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If you recall, I just got back from Savannah, Georgia where I visited cemeteries, ate pralines and dined at Paula Deen’s restaurant, The Lady and Sons. Here’s the run-down.
For the uninitiated, Paula Deen is a Food Network celebrity chef who is famous for her southern fare — wrapping things in bacon, using butter and olive oil in the same dish, making desserts so rich that if you dropped them they’d make a dent in the floor. She’s kind of a caricature of herself sometimes, dropping “y’alls” like it’s the end of the world and playing up that hostess thing that people from the south like to do.
She’s also got two southern fried sons, as the restaurant’s name would imply, who also have their own Food Network show where they drive around the country and eat things. They’re likable and all, but they’re always going to be “Paula Deen’s sons.”
Little did I know, but Paula Deen rules the city of Savannah with an iron fist. Lady and Sons is probably the biggest national draw for the city, aside from Bonaventure Cemetery and other things having to do with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
If you want to eat at The Lady and Sons for dinner, they begin taking dinner reservations at 3:30. As we learned our first day, this does not mean you can show up at 3:30 and get your reservation. We did just that and this was the scene we were met with:
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As I walked back to take this picture, a homeless man passed me. “The line’s short today,” he said. And then he started to laugh.
After an hour of waiting in line, with word spreading that the dinner reservation slots were heading into the 9 p.m. territory, the people in front of us (a woman and her teenage son) were the first people to be told that they were all booked. I was not pleased.
On our next attempt we showed up at 2:00 on the dot and there was already a small line. My mom and I switched off in line — one person waited, the other shopped/photographed/what have you. There was a small community in the line, as it was full of mostly ladies in capri pants and their Big Dog golf shirt-wearing husbands. It was a nice, southern-skewing crowd of people who made nice chit chat while enduring the 90 degree Georgia heat. Everyone was coming from the same background, in that people tossed around words like “Chefography” without batting an eyelash. One woman, reflecting on the drastic measures it takes to get a table, said “I’d do this for Paula Deen. I wouldn’t do this for Rachael Ray.” But after a long wait, the work paid off and we secured our reservations.
And on to the food…
Before you’ve even thought about what you’re going to get, they give you a hoe cake and a biscuit. A hoe cake is basically just a pancake. Seriously — there’s syrup on the table. And then the biscuit was actually a garlic and cheese biscuit and, let me tell you, on a scale of Dennis Hastert to Jake Gyllenhaal, this was a Paul Rudd. I had two. Cheesy, garlicy, so soft and warm — it’s the stuff that fat, southern dreams are made of.
In honor of Passover, we started off with the shrimp and crab dip with oh-so-leavened squares of toast. I’m no foodie — that’s for damn sure — but it tasted good. I don’t really know what else to say about it other than that.
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For our entrees, my mom had the fried lobster and I had the chicken pot pie (right). I knew going into it that the chicken pot pie, by its very nature, would defeat me. I was able to get all the meat out before that nagging voice, taunting “you’re going to make yourself sick,” started to wear on me.
And then there was the pecan pie. I mean, Jesus Christ. That’s some good shit right there. After taking her first forkful, my mom rolled her eyes at me, as if to say “What am I doing with my life that I’m not eating this pecan pie the other 364 days of the year?”
After dessert I felt disgusting, but it was a good, satisfied sort of disgusting.