By: Jim Hannaford

It’s pretty ironic that Beth Anne McCormick started The Eat Beat in part because she wanted to meet people. More than two decades later, she is a familiar face in most of the area’s restaurants.

She was new to Fairhope at the turn of the millennium and needed something to do, so she started a publication from scratch. Her husband, Tim, had been transferred by the telecommunications company he worked for, and they relocated from Montgomery. She’s one of those people who can clearly recall when our Eastern Shore communities were genuinely quaint, and she wasn’t fully charmed by her first impression.

“It was like Mayberry,” she says. “There wasn’t even a Walmart back then. I remember driving down County Road 27, before it was Highway 181, and there were cows on one side of the road and crop dusters on the other.”

Beneath the calm surface, however, she saw that some cool things were happening in the areas of dining and entertainment, but there wasn’t an easy way to find out about them. She had years of experience in marketing and had for almost a decade produced print advertisements for Gayfers stores, so she put her skills to use in a fun, new direction.

“I didn’t know anybody here, and I wanted to make some connections,” says Beth Anne. “I realized there wasn’t anything in print that you could pick up and see what was happening in the area—where kids eat free, who’s having a wine tasting, what bands are playing where. There was actually a lot going on in our community, so I just put it in print form because that was my background.”

Focusing on restaurants seemed like it would have a universal appeal, she thought, because everyone has to eat. The “beat” part of the title was a play on words, referring both to a journalist’s routine and the rhythm of the local music scene. Except for a hiatus related to the COVID pandemic shutdown, she’s been compiling the culinary and musical happenings since 2002 and printing them on glossy stock.

This was well before the “foodie” explosion, ushered in by the popularity of The Food Network and other popular media, which puts Beth Anne ahead of the curve on a major societal shift. She doesn’t see it that way, though. She says she’s always been interested in cooking and trying new flavors, but really she was just trying to serve a practical need. And, again, walking into a restaurant and trying to sell them an ad for a publication was a way of meeting people.

“And I’m not a salesperson,” she insists. “I like to help people, and that was my way of helping these small businesses get exposure and bring customers in.”

She’s not a food critic either, but she is a journalist, having chronicled a huge part of the Eastern Shore’s social and cultural history over her successful run. Besides events listings, each issue typically has a recipe and cooking tips, some community news, and a feature story on a food professional.

The archived copies of The Eat Beat she keeps in her office are truly a treasure trove. Thumbing through those bound editions, Beth Anne points out a few people and places, some well remembered and others nearly forgotten. Every issue seems to give her a smile, perhaps triggering a particular memory. 

“I’ve always enjoyed having the privilege of talking with people and learning about the experiences they’ve had,” she says, “and it doesn’t necessarily have to be about food.”

A more specific gauge of the changes in Fairhope’s food and entertainment scene hits the streets in the spring. Many visitors to the annual Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival rely on the map she produces to navigate the ever-changing maze of commercial establishments.

“It’s an insert that has a map that covers from Sunset Pointe to Scenic 98 and has at least 50 businesses from that small area. It’s restaurants and bars plus bake shops and a grocery store,” Beth Anne says. “Each year I have to rearrange it because this person’s now over here and this person’s gone out of business and this business is called something different,” she says.

Putting together The Eat Beat takes a lot of work, from gathering the information and writing it up and publishing it, then delivering it to places where people can pick it up and enjoy it, often over a meal or a drink. For many years, Beth Anne made all of those deliveries herself, frequently turning it into family time with one or more of her three children riding along.

“I would start up on the Causeway and make my way down to Jesse’s in Magnolia Springs,” she says, “It was anywhere from 40 to 60 stops, and I would do it in one or two days. That’s how people got to know me. They saw that I was the owner, the production person, the distribution person, and the salesperson. I was a one-man band for years.”

When she re-emerged after the COVID break, she had some help. These days her partners are C.J. and Valerie Ezell of CrossBay Digital, located on Morphy Avenue. They not only handle The Eat Beat’s printing but also its online presence.

“We complement each other,” she says. “It gives me great comfort knowing I’ve got somebody I can count on, and I can bounce ideas off of and that I can collaborate with. They are also well versed in the digital aspects of marketing and social media.”

While Beth Anne had her reservations about adjusting to small-town life from the larger city of Montgomery, she certainly seems to have found a rewarding niche – and then some. Through connections made on the restaurant scene, she started a separate career in property management and real estate. Among her side ventures is managing an enclave of vacation rental properties overlooking Mobile Bay. The owner of The Bay House & Bungalows is Joe Ou (owner of Master’s Joe’s), and the gorgeous house and surrounding buildings are the former home of longtime restaurateur Rick Gambino.

She sees the Eastern Shore’s incredible growth since she and Tim moved here and isn’t sure she likes what the sleepy little town has become. She can look back and laugh at her own initial reaction after moving here in 1999.

“Back then, I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’ I mean, there was nothing down here, but it turns out that ‘nothing’ was good. My boys grew up on the pier with a cast net catching their bait for fishing and playing Little League before it turned into a mega sports complex. Looking back on it, Mayberry wasn’t so bad. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to experience and appreciate the Fairhope community when I did.”