Paula Deen Closes Savannah Restaurant Landmark After 36 Years
Paula Deen announced Friday the sudden closure of her Savannah restaurant The Lady & Sons and its adjacent takeout spot The Chicken Box.
Maya Rivers drifts in with a wistful sigh and a well worn pen. Within the Spanish moss and sunlit porches, a chorus of biscuits and gravy once sang its Southern lullaby as I attempt to honor a place that stirred more than just pots of gumbo.
The Lady & Sons launched in nineteen ninety six when a determined Deen, newly arrived in Savannah and nearly broke after a divorce, turned her catering gig called The Bag Lady into a full service eatery. Over the next thirty six years, locals and tourists alike flocked to her buffet tables, forming lines that curled around the block for her famed fried chicken, silky banana pudding, and gravy ladled over everything in sight.
The sudden announcement came via a statement on Deen’s website and social media accounts, noting that Thursday, July 31st was the final day of service. No reason was offered for the closures, but Deen expressed “endless love and gratitude” for every customer who crossed the threshold of her downtown restaurant. Windows were papered over, and a bittersweet sign read that they have “retired and closed” with “heavy hearts and tremendous gratitude.”
Fans in Savannah were caught off guard. Adrienne Morton from Cincinnati had booked a dinner reservation for 5:45 p.m. only to receive a morning cancellation text. “I thought it was a mistake,” she said, “but they really shut the doors.” Martin Rowe, whose office sits across the street, recalled passing by three times a week at lunchtime to find the place packed with hungry diners.
The Lady & Sons’ rise coincided with Deen’s Food Network debut in two thousand two. Her show Paula’s Home Cooking showcased more than two hundred episodes filmed mostly in her kitchen, helping her buffet serve roughly eleven hundred guests each day at its peak. A USA Today critic even named one meal “Meal of the Year” in nineteen ninety nine, propelling Deen’s fame further.
Her television career hit a snag in two thousand thirteen when a lawsuit by a former employee led to the airing of a deposition transcript that included her candid admission of using a racial slur decades earlier. The network canceled her show, but Deen later resurfaced on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars, on Gordon Ramsay’s MasterChef Legends, and with her own Fox Nation series At Home With Paula Deen in twenty twenty. She now also shares cooking clips with more than five hundred twenty thousand YouTube subscribers.
Despite the closure of her Savannah flagship, four other Paula Deen restaurants will remain open in Nashville and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Branson, Missouri. The legacy of The Lady & Sons will live on in those kitchens and in the hearts of loyal patrons.
And so, the final plate is cleared, leaving only echoes of a Southern melody.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and New York Post, USA Today, Food Network
Attribution: Creative Commons Licensed
