A Bill of Good
Drexell & Honeybee’s Donations-only Restaurant in Brewton
Stop in for lunch at Drexell & Honeybee’s 15-table restaurant and you’ll find a menu filled with down-home cooking: barbecue ribs, chicken and dumplings, mac and cheese, and blueberry cobbler. What you won’t find on the menu: prices. At Drexell & Honeybee’s, customers pay what they want—or what they can. Patrons leave their money in a donation box near the door. The box is behind a screen that shields it from the rest of the room, so if you can’t pay for your meal today—as many people in this lower-income town often can’t—nobody will know, and, more importantly, nobody will judge.
The amount a customer pays may vary, but it almost always comes with an extra helping of gratitude. “Today I wasn’t able to eat and you guys helped me,” one patron wrote in a thank-you note. “Thank you for being a blessing to this town/community/and to me.” Inside the balled-up note: a single quarter.
“We want to be that beacon of light to someone desperate,” says Lisa Thomas-mcmillan, who opened the restaurant with her husband, Freddie Mcmillan, last year. “We might not be able to pull it all out, but we’re going to try to help you in some kind of way.”
The entire town of Brewton has rallied behind them. Drexell & Honeybee’s is volunteer-staffed and often volunteer-stocked: Locals bring in homegrown vegetables, and two farmers keep separate gardens just for the restaurant. A 15-year-old boy even tried donating his prizewinning pig. Thomas-mcmillan couldn’t accept it (the pig hadn’t been inspected by the USDA), but you don’t keep the doors open four days a week at a pay-whatyou-can restaurant without being a little creative. The boy auctioned off the pig and put the $457 he made right in Drexell & Honeybee’s donation box.