The regulars know to get here early on Sunday morning.
By 10 o’clock, a half-hour before Eagle’s Restaurant opens its takeout windows, a socially distant line has already started forming, stretching from the front of the little cinderblock building down 16th Street North toward Birmingham’s ACIPCO pipe plant.
“If you don’t get here early, you’re going to be standing out here for a good little while,” says James “J Roc” White, who’s here with about a dozen other early birds. “You stay out here long enough, this line’s going to get longer and longer by the time church gets out.”