Chef rises from bag-lunch sales to TV cook

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- 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.

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.

The Deens did well enough by 1990 to open a small restaurant in a Best Western hotel, then moved by 1995.