The news spread quickly on Friday, fueled-as it usually is these days-by a post to social media. Savannah’s one time culinary crown jewel, The Lady and Sons, was closed..yes for good. There was no warning. There was no ‘last call’ announcement. There was neither pomp nor circumstance. If you ate there on Thursday, July 31st, then you can claim you were among the last people to do so before they turned off the lights.

I saw the news Friday morning, very literally, as I was checking out of a hotel in Petersburg, Virginia about to climb into a moving van en route to Savannah. I wasn’t in a position to react or call anyone about the news, which turned out to be not such a bad thing in the aftermath.

I mean, are any of us here in Savannah surprised? No, we are not. And if you were, you just weren’t paying attention. There was a time when The Lady and Sons dominated the culinary landscape in this town. Capital “D”. I don’t think anyone will deny that. Hell, the premise for this very website was built upon the question every local was asked when encountering a random tourist on the street.

“We are going to Paula’s one night. Where else should we go eat?”

Yes, at one time The Lady and Sons was that good. Good enough to earn Paula and her team USA Today’s Meal of the Year in 1999. Yes, it was that good.

I smile sometimes when I remember talking to a friend in Orlando the day before I moved here to Savannah in 1999.

“Oh man!” He said “I went to this restaurant in Savannah last year when we were playing Savannah State and that food was so good, I cried.”

Yeah, back then? It was all that. It stayed that way for a very long time, too. The lines and very long waits for a seat followed Paula and the boys from the Congress Street location near Garibaldi’s that made her famous to the 3 story behemoth at the corner of Whitaker and Congress. The former location was a wonderful little spot near City Market where it wasn’t at all uncommon to see Paula, Bobby and Jamie running the show in a very busy restaurant. The food, as we said, was outstanding.

For many years, Savannah’s two biggest draws were “The Book” Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994 and movie 1997) and The Lady and Sons.

In fact, the only time I have ever asked the family for special favor was the day after our going away party in Spring of 2004. I walked in there nursing a violent hangover and begged Jamie to allow us to skip the line because I was about to move to Nashville. Yeah, I got the hook up.

My “exhibit B” is the fact that my mom (who lived in Miami in the early 2000s) planned her visits to see her granddaughter here around being able to visit The Lady and Sons. She didn’t fly, so she took a Greyhound bus, always looking for that midnight departure. Why? Because that midnight bus arrived in Savannah between 11:30am and 12:30pm. Our first stop from the bus station on Oglethorpe was The Lady and Sons. Every single time. She’d eat her weight in collards and chicken and then pass out in my apartment until the next day. It was only then that her visit with her grand baby would begin.

I can’t tell you how many times we did that. So much so, that after mom passed in 2017, The Lady and Sons was a yearly appointment for us. Me, my sister and my daughter… on September 3rd….mom’s birthday. We did so until the 2020 shut down, which is when it all changed in our book.

Our two visits post-pandemic shutdown were underwhelming by comparison. The seemingly world famous buffet was removed and never replaced. The sheer quality of the food was never the same. So it stands to reason that we weren’t the only ones to notice.

The guess from my seat? The quality of food at The Lady and Sons became more about the private equity ‘bean counters’ that invested up to $100 million a decade or so ago than it has to do with Paula’s skills slipping. That, plus the dining options around downtown Savannah-as we know- are seemingly endless today. It takes a monumental effort and something very special to put 3 stories worth of butts in seats on a regular basis. When was the last time you ate there?

I’m not sure any restaurant could survive that scenario. Certainly not on fried chicken and sweet tea. It’s why you see other Paula Deen restaurants around the country. This one was massive and I’m sure very expensive to operate.

I do have to say that if you believe everything you read, employees found out at the same time we all did, with no warning or severance. That’s unfortunate, but not the first time a restaurant closes without warning, Deen-related or otherwise. Still, if it is true, then tenured employees deserved better.

But hey, guess what? Despite a lot of the sentiment on social this weekend, this isn’t an obituary. And it most certainly isn’t another tired referendum on what The Deens have or haven’t done for this city. Whether anyone wants to believe it or not, it has been quite a bit, but that’s a story for another day.

I do believe it was a sad day at Casa Deen when the decision was made to close the doors. 36 years is nearly half of Paula’s life. It is certainly more than half of Bobby and Jamie’s.

Paula may have only been popping in for book signings at the end, but it was not at all uncommon for me to see Jamie pulling boxes out to the trash with an apron on fairly regularly. All the way up until-if I recall-a few months ago. Every time, I’d ask myself ‘brother, do you not play golf?”

But if you had told them 40 years ago while they were delivering bag lunches door to door during those nasty Savannah summers, that the hard work would pay off and their families would be set up for a couple of generations? They’d have signed up for that on the spot. And so would have any small business owner out there.

Four decades-by any account-is a monster run. Congratulations are in order, and they’ve got mine.

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