The Restaurant — An Assessment
The Royal Scam takes its name from a 1976 Steely Dan record, which tells you most of what you need to know about the restaurant's sensibility before you open the menu. This is a room with taste in its musical references and the confidence to inhabit them — casual, faintly subversive, committed to precision without pretension. Since opening in 2006 across from the Renaissance Riverview Plaza at the corner of Government and Royal, the Scam has quietly become one of downtown Mobile's most durable dining rooms.
The cuisine is Contemporary American with a strong bias toward the Gulf. Golden tilefish, when it is in, arrives pan-seared with a confidence that suggests the kitchen has done this a hundred times this month. Snapper is treated as seriously as it deserves to be. Tuna tartare — the dish that more restaurants ruin than any other — is plated with the kind of restraint that lets the fish speak. The filet mignon holds its own against any downtown steakhouse at a price that would embarrass any downtown steakhouse. Sandwiches at lunch are proper bistro efforts with proper bread.
The full bar pours an extensive programme of wine, beer, and spirits, with a wine list that punches considerably above the bistro's weight and a cocktail menu that prefers classics built correctly to cocktails invented for Instagram. The courtyard seats roughly thirty and is, on a clear Mobile evening, one of the most pleasant alfresco dining spaces in the city.
This is the kind of room that rewards regulars: menus shift with what the kitchen has been able to source, specials arrive from the owner's own discretion, and the staff remember what you drank last time. First-timers are treated with the same warmth, but it is worth returning — the Scam reveals itself gradually, in the same way that its namesake album reveals itself, on the third or fourth visit rather than the first. Reservations are recommended Thursday through Saturday.