Savannah chef rises from bag-lunch sales to cable TV cook

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Posted 8:41AM on Sunday, January 6, 2002

SAVANNAH - With $200 in the bank and two sons to support, Paula Deen was barely kidding when she went into business as the Bag Lady. Deen spent the next two years packing homemade sandwiches, soups and salads into bag lunches for her sons to sell door-to-door at doctor's offices, beauty parlors and banks. ``When we moved down here I was broke, busted. My accounts were overdrawn,'' Deen said. ``All I wanted for my children and me was to be able to buy groceries and have a good meal.'' Nearly 13 years later, Deen is cooking for a much larger extended family. Her downtown restaurant, the Lady & Sons, is packed with a lunchtime crowd of about 100 piling their plates with fried chicken, sweet potatoes and collard greens. Tourists waiting for tables fill the sidewalk outside. Now the 54-year-old ``Bag Lady''-turned-restaurateur hopes to make the leap to celebrity chefdom in cableland. Deen recently taped the first two installments of her own cooking show for the Food Network. A Southern cook who specializes in cheese biscuits and banana pudding, and whose most exotic ingredients are ham hock and buttermilk, may seem out of place alongside chef celebs such as Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck. But Deen's betting there's a national cable audience hungry for the same stuff her restaurant customers find at her buffet simple comfort food that recalls your grandmother's Sunday lunch. ``I think the feeling is people are looking for that comfort, that feeling of being safe and having the food they grew up with,'' Deen said. ``Not fancy food, but food that makes you feel good.'' The first two shows were taped late December in Deen's home kitchen on nearby Wilmington Island. Historic Savannah serves as a backdrop, with Deen visiting the birthplace of the Girl Scouts to find their original cookie recipe. The show won't be Deen's first exposure beyond the oak-shaded squares of Savannah. In 1999, the Lady & Sons received the ``meal of the year'' award from USA Today, edging out restaurants in New York, Paris and Chicago. Two cookbooks Deen published with Random House since 1998 were smash hits on the QVC shopping network. And Deen has made several TV appearances, promoting her books on QVC and as a guest chef on Food Network shows such as ``Door Knock Dinners.'' Gordon Elliott, the former talk-show host who's producing Deen's cable show, has previously had Deen as a guest stint on ``Door Knock Dinners,'' where Elliott and the guest chef raid the kitchens of surprised homeowners to whip up impromptu meals from their pantries. ``Paula was the only chef who could talk her way into a house I couldn't get into,'' Elliott said. ``You show up unannounced and people just throw you out, as they should do. But she just charmed the pants off this guy in Las Vegas.'' Deen's taste of success has been simmering since 1988, when she started the Bag Lady business from scratch. Recently divorced after moving to Savannah from Albany in southwest Georgia, all she had was $200, cooking skills learned from her grandmother and two sons, Jamie and Bobby, willing to pitch in. Deen would cook at home, often starting at 2 a.m., catch a little sleep and continue at 5 a.m. making grilled chicken salads, pimento cheese sandwiches, chopped barbecue, chicken pot pies and twice-baked potatoes stuffed with shrimp. Her sons would pack the lunches into plastic coolers and sell them door-to-door, slowly building a loyal local clientele ``I'll never forget the first door we knocked on and said, `Y'all want to buy lunch?''' said Jamie Dean, 34. ``It was as hard as you can imagine a total cold sale every day. But after a while, folks would expect us to come back every day.'' The Deens did well enough by 1990 to open a small restaurant in a Best Western hotel, then moved to their current location in Savannah's historic district in 1995. Deen has already bought a larger space nearby where she hopes to move by 2003. Her national exposure happened largely by chance. A Random House editor who wandered in for lunch decided to publish Deen's self-published cookbook. A mutual friend introduced her to Elliott, who put her on his TV show. The Deens are already local celebrities of sort. The sons still work the floor of the restaurant, busing tables and refilling tea glasses, while their mother signs cookbooks purchased by customers. Dean says she hopes the Food Network will give her a weekly show after the first episode airs, tentatively by March. Still, she says she's doing more to promote the restaurant than for celebrity's sake. ``It's like getting a 30-minute commercial,'' she says. ``My goal is not to be a TV star, not at all. ``It's just fun. But it's stressful,'' she said. ``I've worked 20-hour days in this restaurant and with physical labor, and I couldn't have been a drop more tired than when I got done doing those cooking shows.'' Her sons, who make appearances in the first show filmed in Deen's home kitchen, say they're not banking on stardom either. ``We just wake up and work hard and these things seem to come,'' Jamie Deen said. ``I don't have time to sit in the living room and smoke a cigar and say, `Today the Food Network, tomorrow the world.'"