Full Moon Bar-B-Que keeps early Southern hours: doors at 10:30 in the morning, closed by nine at night, and an hour earlier than that on Sundays. That is a full ninety minutes earlier on the front end than most barbecue chains open, and it changes when the good stuff is available.
Standard hours
| Day | Opens | Closes |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 10:30 | 21:00 |
| Tuesday | 10:30 | 21:00 |
| Wednesday | 10:30 | 21:00 |
| Thursday | 10:30 | 21:00 |
| Friday | 10:30 | 21:00 |
| Saturday | 10:30 | 21:00 |
| Sunday | 10:30 | 20:00 |
These are the chain's typical hours, and with around thirty restaurants run largely in and around Alabama, individual stores vary. Locations inside malls, hospitals, airports or stadium districts keep their host building's hours instead, which can mean an earlier close or a Sunday closure entirely. Check the specific restaurant before a long drive.
The quiet windows
Full Moon is a counter-service operation, which means the difference between a two-minute wait and a twenty-minute wait is entirely about when you walk in.
- 10:30–11:30 — the best hour of the day. Quietest, and the pork has just come off the hickory. If you only take one thing from this page, take this.
- 11:30–13:00 — the Birmingham lunch rush. Expect a line out the door at the busier city stores.
- 13:00–16:30 — quiet again, but this is the window in which ribs start to run short.
- 17:00–19:00 — the second rush, families and takeout orders together.
- 19:00–close — quiet, with the narrowest choice of the day.
What sells out, and when
Smoked meat is finite in a way fried food is not — a restaurant can drop more catfish at eight in the evening, but it cannot smoke another rack of ribs on demand. At Full Moon the order of scarcity is fairly consistent:
- Ribs first. The Classic Rib Plate and Baby Back Rib Plate are both $16.99 and both go before anything else. Mid-afternoon on a busy day is when a location starts saying no.
- Rib sandwiches next, for the same reason — they come off the same racks. If the 3-bone sandwich at $8.99 matters to you, do not turn up at 20:30.
- Vegetable of the day. It rotates daily, the quantity is fixed, and the popular ones go early. This affects the 3- and 4-vegetable plates most.
- Chopped pork almost never. It is the volume item and it is the last thing to run out.
Nothing else on the menu is realistically at risk. Burgers, dogs, salads and the Southern Fried Catfish are cooked to order all day.
Holidays and game days
Expect Full Moon restaurants to be closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, and to close early on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. Because holiday schedules are set locally rather than centrally, treat that as the pattern rather than the promise and call ahead. The pre-order side of the holidays — smoked turkey and trays for the table — is covered in the Thanksgiving guide, and pre-orders are collected in the days before, not on the day.
The other Alabama-specific consideration is football. On home Saturdays in Tuscaloosa and Auburn, and on Iron Bowl weekend statewide, restaurants near a stadium run a completely different rhythm from the table above: slammed before kickoff, dead during, slammed again after. If you are eating within a few miles of a game, either arrive well before the crowd or accept the wait.
Ordering around the clock
The early open is genuinely useful. At 10:30 you can collect a large order before the lunch rush has begun, which is what any group order should aim for — see the catering breakdown for what feeding twenty actually costs. Ordering ahead through the app or website shifts your wait out of the line entirely; the online ordering guide explains how far in advance to place it.
One last note on the last hour. The Half Moon Cookie is handed out free with every meal all day long, and it does not run out. Whatever else is gone at 20:45, that is not.