Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

We hope you're following along as AL.com's resident carnivores Jared Boyd and Haley Laurence traverse the state in search of Alabama's Best Steakhouse.

Their protein-fueled journey is coming to a close, and soon they will reveal a winner.

Until then, though, we thought we’d hit the rewind button and go back in time to share the history behind perhaps Alabama’s most legendary steak sauce, Dale’s Seasoning.

A savory, soy sauce-based marinade that's great with everything from ribeyes to Bloody Marys, Dale's began in Birmingham in 1946, and it's now available in 44 states across the country. It's still owned and operated by the same family that started Dale's 71 years ago. -- Bob Carlton | bcarlton@al.com

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

Where it began

Jacob “Jake” M. Levine Jr. and Joe Daole, who were Army buddies during World War II, returned from the war and opened the original Dale’s Cellar Restaurant in downtown Birmingham on the site of what is now Renasant Place (formerly Park Place Tower). The steakhouse was in the basement of an apartment building.

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Graphic courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

What's in a name?

There was no Dale. The owners came up with the name by combining the first two letters of each of their last names. “They had to come up with a name, so they put the “Da” in Daole and the “Le” in Levine, and that was Dale’s,” Alan Seigel, Levine’s nephew and the vice president of Dale’s Sauces Inc., says. “It was an ingenious idea.”

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

The secret to the sauce

Levine and Daole served in Hawaii during World War II and were cooks in the officers’ club, Seigel says. “There’s nothing in the family that says Jake was a chef, but somehow or another, they called themselves cooks,” he says. “They were cooking at the officers’ club, and they found this lady who had a recipe and they started cooking with it and people started liking it. I don’t know how they ended up with the recipe, to be honest with you.” The soy-based sauce became the house marinade when Levine and Daole opened their steakhouse in 1946.

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

A bottle of marinade to go

Customers at Dale’s Cellar Restaurant liked the steak marinade so much that they began asking if they could get some to take home with them. “People would come in and say, ‘Can I have some of that sauce?’” Seigel says. “They got a Coke bottle and filled it up.” Later, Levine began bottling the secret marinade and selling it over the counter at the restaurant. One of those original bottles is pictured above.

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Image courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

Dale's branches out

Buoyed by the success of the original Dale’s Cellar Restaurant, Levine opened more Dale’s locations throughout Alabama and around the South, including restaurants in Montgomery, Huntsville and Florence, as well as in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Panama City, Fla. A second Birmingham-area location, called Dale’s Hideaway, opened in Homewood in the late 1950s. The original Dale’s Cellar Restaurant later relocated to the basement of the old Essex House on Sixth Avenue North in 1966. It closed nine years later. Pictured above is an early advertisement for Dale's.

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

A celebrity hangout

Dale’s Hideaway in Homewood was a hitching post for musicians traveling through town, including country singer and actor Tex Ritter (who is pictured here dining with Birmingham musician “Happy Hal” Burns, right) and the pop quartet the Ames Brothers. “They called that the celebrity booth,” Seigel says, pointing to the picture of Ritter on the wall of the Dale’s Seasoning corporate office. “Anybody who was any kind of a celebrity got their picture taken and hung on the wall.”

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

A death in the family

Jake Levine (pictured) died of a heart attack in 1966, and following his death, his wife, Estelle, ran the restaurants along with her brother-in-law, Sam Levine. In 1975, Estelle got out of the restaurant business and with the help of her son, Michael Levine, concentrated on producing and selling Dale’s signature marinade. “That’s kind of when the sauce business was born,” Seigel, her nephew, says. “My cousin (Levine) was with her every step of the way.”

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

Starting small

Operating out of a small commercial kitchen in Homewood, the family bottled the Dale’s marinade using a hand-held pump that would fill four bottles of sauce at a time. “It would take 20 to 30 minutes to fill 48 bottles,” Seigel recalls. On a good day, they would fill about 900 bottles of sauce – a task that takes about six minutes on the assembly line today. “It just like every other little sauce business in the world started,” Seigel says. They started selling Dale’s sauce at Birmingham grocery stores, including Piggly Wiggly, Western Supermarkets and Bruno’s. “We started getting some distribution,” Seigel says, “and the good news is, people liked the product.” Seigel, left, is pictured here with his cousin Michael Levine, who is president of Dale's Sauces Inc., in a photo from the 1990s.

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

Getting bigger

Dale’s soon outgrew its space in Homewood and relocated to Irondale. The family got out of the production business in the early 2000s, closing its Irondale plant and contracting with a co-packer in the Brundidge, Ala., to bottle and distribute the sauce. The corporate headquarters remains in Birmingham, in the Crescent Building on Highland Avenue. “It’s worked out really well for us,” Seigel says. “We are a sales and marketing operation now. All we really wanted to do was sell stuff. We really didn’t want to make stuff.” In 2006, Dale's introduced a second marinade that has 42 percent less sodium than the original.

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Bob Carlton | bcarlton@al.com

Forty-four states and counting

Seigel has a map of the United States in his office, with push pins marking the cities where Dale’s Seasoning ships its marinade to retailers and wholesalers. Those pins are now in 44 states, Seigel says, and Dale’s is now available in about 12,000 grocery stores nationwide, including Publix, Kroger, Food Lion, Safeway and Walmart. “When I started here, there were maybe 20 pins on the map, and in 25 years, we’ve got all those pins,” he says. “It’s one of those things where we just sit back and say, ‘How did that happen?’”

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Bob Carlton | bcarlton@al.com

The last of the Dale's restaurants

While Dale’s Seasoning continues to grow, the last remaining Dale’s Steakhouse restaurant -- which was located just across the Tennessee River in Florence -- was rebranded as a Sperry’s Restaurant in 2014. (Sperry’s has subsequently closed.) “That (Dale’s) was a franchise my uncle sold 50-some-odd years ago,” Seigel says. “We now have all the trademarks and copyrights to everything. We don’t really want to go into the restaurant business, but we probably could if the right opportunity came along.”

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

Dale's is still Estelle's baby

Estelle Levine Silverstein is 92 now, but she still comes into the office every now and then to keep an eye on her son, Michael Levine, who is the president of Dale’s Sauces Inc., and her nephew Seigel, the company's vice president. “She is semi-retired, but this is kind of her baby,” Seigel says. “She started this thing when she was 50 years old, and she was right in the middle of it, filling bottles and pushing pallets. She wasn’t just sitting back and watching it happen.”

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Photo courtesy of Dale's Seasoning

How do you do your Dale's?

Most folks use Dale’s Seasoning on steaks and burgers, but the marinade also goes well with everything from chicken and pork chops to asparagus and grilled corn. Recipes are available in the Dale’s Seasoning cookbook, which includes old recipes from the restaurants as well as contributions from customers. “People send us recipes,” Seigel says. “We have the coolest, most loyal customers in the world.” About 10 years ago, the company came up with a "How do you do your Dale's?" jingle that is still popular today. A restaurant owner in Louisiana seasons gator meat with Dale’s, Seigel says, and his brother substitutes Dale’s for Worcestershire sauce when he mixes Bloody Marys. “He says he will not have a Bloody Mary without Dale’s,” Seigel says. “And my brother knows about Bloody Marys.”

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Joe Songer | jsonger@al.com

Celebrating a Birmingham tradition

On July 4, for the 20th year in a row, Dale's Seasoning will be one of main sponsors of Birmingham's annual Thunder on the Mountain fireworks show -- a tradition that is special to the Dale's family. "Mike (Levine) and I were raised here, and we saw the fireworks show every Fourth of July," Seigel says. "We thought, what a cool way to give back to our community on what is one of our biggest weekends. This is home, and we are just trying to keep a tradition going."

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