Bird Dog Chicken Company — Restaurant in Orange Beach

Chicken tender places are pretty much a dime a dozen these days, so to stand out, one has to do something a little bit different. Bird Dog has the standard fried chicken tenders like Guthrie's or Foosackly's, but here you can get them tossed in a variety of sauces much like you would do with wings. Oh, and yes, they do also have wings, too!

Normal sides at the other places are some sort of fries and slaw, maybe a piece of toast. But here you can easily sub out onion rings or fried okra for the fries, which is a nice alternative. The onion rings are coated, not batter-dipped, so they're a bit lighter. The ones I tried were good thanks to using sweet onions. The okra is also good, but fried okra is hard to mess up.

I had a meal of 7 tenders tossed in the Nashville Hot sauce, with a side of homemade ranch. The tenders were kind of on the small side but not overcooked, so they remained tender and juicy throughout the meal. The sauce was really good but not nearly as spicy as Nashville Hot should be. This was not so much a 3-alarm fire heat but more of a recently-lit match from across the room heat.

I also got a small taste of their signature Bird Dog sauce, which is sort of like foo sauce or a comeback sauce, extremely mild and creamy.

Service is counter only, but the young woman who took my order was super helpful and friendly. It's worth noting that sauces are 50 cents each but the dipping cups are notably larger than the standard serving size so you're at least getting a good amount for the extra charge. The ranch claimed homemade and tasted excellent, with no weird chemical flavors like you get with the bottled stuff.

Drinks are self-serve Coke products plus Hill & Brooks teas and a strawberry lemonade option. They also have bottled soft drinks, included Mexican Coca Cola.

Overall, a good meal. The prices seemed a bit steep -- close to $40 for two dinners, tip included -- but the portion sizes were more than adequate. Thanks to the variety of sauce options plus dips, it's worth coming back again and again to try all kinds of...

Their lunch/dinner menu items are pretty much what you'd expect from any chain of chicken places. Dry and mostly salt. What made them stand out from the rest was their breakfast... for the first month or so that they were open. During their first few weeks the breakfast biscuits were incredible. Then that changed and all the breakfast biscuits turned into... pretty much a pound of egg with some cheese, a barely perceptible whisp of meat, and presumably a biscuit somewhere in all the egg. There's just so much egg in their breakfast biscuits now, it's off-putting, verging on nauseating. Birddog showed some promise at first but fell off a cliff almost immediately after they opened. I don't know why so many people try to start up -yet another- chicken place or -yet another- BBQ place in Robertsdale. Those markets are beyond saturated in Robertsdale. Nobody here is looking for more over salted fried chicken or BBQ, those things are already...

Went to new location in Robertsdale. Since they’re New I’ll give it a few months to work out all their issues. But I’m giving this review now.. First off it took 25 minutes at the drive thru. Girl running the drive thru is also the person answering the phone for ALL call in orders, so she spends most of her time on the phone delaying the drive thru while 4 people stood up front. Second our food was heat lamp kept. Fries were old and stale, we ordered the Bird dog sandwich and wrap. The wrap was a burrito not a true wrap, with no sauce, the sandwich was bit better but still no sauce. Cups so full of ice it wasn’t a full drink. For $30 I would expect a lot better. So far no very impressive.

UPDATE: went and tried their Breakfast Biscuits and they were very good. Fresh and hot. So the Breakfast...