Southside Cocktail Club

Southside Cocktail Club feels less like a bar dropped into downtown Huntsville and more like one that has been collecting stories here for decades. Opened in early 2026 by Huntsville natives Scott Stierwalt and Reeves Jordan, Southside is something of a homecoming project. The two previously worked together behind the bar at Cotton Row before their careers took them elsewhere, including Stierwalt’s years working in the cocktail worlds of New Orleans and New York. Eventually, that experience came home. The result is what they call a neighborhood cocktail bar: polished without being precious, comfortable enough to become a regular haunt and unmistakably Huntsville. Look around before you order. The long bar itself was built from reclaimed bowling alley flooring, while antique maps, old photographs, newspaper clippings, Huntsville Stars baseball cards and other pieces of local history are layered throughout the room. Some of the artifacts go considerably deeper than decorative nostalgia, including historic Huntsville development maps and a rare nod to the never-built Space City USA theme park. Behind the bar, the philosophy is refreshingly straightforward. Rather than cocktails engineered primarily to make you ask how they did that, Southside puts its energy into executing classics well, alongside thoughtful house variations. It’s the kind of cocktail program built for returning next week, not just photographing once. And don’t write this place off as drinks-only. The kitchen turns out a compact menu of elevated bar food, including sandwiches, salads and snacks, but one of Southside’s most talked-about orders may be dessert: its made-to-order chocolate chip Cookie Service. You can request your cookie rare, medium or well done, and it arrives with Earl Grey-steeped oat milk. Yes, apparently Huntsville now lives in a world where we specify the temperature of our cocktails AND the doneness of our cookies. I support this development. Southside is also a nice marker of where downtown Huntsville dining is headed. Here are two people who grew up here, left, learned their craft elsewhere and chose to bring that experience back rather than reproducing something they saw in another city. That makes the vintage Huntsville memorabilia feel less like a design theme and more like the point. This isn't Huntsville trying to look like Nashville, New Orleans or New York. It's a neighborhood cocktail bar arguing that Huntsville has enough stories of its own.