By Sam Prickett
Jonathan Sealy lives walking distance from Local 39 Homewood, the newly opened restaurant he owns and operates with his wife, Lyndsey. It’s 174 steps from his back door to the restaurant, actually; he’s counted.
“I walk to work every day,” he said.
The Sealys have lived in Homewood’s Edgewood neighborhood for 10 years, and in that time, they’ve seen a handful of businesses open and close along Oxmoor Road. “I’ve watched all the restaurants that have come and gone through here,” Jonathan Sealy said. “It just seemed like they were missing that little bit of love. That’s all they were missing.”
With Local 39 Homewood, which opened Jan. 29, the Sealys hope they’ve added that missing ingredient by creating a warm, inviting, neighborhood-focused establishment – one they hope will feel “like an extension of home.”
“There’s not a neighborhood place (in Homewood) anymore,” Sealy said. “Everything’s got a concept, they’ve got craft cocktails or something else tied in with it. But you can do all those things and still be a neighborhood place. My demographic is, I want to hit all the locals. We’re in a great neighborhood in a great city that’s tied into Birmingham, and basically we just want to work on that.”
Local 39 Homewood occupies the narrow storefront at 1006 Oxmoor Road, between Saw’s BBQ and Dreamcakes Bakery. It’s a cozy spot, with exposed-brick walls, a large wooden bar, and dim, atmospheric lighting.
“We’ve worked with the structure that was here previously,” Sealy said. “This place has good bones, and it looks like it’s been here for years … . Lighting was a big deal, too. Presentation is important. We wanted to be a warm, welcoming place. We want you to feel like it’s your spot. I want it to feel like a back porch.”
That sense of hospitality, Sealy said, is inspired by his nearly 20 years working under the nationally recognized chef Frank Stitt at Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham. That job, which he held until he left in December to open Local 39, also greatly shaped his bartending skills, he said.
“I’ve always worked in the restaurant business, even through college, but the big point was Highlands,” he said. “This is not a white-tablecloth place, and it’s more laid-back and has a neighborhood vibe, but I still want to implement that hospitality, because that’s what I look for.
“I may not want a fine-dining experience, but I want to go somewhere where they’ve got a decent selection of wine, bourbon, whiskeys, vodkas, anything, and just know a little bit about what they’re doing … . And it’s cliché, but being nice is huge.”
And though he maintains that craft cocktails aren’t the overall focus of Local 39, that doesn’t mean they can’t still serve a mean Old-Fashioned, Sealy said. The bar is a major focus.
“It’s nice, because we have some younger people working behind the bar, and I can teach them a little bit,” he said. “We help them hone their craft.” Plans for the bar include a “make-your-own” Bloody Mary bar, featuring a variety of pickled options, and a constant, up-to-date selection of local beers on tap.
Local 39 Homewood’s menu is intended to evolve over time, but it already features a handful of local favorites, thanks to the Sealys’ partnership with Mike Wilson and Hunter Lake of Saw’s BBQ. Local 39’s location previously was the home of Wilson and Lake’s Saw’s on the Side, a bar that was a spinoff of the neighboring barbecue restaurant. It opened in 2018 and closed last year.
Local 39 will offer a variety of Saw’s staples, including the restaurant’s signature sweet tea fried chicken sandwich, cheeseburger and hot wings.
“We took the successful part of a menu that was already existing and just added some salads and some seafood in there,” Sealy said. “We mostly kept the (Saw’s on the Side) bar fare idea, but just added a couple of things.”
To emphasize its neighborhood ties, Local 39 Homewood also leans into the area’s history. It takes its name, for instance, from the number of the Birmingham & Edgewood Electric Railway streetcar that ran along Oxmoor Road and Broadway Street in the first half of the 20th century. A stretch of the streetcar’s tracks, uncovered and restored in 2018, is visible less than a block away.
So far, Local 39 Homewood has been embraced by the surrounding neighborhood, Sealy said.
“This location’s amazing,” he said. “The window’s full of foot traffic. I watched that every day when we were just cleaning up and repainting and doing all of that.”
Sealy said that, since the restaurant has been open, “80% of the people here every night have been locals who live within a mile of here. I definitely think the demographic’s there, and they’re showing support already, so I just hope to keep working with this idea and keep the momentum going.”
