delights of one of the 114-year-old restaurant’s signature dishes.
While the Bright Star is renowned for its fresh seafood -- from the crab claws to the stuffed shrimp -- the snapper dishes are the stars of the show here. And for those who know, it doesn’t get any better than the snapper throats.
“Most of the loyal clientele that come here, they’re educated in what we do here,” Andreas Anastassakis, the restaurant’s executive chef and co-owner, says of the Bright Star’s distinctive dish. “They’re familiar with it. They know it’s a delicacy. They come here for it. It brings people in.
“Now, when you get someone who has never been here before, never heard of the restaurant, you’ve got to explain it to them,” Anastassakis adds. “And really, the best part is when they say, ‘What is a snapper throat?’
“You tell them, ‘Well, it’s actually the throat of the fish.’ Then you explain to them that it’s a fish with a bone in it. And if you don’t have a problem eating fish with bones, we definitely recommend it.”
The Bright Star restaurant in Bessemer, Ala., prepares and serves about 1,000 pounds of red snapper each week. The restaurant gets its snapper delivered twice a week from Greg Abrams Seafood in Panama City, Fla.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
‘The standard for how we did things here’
Recognized as “Alabama’s Oldest Restaurant” by the state tourism department and as an “America’s Classic” by the James Beard Foundation, the Bright Star was founded by Greek immigrant Tom Bonduris in the industrial boom town of Bessemer in 1907, and sometime around the 1930s, Gus Sarris, who was a chef and co-owner at that time, added his soon-to-be-famous Greek snapper to the menu.
Sarris often filleted the fish himself, holding it by the tail and running his knife along the body of the snapper, surgically removing the bone and the skin, according to the 2007 book “A Centennial Celebration of The Bright Star Restaurant.”
Not one to waste food, Sarris took the leftover throats -- that chunk of meat on the underside of the fish behind the gills -- and deep-fried them to serve to the staff.
“With the upbringing they had, coming from Greece, they ate what was left over, what they couldn’t sell,” Anastassakis says. “And that’s how they discovered snapper throats.
“There was no way they were throwing that good fish away,” he adds. “They found a way to make that for their dinner, and eventually, it evolved to where it got on the menu.”
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Years later, after brothers Jimmy and Nicky Koikos took over the restaurant from their father, Bill Koikos, they not only continued that tradition, but they also built on it.
“Cutting our own fish at the Bright Star was always the standard for how we did things here, going back to when Jimmy and Nicky’s father and uncle (Pete Koikos) ran the restaurant,” Anastassakis, who came to the Bright Star in 2010, says.
When Jimmy and Nicky expanded the restaurant by adding the “1907 Room” in 1978, the fried snapper throats became a fixture on the menu.
“The snapper throats really took off when the restaurant expanded,” Anastassakis says. “That’s when they started buying enough fish to put them on the menu.”
Over the ensuing years, the fried snapper throats became one of the most popular lunchtime dishes at the Bright Star, and in 2008, Southern food scholar John T. Edge featured them on his bucket list of “100 Southern Foods You Absolutely, Positively Must Try Before You Die” that he wrote for Garden & Gun magazine.
“It’s a very tender piece of meat,” Anastassakis says. “You just put your fork on it, and it just flakes right off that bone.”
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Phil Webb, an Alabama businessman who owns a concrete and building supply company, says he was introduced to snapper throats by former Alabama football star Major Ogilvie sometime back in the early ’80s.
“We were coming up the interstate,” Webb recalls, “and he says, ‘Man, let’s go to the Bright Star, and let’s have some snapper throats.’
“And I said, ‘Do what? I don’t want to eat the throat of a snapper.’ . . . I love fish, but I had never heard of it.”
One bite of that tender, white snapper meat, though, and Webb was hooked for life.
“I swear, I have eaten hundreds of times at the Bright Star, and I think I have only had maybe one other meal,” he says.
“And every time I carry different people there, they say, ‘Oh, we know what you’re going to get, Phil.’ There is no telling how many people I’ve gotten started on snapper throats.”
Carl Thomas, who has butchered fish at the Bright Star since 1979, fillets a snapper in the prep room of the Bessemer restaurant.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
‘The secret to doing the fish right’
Carl Thomas has been butchering the fish at the Bright Star since 1979, and in his early days at the restaurant, Thomas also made twice-weekly runs to Panama City to buy snapper fresh off the boat and bring it back to Bessemer.
Back in those days, Thomas used a meat cleaver to butcher the fish. Now, using a commercial band saw, Thomas carves the snapper with the precision of a master craftsman. It is a labor-intensive process in which he takes great pride.
Most weeks, Thomas and his protégé, C.J. Jackson, will prep between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds of snapper, which will appear on the Bright Star menu in the form of Greek-style snapper, blackened snapper, fried snapper, snapper almondine, and snapper stuffed with crabmeat and shrimp -- as well as in the restaurant’s famous seafood gumbo.
Nothing, though, is finer than the snapper throat, a delicacy that Thomas likens to a bone-in ribeye or pork chop.
“It has that one big bone in it, and it’s got a sweeter taste,” he says. “It comes from the same fish, but it’s just a better product to me.”
Around 1990, the Bright Star began buying its snapper from Panama City fishmonger Greg Abrams of Greg Abrams Seafood, beginning a longstanding relationship that has worked out handsomely for both parties.
“I’ve been selling to them for 30 years,” Abrams says. “In fact, Jimmy (Koikos) was one of my first customers when I start peddling off my truck.”
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Not many other restaurants serve snapper throats, Abrams says, because few of them buy the volume of fish that the Bright Star does, nor do they have the equipment or the expertise to butcher their own fish.
“There are very few restaurants that buy the whole fish like the Bright Star does,” Abrams says. “The Bright Star set the stage years ago of doing this.
“They’ve still got a lot of people working for them that know how to clean the fish, and that is how they’ve been so successful.”
Anastassakis adds: “I have people, even restaurateurs, call me all the time, saying, ‘I went to the Gulf and caught snapper.’ They want to know: How do you cut the snapper throats? It’s a very complex process.”
But butchering the fish is only part of that process.
After he finishes cutting and cleaning the snapper, removing the fins and the skin, Thomas soaks the throats overnight in an ice bath.
“What that will do is get all of the blood out of there from when that fish was caught and all that blood went straight into the throat,” Anastassakis says. “Once you do that, you will have that nice, clean white meat.
“Again, going back to Gus Sarris and the old days, that’s the process that they figured out, that they learned how to do, and they passed it down to us. That’s the secret to doing the fish right.
“I’m not afraid to share the secret,” he adds. “Anybody can do it. It’s the amount of work that goes into it, and nobody (else) wants to do it.”
A typical 10-pound snapper will yield about two servings of throats.
“When you get that fish, you’ve only got so many throats,” Anastassakis says. “You want to balance it out so that at the end of the week, when it’s time to order fish again, you haven’t run out of throats and you can still keep them on the menu for the people who travel a long way just to get them.”
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Abrams, who also supplies fish to such Birmingham fine-dining restaurants as Highlands Bar and Grill and Hot and Hot Fish Club, recently purchased Hunt’s Oyster Bar and Seafood Restaurant in Panama City, and Anastassakis has promised Abrams that he’ll come down there to teach him the tricks to doing snapper throats right.
“You’ve got to have a band saw where you can do what he does to his,” Abrams says. “I’ve got a Hobart band saw coming, and he’s going to come and show me. Because he doesn’t show many people. It’s an art to getting the right meat out of that throat.”
The Greek-style broiled snapper throats were a favorite of the late Jimmy Koikos, the Bright Star's longtime co-owner.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
‘What do you know about snapper throats?’
For decades, the Bright Star served only fried snapper throats, but Jimmy Koikos, the restaurant’s late and longtime co-owner, used to get the kitchen staff to prepare his throats Greek-style – broiled and seasoned with olive oil, lemon juice and oregano.
“That was his favorite thing to eat in this restaurant,” Anastassakis says. “I’ve been to restaurants all over the Southeast with Jimmy, and I can tell you he never enjoyed a meal anywhere as much as he enjoyed Greek-style snapper throats from the Bright Star.”
About 10 years ago, Anastassakis convinced his cousin Jimmy to put the Greek-style snapper throats on the Bright Star menu, too. They are available only as a dinner entrée.
Oats, the Alabama basketball coach, is also partial to the broiled throats.
“He eats them almost every time he comes to the Bright Star,” Anastassakis says, “and he’s probably been here 25 times.”
“Yeah,” Oats says, “the broiled snapper throats, that’s one of my favorite meals in Alabama. First time I had it was here.”
Now, Oats can talk snapper throats with the best of them.
“I was down fishing in the Gulf, and I said something to one of the guys that was on the fishing boat -- I don’t know if it was the captain or the deckhand -- about snapper throats,” Oats says.
“He said, ‘What do you know about snapper throats?’ I think they thought that was like a fisherman’s secret, that the throats were the best meat. But I love ‘em.”
The Bright Star is at 304 19th St. North in Bessemer. The phone is 205-426-1861. Lunch hours are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, and dinner hours are 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 4:30 to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Sundays. For more information, go here.
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