by Paula Deen
Bubba has an interesting theory about an owner’s professional relationship with his or her staff. “Servers are independent contractors,” says Bubba. “They come in and ‘rent’ tables from us every day and they give the revenue from the meals at these tables to the owners. We furnish the electricity, the building, the furniture, the insurance, and the product, and all they have to do is sell our product. If they do a good job, they make good tips and a good salary and they haven’t spent a dime of their own money. But, at the end of the day, if it’s the server’s fault that one guest didn’t get her food till half an hour after everyone else at her table, that guest’s not going to remember the server’s name but she’s going to be mad at Uncle Bubba because it’s my name that’s over the front door. If I have to comp that guest for her inconvenience, when the day’s over I’m going to tell my server, ‘You owe me twenty-five dollars.’ If I am going to be held accountable by the bank, the city, the state, and the federal government, not to mention my sister, Paula, my servers also have to be accountable for their actions.”
You go, Bubba! That sounds right to me.
When I started out, my staff now laughingly says that I was the biggest bitch, and I probably was, but only because I was fighting for all our lives and I had to get the very best out of those people that I could. At the same time, I like to think that when we were not in the middle of battle, they knew I loved them. I wanted them to succeed. It would thrill me to pieces when I would hear that a server had just made oodles of tip money on a shift.
• • •
New owners regularly ask me how I deal with mean customers. You know, I’ve got to be the luckiest girl in the whole world because somehow, the nicest, sweetest people in this world find their way to my restaurant door. I could probably count on one hand the people who have treated me ugly. But see, I make it hard for people to be mean to me. If you show people love and kindness and a smile, it’s hard to get angry and worked up. I guarantee that customers will get fired up in a minute if you’re grumpy, frowning, short, or rude. When I have people on my staff for whom I have to apologize, that’s very upsetting to me because my business was built on hospitality and making people feel good about putting their feet under my table.
When a server has the bad luck to find a truly obnoxious patron, I recommend that the server respond by being as nice as she can. She’s trained to offer solutions to make customers happy. Sometimes it’s a freebie. I may lose on that meal, but if what’s making the customer cranky is based on something we did, I’ll always do the right thing. When complaints have a basis, you apologize and say you’re sorry that the customer has been unhappy with his experience and you do the right thing.
An elderly gentleman said to my brother, Bubba, “Son, don’t ever apologize for making a profit. That’s why we’re in business. That’s what America was built on, that’s free enterprise. That’s this country’s strength.”
So what did I think when I read an e-mail from a woman who wrote, “Paula, you are the greediest woman I have ever heard of and our Father in heaven knows what kind of terrible person you are.” Why did she write that? Because I charged more for chicken than she paid in the supermarket. What I thought was that this person had never run a restaurant!
That woman did hurt my feelings badly.
Ever wonder what it really means when the waiter tells you what the “specials of the day” are? Is the “special” the freshest, most desirable choice on the menu? Is it the least expensive? Or by special, do they mean the dish is so great it’ll be super expensive? In my restaurants, the “special” means something different every day. For example, I may buy a load of wonderful fish at a great price and then also offer it at a particularly reasonable price to my customers because it will last for two days and still be extremely fresh. Sometimes a special might be a way for a restaurateur to raise the price a bit by adding something extra, like crab stuffing, that will make that fish just fantastic; still, when hard-to-find or expensive ingredients are involved and the dish takes more of the chef’s time to prepare, I’ve got to charge you more. Sometimes specials are used as marketing devices: I know some restaurants that have a different “special” every day of the week—and people who have come to love the restaurant’s lamb chops come in every Tuesday to get that lamb chop special. Finally, I’m sorry to say that in some restaurants, what they call a special is what is not quite fresh and must sell immediately or be discarded. In those cases, it’s usually true that an owner will lower the price, but incredibly, he may also raise the price for the same dish, and to hell with his guests. So, what makes the special special? In any restaurant but my own, damned if I know. Tip: Ask the wait person why the special she’s pushing is so damned special—and hope for the truth.
Some of you may be thinking of starting a family business, and I’d like to say a few words about owning a business with beloved relatives or even trusted friends. When we were at the Best Western, my sons, Bobby and Jamie, worked as employees. Sometimes, when three in the afternoon came around, one or the other of them would take off to play somewhere, leaving the vacuum cleaner they were using right in the middle of the room. I knew that golf was drawing their attention more than the restaurant. When I was about to open The Lady & Sons, my intuition told me that they’d be a whole lot more invested in the business if they owned some of it, and so I told my accountant, Karl, that I was fixin’ to give them half of the business—25 percent each.
“Paula,” Karl told me, “I’m a firm believer in one person having control, so let’s compromise. You keep 52 percent. You give them each 24 percent.”
That’s what I did and that’s when I decided to change the name of The Lady to The Lady & Sons.
Well, it wasn’t just the name that changed. The boys also changed so much. When they saw their names out there as owners, they became dedicated to growing the business and started putting in ninety-plus hours a week. One of them was always there, sometimes both. Sure, they were. It was theirs now.
That was great for me, great for them, and great for my taxes because the tax burden on me was vastly lowered. My advice? It’s a very good idea to make a trusted person a partner if you want that person to really commit himself to your business. But stay in control with the smallest percentage more than your partner.
Listen, I figure that even if I don’t follow my own advice and I end up giving the boys a greater share, I can still outvote them because I’m still yo’ momma. In the South, being yo’ momma trumps all.
The only one that outvotes yo’ momma is the health inspector, who comes unannounced every six, eight, or ten weeks. Everyone gets in a wild tizzy when that man appears, and let me tell you, when his car’s pullin’ up, word spreads through the building very fast. Everyone starts cleaning and shutting cooler doors. A health inspector will write you up if a hand towel’s missing or a soap dispenser’s empty in the bathroom. God forbid you don’t have a thermometer in a refrigerated unit. I remember one time at the Best Western, the health inspector showed up; he’d seen me at my best and at my worst, but this day was more like the latter. Here I am trying to distract him while the staff’s fast cleaning up the kitchen, so I say, “John, honey, come out here on the patio deck so’s I can show you what’s going down on our buffet line today.” Well, I took him outside where a big old drum grill was just loaded down with chicken, and his face about purpled up and he said, “Paula, what are you thinking? You can’t do this. You can’t cook outside unless it’s in an enclosed area.” Here I was thinking I was diverting the wolf, and I led him right to the sheep. And led myself to a big old fine, too.
Bubba remembers the time when Uncle Bubba’s was open only a few months and a young boy ordered our really incredible crab stew and he was sitting there quietly eatin’ it when Bubba saw him reach up, nudge his momma, and loudly say, “Momma, where’s the crab at?” Well, don’t you know our staff had prepared the crab stew and forgot the crab? Thank the Lord there was no inspector around that day.
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br /> So, you still want to open a restaurant? Well, friend, do it! I’ve been running my mouth in this chapter because I want you to be clearheaded about what lies ahead for you. It takes so much work and grit and raw strength and energy, and still so many things can go wrong, but you know what? If it works, it can be the most magical business in the world.
Pan-Fried Corn
This is my momma’s recipe. I never published it in any of my books before, and I don’t know why, because it’s pretty delicious and everyone just loves it in my restaurants. This is the recipe I use when I prepare pan-fried corn at home; for the restaurants, I have to modify it a bit because there isn’t a frying pan big enough for those crowds.
You start with a dozen ears of Silver Queen corn, which is kinda like white corn. First, wash the corn. Next, grate those ears with a corn grater to get the kernels off. Then put a little butter in a cast-iron skillet and fry up about 3 or 4 strips of streak o’ lean, which is pork but minus the fat (you can find it in packages next to your hams in the grocery store or order it on the Internet). In a pinch, you can always use bacon or fatback, but I personally love streak o’ lean for the ultimate piggy flavor with my fried corn.
When the streak o’ lean’s nice and brown, take it out, add a stick of butter to the streak o’ lean drippings, and then pour in your corn kernels and stir and fry them until done, about 5 to 8 minutes. Then I chop my meat, whether it’s bacon, streak o’ lean, or fatback, and throw it back in the corn. Season it with salt and black pepper.
It serves 6 to 8 people and is great served with ham or fried chicken.
Chapter 17
SCENES FROM A LIFE: GROWTH, CAMERON, MR. JIMMY, BUBBA, AND ME
Taste makes waist.
The Lady & Sons, at 311 Congress Street, was filled to capacity every night, and I started to think: Dare I take yet another risk? Am I arrogant to think I could expand to something bigger, much bigger? The restaurant had eighty-five seats and we’d maxed the space: lines of friends, neighbors, and other locals circled the block two and three times nightly, so there was always a wait of from one to three hours to get in. We’d long ago stopped bothering to take reservations from groups under ten people—it was “Get here and we’ll get you in, somehow.” But it was the tourists I had on my mind now. Savannah was growing by leaps and bounds, and I felt I had to accommodate all those people who’d heard about us from Oprah, my cookbooks, and our show on the Food Network.
We knew that eventually, the lease at 311 West Congress Street would end and the landlord would raise our rent. It was time for me to be my own landlord. To do that, I needed to put some money where my mouth was.
Now was the moment for some serious but calculated risk-taking. I borrowed money from the bank and started purchasing property that would make me a real, grown-up landlord.
On October 25, 1999, I bought 108 West Congress Street, which was about the same size of the space we were renting. Although we were still under our lease at 311 West Congress, I wanted a place my restaurant could move to when the lease expired. The luxury of 108 was that it had a tenant who could help pay for the property until we could renovate the space and move in.
Then, miracle of miracles, 106 West Congress became available; thinking ahead but with my heart in my throat, I realized that I also had to buy this building too. An adjacent building would give us the room to eventually expand The Lady & Sons. The property didn’t have a tenant, but we tightened our belts, and on June 21, 2000, we bought it and managed to pay our mortgage on time.
All good stuff comes in packages. When 102 and 104 became available, I really flinched at the price, which was almost a million dollars. I was on a roll though, and I bought them on December 20, 2001. Now we had a whole lot of property—and no income. Good work, Paula.
Was I nuts? No. I was a budding entrepreneur. I was becoming the Paula Deen I always wanted to be—not exactly fearless, but cautiously brave. We moved up our plans, and decided to borrow some more money to plunge ahead and build our big, beautiful new restaurant—even way before our current lease at 311 ran out. Following Karl’s advice, I calculated that the additional revenue we’d see from a vastly expanded restaurant would pay for the new buildings, their improvements, and also our rented space at 311 until the lease ended.
We were right.
In 2003, excitedly, we moved from 311 Congress to our new home just days before Thanksgiving. It had taken fourteen months to get the new space ready. We owned about half the block now, and went from an 85-seat restaurant to a 250-seat place in a four-floor building that contained a banquet room, a huge bar area, offices, and a state-of-the-art kitchen. On Thanksgiving Day, we served more than fourteen hundred people. Loved my life! Did I need another restaurant? Not really, but Bubba did.
BUBBA’S STORY
How did I get into the restaurant business? My sister’s dreams reach far. Let me first say that for me, Paula’s the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, and there ain’t nothing ever going to separate us but death. Not to say she don’t aggravate me on occasion, but that big sister has saved my hide more than once. And, she was about to do it again.
I’d been doing very well in a landscaping and lawn maintenance company I’d started in Albany, but when my wife left me, Paula got mad and called to say, “Sell everything, and move over here.” In a few months, I called back to say, “You know what? I think I’m ready.”
My kids were grown. Corrie would live with me in Savannah, but for now she was off at college. Jay was on his own in Atlanta but would remain my son and close to me forever. I knew Paula was going to the top however she had to do it—and I felt like I had something to offer her. Her two sons had worked so hard, but I knew I could give them some guidance and take some of the stress off my sister. When I moved to Savannah in 1999, they didn’t even have an office; Jamie used to pay the bills in the mornings on the dining room table. I truly wanted to help Paula, Jamie, and Bobby get their business to the next level. So, for about two years, I worked at The Lady & Sons, learning the business—you might say I went from lawns to prawns. In the meantime, I started looking around for another restaurant because there were too many of us to be in just the one place. Frankly, we both thought we’d open another Lady & Sons.
One day I walked into the office, and Paula was already there. “Bubba,” she said, “I figured out what we’re going to do.”
“Oh, shoot,” I said, “let me sit down for this. It makes me scared when you start thinking.”
She said, “We’re already doing great Southern cuisine—the home cooking that we were raised on, and here we are living in this beautiful coastal city. Let’s open up a seafood restaurant.”
It was an obvious idea but it took Paula to think of it.
So that was the plan. Not another Lady & Sons, but a different kind of restaurant, one that I would be mainly responsible for. We started looking at property and found some gorgeous land on Whitemarsh Island on Turners Creek. One day, again, I walked into the office, and she said, “Bubba, I figured out the name of our new place.”
I thought we would call the new restaurant The Lady & Her Brother or The Lady’s Brother, but she said, “No, we’re going to call it Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House.”
I was thrilled. It was a real Southern name. It was my name. Made me feel good.
Paula and I decided that she and I would be partners in Uncle Bubba’s because Jamie and Bobby were already her partners at The Lady & Sons. If something happened to Paula, Jamie and Bobby would get her share of the interest. The main goal was to keep everything in the family. Family is what turns us on.
We opened the doors to Uncle Bubba’s just before Christmas 2004. There’s a creek running out back, koi fish swimming in the pond by the front door, and irresistible smells pullin’ in the people. We have an old Southern tradition that says if you cook a good dish, you gotta get slapped. Our char-grilled oysters are so good, as Paula says, they’ll make you want to slap yo’ momma. Just a taste will give
you a Southern drawl. There are a whole lot of family pictures in the entranceway of Uncle Bubba’s; one them is of Paula and me with her tweakin’ my left nipple—we call it the titty-twister photo. She has an evil grin on her lips and she’s clearly enjoyin’ the tweakin’. I’m shrieking in despair and dismay and horrible pain. That picture is a prime example of how she’s approached me all my life, with a lot of aggravation and a lot of love. She always aggravated me with love.
And that’s no frickin’ lie.
So now it was 2005, I had a husband, a blended family, and two restaurants to keep me focused. I wasn’t bored, y’all. Then I had an experience my momma and daddy would have been crazy proud of, given all the bad report cards they had to sign.
On a Thursday in March 2004, two days away from my becoming Mrs. Michael Groover, I got a message from Cookie, my office manager, that someone named Gail from Paramount Pictures had called and would like me to call her back. And I said, “Well, why the hell is Paramount calling me? I can’t cater chicken that far from Savannah. That chicken would be rotten by the time I got it there.” Very funny joke, I thought. Then I forgot about Gail and Paramount.
Michael and I were married that Saturday. It was a crazy time and we decided that because there was so much going on for us, we couldn’t afford the time to go on a real honeymoon. We spent the night in a wonderful downtown B&B, Planters Inn. The next day, we had lunch with all our friends who had come for the wedding, then we drove down to a fabulous resort called The Cloister on Sea Island, about sixty miles away. We took the little silver 350Z Nissan convertible that Michael had given me for a wedding present, and we left the top down all the way to Sea Island. We checked into a room and literally collapsed on the bed; we were both so exhausted. We were only going to spend two days there because I had to get back to Savannah. On the second day, the weather’s wonderful, we’re riding around with our top down, we’re looking at all the pretty houses, when Michael looks over at me and says, “Hey, Paula, did you ever call Paramount Pictures back?”