by Paula Deen
Some say Southerners seize on any holiday as an excuse to make celebration food and they’d be right as rain. I personally love to pull out my recipes for shrimp and lobster bisque on Valentine’s Day, my strawberries dipped in white chocolate for May Day (once I was the runner-up for Queen of the May in middle school), deviled eggs for Father’s Day, and even peanut butter gooey cakes to celebrate our King Elvis’s birthday on January 8. Fact is, we Southerners love to entertain, and that’s all about making people feel good in your presence and serving them food that honors how special they are.
I serve celebration food every day in my restaurant because it’s my opinion that every day, just to be on the right side of the dirt is a celebration. When someone comes into my restaurant, I want to make him feel good he walked in my door. I want to show him I appreciate his business and that he’s doing something nice for me by being there. Every bit of food I serve him is a little celebration of that customer. Sometimes I go into restaurants whose owners seem to feel they’re doing me a big favor just by sending a waiter over to take my order. We invite people into our restaurant home and we treat them as though they’re at a family celebration, which brings me to one of my favorite sayin’s—you’ll never be lonely if you treat family like company and company like family.
Southern hospitality means celebrating friends in bad times as well as good. When one of our friends is hurtin’—say, she’s just gotten a divorce, her child scored all D’s in school, or she’s put on twenty pounds—we’ll likely make her a celebration party so’s she can remember how lucky she is in other parts of her life. One thing you’ll always find at that party—or any other Southern party—are tomato sandwiches; we just love ’em down here. We trim off the crusts from some bread slices, cut round circles out of the bread with a small juice glass, and spread the circles with a salt-and-pepper-seasoned mayonnaise. Topping it all are small, round slices of succulent red tomatoes. What you’ll never find at that party would be a sea urchin cocktail. We don’t cotton to sea urchins in these parts, honey. Or any exotic dishes, actually.
Southern hospitality extends to business relationships also. We rarely celebrate a business deal with cocktails in a restaurant; we’re more likely to invite that colleague home for a celebration dinner to show that we feel he’s done something nice for us and we want to honor him with an intimate little party … just as you’d invite your boss and her husband over to pay tribute to a great year. The celebration food you’d serve would be special—maybe a veal loin stuffed with peppers or a glazed Rock Cornish hen stuffed with wild rice. This would not be the occasion to serve my famous beer-in-the-rear chicken, which is yummy, but because it calls for a whole can of beer inserted in the chicken’s butt, it’s not exactly grand.
Southerners know how to entertain, and they love to share their special occasions with displays of food that show creativity. Celebration food almost always involves a new way of looking at an old dish. For example, a party called in haste for, say,someone’s unexpected job promotion can be the simplest supper consisting of festive margaritas and a giant bowl of spaghetti topped with a dramatic meat or shrimp sauce. What fun—it’s a gala! And, if you’ve noticed, it’s really just spaghetti. A New Year’s Day soup lunch for the neighbors could involve a celebration display of six different pots bubbling over with six hearty soups—a spicy tomato soup, a potato soup with shrimp, a wild rice soup, a cream of broccoli and cauliflower soup, a French onion soup, and a beef and cabbage soup. The neighbors dip into their favorites using one of six or seven pretty soup ladles; then, they carry their soup to a table set with long French breads and rolls, and everyone eats soup and gossips and toasts the New Year with joy and anticipation and soup spoons. It’s just soup—but it’s a whole lot more; the presentation makes it celebration food.
Although there’s no law that says you can’t make a celebration feast for your own self—say, an entire junior sausage pizza just because you placed second in the marathon race—celebration food is most often about sharing. It’s about gathering up all the mothers of your best friends for a Mother’s Day tea where you’ll serve cucumber and ham sandwiches and an enormous assortment of tiny pastries, or the members of your book club for an ice cream social featuring every possible ice cream flavor and topping on this sweet planet. Southern celebration food is hospitable and it’s spirited.
Here’s to celebration food celebrating the times of your life and the life in your times!
SEXY FOOD
Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven.
—FROM THE BACK OF A PILLSBURY FLOUR BOX
Finally, I’d like to say a few words about Southern cooking and sensuality. You can disagree with me on this one, but you’d be wrong. Every true Southern gal knows for a fact that food, sex, and desire are intertwined. Sometimes I wonder if my most sensitive sexual organ isn’t back there on my tongue.
I have always felt that cooking with my man is a kind of lovemaking, from foreplay to consummation. You lick each other’s gravy fingers; you squeeze the tender peach, then feed it to each other; you get the taste of the key lime pie he just sampled. From the quick kiss you steal; your lips, your tongue are always busy with the sucking, the sampling, and the drinking in—and then the slow, slow eating of that turn-on meal—don’t tell me that cooking isn’t sexy, child.
If I were going to make a romantic feast today for my man, I’d start with oysters at a table for two at home. A sprinkling of rose petals over the tabletop and a little candlelight wouldn’t hurt. Some people say that oysters are an aphrodisiac, and I don’t doubt it for a moment. Just think of holding up that cold, silky oyster and slipping it down your man’s throat. I can’t hardly stand it. After the oysters, I’d probably serve a steamed lobster dipped in butter. Yummy. You could almost rub yourself down with butter. That warm, yellow butter just slipping that lobster down his throat—imagine it.
Now, it may not seem very sexy to you, but a tater is just the absolute feel-good food of all time, and I’d definitely include it in my seduction dinner. You can mash a tater, you can boil it, you can fry it, you can scallop it, you can make soup with it, you can roast it. I might even take that lobster, split it, and make a shrimp and crab mashed potato and stuff it back into the lobster’s shell. Oh, baby.
I think eating anything with my fingers and dipped in—yes—butter is pretty sexy. I could even get Michael Groover to eat a few stalks of roasted asparagus if I fed them to him.
Finally, for dessert, I’d wrap some puff pastry around my Michael’s favorite chocolate candies (Snickers or Hershey’s) and bake it until the pastry was crisp and the candy melts. When he bites into that irresistible oozing chocolate, he’s going to melt.
Now, if that don’t create a romantic response, grits ain’t groceries in a poor man’s house.
Food, glorious food, Southern style. I got it all straight in those early years running The Lady. I knew the food I cooked would celebrate my heritage and my joyful days.
Mrs. Dull’s Tomato Aspic Funeral Food Dish
This is one of the most traditional funeral food offerings in the house. Mrs. Henrietta Dull was born on a plantation in the mid-1860s, and she conducted cooking schools throughout the South, eventually becoming the editor of the Home Economics page in the Atlanta Journal. She was my grandmomma’s favorite chef and her tomato aspic was legendary. You couldn’t hardly die in style without this aspic served on someone’s very best china at the gathering after the funeral. Following is Mrs. Dull’s recipe, handed down from Grandmomma Paul, as she wrote it.
1 quart can tomatoes
A half to a whole bunch of celery
One 5¾-ounce bottle of stuffed olives, drained
3 tablespoons of vinegar
1 tablespoon of grated onion
1 tablespoon of salt
⅛ tablespoon of cayenne pepper
1 box Knox gelatin
½ cup cold water
Mash tomatoes into a pulp, removing any stem pieces; cut
celery thin, slice olives thin, add all seasonings. Put the gelatin in the cold water for ten minutes, then heat over boiling water until melted; add the tomato mixture, turn into a large mold or individual molds to jell in the refrigerator. Rinse the mold with cold water before pouring in the mixture so it will unmold easily.
Serve the whole aspic on pretty lettuce leaves, or if you’ve jelled the aspic in individual jelly glasses, you can unmold each glass and cut the aspic in inch-thick slices—then put on lettuce with a side of mayonnaise.
Remember, this aspic is not cooked at all. You can garnish with asparagus or other fresh vegetables on the side of the plate.
Chapter 16
SO YOU WANT TO OWN A RESTAURANT?
A customer walks into a restaurant and sees a sign on the wall that says, $500 IF WE FAIL TO FILL YOUR ORDER. When a waitress comes to his table, he orders elephant ears on rye. The waitress goes into the kitchen and a few minutes later the angry restaurant owner comes out, lays five one-hundred-dollar bills on the customer’s table, and says, “You got me this time, buddy, but it’s the first time we ever ran out of rye bread.”
Just as often as I hear from people who want to publish a book, I hear from people who want me to tell them how to open a restaurant. How hard can it be? they figure.
Hard. Major hard. Very, very hard.
I’m only kidding. Sure, it’s hard, but you never have to be afraid if you’re fixin’ to do it with all the passion and smarts that are in you. I once heard someone say that any first-rate business-person loves the product she’s pushing. That means that if you’re a successful pocketbook manufacturer, you will generally love the leather, the color, the smell, and the feel of the purses. If you are a winning publisher, you will surely love books, good paper, good stories. If you want to start a restaurant, you’ll love food, of course, seriously love it. But there’s one more thing in this business: you’ll positively have to love people, the people who consume your product and the people who help you get it to their tables. I know very few top chefs or restaurant owners who are loners. As a restaurant owner, you got to be out there selling your passion for feeding people well, working the room with pleasure, greeting your guests with affection, and not from a sense of duty.
I’ve seen the dread in people who have to go to work at jobs they hate. It’s so sad to me, because we spend two-thirds of our lives at work, and to be miserable two-thirds of our lives—how awful is that? My family and I feel blessed that we’re able to make a living doing what we love, because so many don’t have that luxury.
So let me tell you a little bit about my own experience.
First of all, there are different levels of success in this business. It takes a stubborn, single-minded path to have a wildly popular restaurant, and you do lose something (like a whole lot of playtime) when you’re focused on that quest, trust me. Determining what’s your most comfortable degree of success has to come from your honest appraisal of how much time and effort you’re willing to invest in work. What’s success to me (like workin’ seven days a week) may not be what you define as success.
It was probably inevitable that I would own restaurants one day. I’m happiest feeding people, and from the first time I noticed how much pleasure I could bring to others, it was a done deal. How many professions can boast that kind of instant gratification for the owner’s work? Now, if I go to a dentist, and he’s fillin’ my teeth, even though it’s good for me, I’m sorry, I ain’t goin’ to say, “Thank you, that feels wonderful.” But how lucky am I that I can put fried chicken and biscuits in front of someone, and watch him roll his eyes and say, transported, “Oh, God, this is so delicious”?
When I opened The Lady & Sons, I needed help, I needed financing, and, most of all, I needed sound advice. Here in Savannah, a building owner will not construct your restaurant. If you pay him a hefty rent, he will allow you to run a restaurant and make improvements in his building—just don’t go looking to him for help with the cost of any renovation. You have to have a certain percentage of the cost of the entire project right up front. If it’s going to cost about $150,000 for a reconstruction, you’ve got to have saved anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000 of what they call “good faith” or “start-up money” to offer the bank so’s you can get that bank to finance the rest. I’ve already told y’all about the money I’d saved and how Aunt Peggy came through with the balance of the start-up money.
How much will you need? For starters, make a list called “Professional Help.” You’ll almost definitely need money for a lawyer, and, for me, a good accountant was key. An accountant puts the pencil to the paper, takes your expenses, and then tells you how many fried chicken dinners you need to serve to make a profit in a week. I survived two years and some months without an accountant: I had nothin’ to count, so why would I need an accountant, was my clever reasoning. Then I broke down and realized I needed professional help, and, thank God, in early 1990 I found Karl Schumacher.
Probably the first thing Karl told me was that every successful entrepreneur in the restaurant business must be three types of people—and if she can’t be three people, she has to have two other types of people in the business to complement her and she’s got to pay them. (That’s the start of the list called “Salaries.”) The first type is the one with the ideas—that was me. I was the one with the risk-taking ability and the creative brain, and I had to think everything through. One of my best ideas, for example, was the buffet. It would be like eating at Momma’s table, where you just knew you’d like most everything on it—but, for sure, there was something special on it just for you. We’d have the country fried steak and the Salisbury steak—something for everybody.
I knew I needed a general manager, an administrative person who would keep track of everything that went on and be the one who stayed behind when the restaurant closed to make sure everything got done. Dustin Walls is the general manager of The Lady & Sons. He’s been with me for about ten years and he has some ideas about good managing.
“If someone is unhappy because they say they don’t like the food (and that’s rare), we always have to find out what they didn’t like about it. Some people just don’t have the palate for Southern food; the collard greens, for example, are mighty spicy. If you want to put some South in your mouth, expect plenty of butter at Paula’s places. To some people, that’s not pleasing to the palate. If there’s a legit complaint, I try to make the complainer as happy as I can, maybe find them something else, like a nice salad. We treat our guests like they’re in Paula Deen’s house.”
Dustin makes sure that everyone’s satisfied, and that’s a good restaurant policy for any owner. “It’s illegal,” says Dustin, “to say no to a guest’s needs when you wouldn’t say no to a guest in your home.” If we should run out of chicken, it’s often Dustin himself who gets in his car, drives like the wind to the grocery store for more chickens, and gives the customer some fried green tomatoes until the chicken’s ready. Many things can go wrong in the kitchen. If a steak is not done to the customer’s satisfaction, that’s pretty easy to fix, but because we make food in such large batches, sometimes an entire pot of collard greens will come out too salty and then we have to recook the whole batch, which is a long process. In cases like these, the manager or server will often talk to the hungry customer to take his mind off his belly.
I asked my general manager to tell me the most important thing a person buying a restaurant ought to know.
“You’ll have no personal life for most of your adult life,” he says with a grin. “You work, you get done, you go home to sleep, you wake up the next day. You are constantly thinking about that next day—what you got to do, what you got to be prepared for, what you got to fix, who’s not going to show up for work. If you have to, you roll up your sleeves and get to work doing the no-show’s job. I’m a general manager but I started as a hoe cake maker, and when I have to I wash dishes, just like Paula’s sons, Jamie and Bobby, do in a pinch. You never can get too big for your britche
s. And maybe, just maybe, if you see a little bit of success, you can try to catch up on your social life.”
Finally, besides the risk taker and the administrative person, I needed to add in salaries for the cooks and servers.
Next, Karl said that we had to make a “projection.” That’s an estimate of what you think you’ll make in restaurant sales, then what you think all your costs, aside from salaries, are going to be. Put that down on paper even though your projection may not be totally accurate.
Now you need a list titled “Food Costs.” You have to figure out what your average cost for a meal is going to be per person, then what you’ll have to charge for the meal in order to make a profit. You need to know how many tables there will be, how many people will sit at a table, and how many times that table will be turned—in other words, served and emptied out, and refilled with new customers.
Let me show you what I mean: say you have thirty tables. Each table seats two people—that’s sixty seats. At lunchtime, your accountant says, you must turn each table one and a half times to make a profit. So, if there are sixty seats in your restaurant, you need to serve ninety meals at lunch (sixty plus thirty) to make a profit.
Let’s multiply it out: if you charge $8 a person for lunch, serving ninety meals will make you $720. Subtract your costs for the day from that $720, and what you have left is your profit.
How do you figure your costs? Karl says you must come up with a menu to figure out costs. For example, a meal of scallops will cost more than chicken, but since French fries cost less than whole baked potatoes, you can save money on your costs by offering French fries with the scallops. You have to figure out what your cost is going to be per plate for everything you’ve got on that menu.
Now you can estimate how much your wholesale costs for food will be. You’ll need to talk to people who’ve been in a similar kind of restaurant business, and also talk to the suppliers. Ask them what the best food brands are and what brands you should pass on. Ask what jumps off the menu and what just lies there because it never excited no customer.