CHEF PROFILES | ALABAMA

David Bancroft Built His Alabama Restaurants From Smoke, Dirt, and the Yellow Pages

By Eric Barton | May 7, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

David Bancroft’s childhood begins with a cattle and catfish farm in Lower Alabama. There was surf fishing and flounder gigging around Grayton Beach, where his great-grandfather had built a beach house and fish camp a century ago. There were tables loaded with fried catfish, turnip greens, field peas, creamed corn, and hot water cornbread that Mama Jean served in repurposed Country Crock containers.

Then his family moved to San Antonio when Bancroft was almost five. And dinner changed.

“We went from the typical Alabama fixins’,” he says, “to brisket, chips and salsa, borracho beans, rice, and guacamole salad.”

It’s that dual upbringing that created David Bancroft the chef. Those two very separate chapters—Alabama first, then Texas—led him down a path that brought him to Acre in Auburn, a fine-dining restaurant rooted in Alabama ingredients and tradition, and Bow & Arrow, a barbecue spot built on what he learned in Texas. What followed was James Beard attention, national acclaim, and a career built on fire, family recipes, and a willingness to let two distinct parts of his life share the same plate.

Bancroft

Bancroft was not exactly wounded by the transition to Texas. He was, by his own account, “in full attack mode for every meal.” There was still chicken-fried steak with sawmill gravy and plenty of country sides, but now there were chiles, sauces, spices, smoke, and a whole new set of rules around a barbecue. He loved, he says, the way cowboys and vaqueros blended flavors and traditions in the same meals. The family grocery budget took a memorable hit the day he discovered smoked beef ribs.

The Alabama part of his childhood never really left either. Bancroft’s grandfathers planned meals around what they could hunt, catch, or harvest. His grandmothers took whatever came through the door and turned it into something that stayed with him.

“I followed those women around like a puppy waiting for scraps to fall,” he says. “I loved the aromas and flavors that filled their kitchens to the sounds of The Price is Right and Days of Our Lives in the background.”

Chef David Bancroft Acre Restaurant Burger

Still, Bancroft didn’t begin with a plan. He went, of course, to Auburn, because his grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, and cousins had all graduated from Auburn. Before Christmas break of his sophomore year, he called his father and said he wasn’t happy. He wondered whether he should go to culinary school. His parents urged him not to quit.

Wagyu burger at Acre

Chef David Bancroft Acre Restaurant Auburn

But the feeling stayed. Before his senior year, his parents offered him a practical test. Take the summer off. Work in a restaurant kitchen. See whether he still wanted it. He applied to Amsterdam Café. Until then, his food education had come from his grandmothers, hunting, fishing, and from watching the original Iron Chef. The restaurant kitchen suited him immediately. “It was like a full-contact sport at all times,” he says. “I am so grateful that the chefs and owners allowed me the opportunity to grow and learn how to cook in that kitchen.”

Smoked salmon at Acre

Bow & Arrow Barbecue

At Amsterdam, Bancroft started looking for a way to move some of the college-football food toward the fresh local ingredients he had known growing up. The phrase farm-to-table wasn’t yet everywhere, but he noticed how places like Highlands Bar & Grill and Hot and Hot Fish Club listed farms and first names on their menus. So he asked around Auburn for farm recommendations, opened the Yellow Pages, and started calling.

His first call was to Randle Farms. Eventually, owner Frank Randle invited him out. “I’ll never forget the view after driving just a few miles outside of the college town and arriving at rolling green pastures with lambs grazing across the hilltop,” Bancroft says.

That was the moment. Not a television moment. Not a culinary-school revelation. A phone book, a farmer, and a pasture a few miles outside town. “Good, fresh food had always been available,” he says. “You just had to be willing to do the work to go out and find it.”

In 2013, Bancroft and his wife, Christin, opened Acre in Auburn. It sits on an acre, with gardens and fruit trees. It gave Bancroft a way to pull together the Alabama side of his life: Gulf seafood, local farms, wild things, family cooking, and Southern food treated as something alive rather than framed under glass. The restaurant made Bancroft one of Alabama’s best-known chefs. He became a repeated James Beard Award semifinalist and won Iron Chef Showdown in 2017.

Bancroft

Bow & Arrow followed in 2018, with Texas-style brisket and sides, and now he’s preparing to open a second one. Even with a third restaurant on the way, he still hunts, fishes, and forages, now often with his children. He talks about those trips the way some chefs talk about markets in France.

“I get just as fired up stumbling on a chanterelle honey hole as I do landing a big fish,” he says.

That’s the part that connects Lower Alabama, San Antonio, Auburn, Acre, and Bow & Arrow. Bancroft didn’t build restaurants by escaping where he came from. He built them by going back through it, one farm call, one fire, one fish camp, one pasture at a time.