Celebrity chefs Bobby and Jamie Deen return to Albany for Albany Museum dinner

ALBANY — Bobby Deen may be better known these days as a celebrity chef and show host for Food Network, but at the end of the day he and his family are restaurateurs.

“What we really do for a living is own and operate The Lady & Sons restaurant in Savannah,” he said in an interview Friday. “We have business partners up in Tennessee that we’ve opened a restaurant with.”

Still, the high-profile media careers of Deen, his brother, Jamie, and their mother, Paula, have have made the Deens household names. The Deen brothers were back in their hometown of Albany this weekend to serve as celebrity chefs Saturday in the fourth in this season’s series of five fundraising dinners for the Albany Museum of Art, “The Fine Art of Dining Culinary Series.”

The Deens, with help from Albany Technical College Chef Todd White and his crew, were headlining the dinner at the residence of Cathy and Alton Darby. Their popularity led to expanding the seating, which usually tops at 40.

“All of our dinners sell out,” AMA Executive Director Paula Williams said. “But this one more so.”

Museum officials are continuing fundraising and other community activities as the AMA recovers from the severe damage it sustained in the January storms, forcing the facility to move its collection to secure locations and shut down normal operations while extensive repairs are being made.

Deen said he was struck by the damage the storms did to Albany, where his father, Jimmy Deen, resides, as do other family members.

“I’ve got friends and family here,” Bobby Deen said. “Anytime you see tornadoes ripping through Southwest Georgia, it’s scary.”

Deen said none of his family and people he knows were physically harmed in the ferocious storms that got Albany twice declared a federal disaster area. He said his father’s house, remarkably, was undamaged. “Somehow, it missed his house,” Deen said. “He had other people’s trees in his yard.”

Deen said he came to Albany specifically for the AMA event.

“We’re here for the Museum of Art and it’s an honor and privilege to be asked to do something, to support and try to do good,” Deen said. “We’re just people from Albany, so it was an honor to be asked.”

“I take any opportunity” to come to Albany, he said, adding that, in addition to catching up with family, it was an chance to visit friends and to hang out with one in particular. “My great friend Jay Hatcher, who I met when I was 12, is still my closest friend,” he noted.

A lot has changed since the Deens began delivering lunches in Savannah nearly 30 years ago and opened The Lady & Sons there in the mid-1990s. Paula Deen has ventured into other areas, such as a furniture line, and recently returned to television with a syndicated food show.

Asked whether he’s treated differently because of the celebrity status, Deen said he sees behavior changes more often in people who are interacting with his mother. “I think the answer to that question is people’s perception of you change whenever they see you on television,” he said. “Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad.”

It does have its perks when getting good seats in a restaurant in New York, a city he says he loves, or a hotel room upgrade, he allowed. But at heart, he says, he’s in the restaurant business, which is still his family’s bread and butter.

“I’ve scrubbed many a pot and bused many a table,” Deen said. “I’ve already overachieved if I don’t get to do one more television show. I’m a guy who barely graduated high school in Albany, Georgia, and to have Food Network fly me out to LA and have me shoot a television show for a month … how many other people in Albany, besides my mom and my brother, can say that?

“I feel so lucky. I think what I’ve learned with television — because I’ve been in situations that weren’t great — if you’re having fun while you’re doing the show, it comes across. And if I, as the host, am having a good time, there’s a good chance that the viewer will have a good time.”

That comes across when Deen hosts shows like “Holiday Baking Championship” during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. But there was one show in particular he recalled struggling with.

“I had a terrible time,” he said, “on ‘Cutthroat Kitchen.’”

“Cutthroat Kitchen,” hosted by Alton Brown, who studied at the University of Georgia, is a competition show in which contestants are given $25,000 and can bid on sabotages. The winning bidder selects an opponent to receive the sabotage. The eventual winner gets to keep the money he or she didn’t spend.

“I thought that the first time I met him there’d be this bond with the Georgia thing, you know, ‘Go Dawgs.’ That did not break the ice at all,” Deen said. “He just looked right through me. Didn’t care at all about ‘Go Dawgs.’”

That may have been an omen. Brown, known for his knowledge of the science of food, also is known for his devious twists on the show. Deen got hit with two of them.

“They (other contestants) can gang up on you and I was the new guy and I walked in and they said, ‘You,’” he said. “They gave me this big, huge hamster wheel and an ice ax, and I had to cook on this hamster wheel without letting it stop and I had to do all my prep with an ice ax. It was dangerous, to be honest with you.”

But at least it was quick. Deen was the first eliminated.

“I left my hotel room in downtown Los Angeles, went to the studio, shot, was eliminated from the show, and they still hadn’t cleaned my room yet” when he got back to his hotel, he recalled, laughing. “That’s how fast I got eliminated. I was gone.”

TV food shows have gone heavily toward competition and entertainment after starting out as being more instructional, such as with “Paula’s Home Cooking” in the early days of Food Network.

“Back then, you could go there to learn something about cooking,” he said. “Early on with my mom’s thing, people would come up to us — every ethnicity, men, women, children; she ran the gamut of fans — and people would say, ‘It’s so soothing to watch your mama cook. I don’t even cook, but I watch her while I’m on the treadmill. I like her voice. It’s very soothing.’”

Now, he said, “Everything’s a competition. There’s got to be a big payoff for the viewer.”

But in the restaurant business, there’s also a big payoff, he said — seeing satisfaction on a diner’s face.

“There’s this instant gratification you get when you serve somebody something and you see the look on their face,” he said.

It was one of the things that made worthwhile the hard work of getting established in Savannah. Work days started early and ended late.

“Looking back on it now, as hard as we worked and as long as the hours were — the restaurant business is a grind, it will chew you up and spit you out; it’s a 24/7 business, especially if you own it,” he said. “As hard as it was, I’d do it again because those were the days, when I look back on it now, that I really will always remember, really building something that meant something and was important to people. … I look back on those times before the Food Network and everything … special, special times.”

Meanwhile, the Deens also are looking ahead. Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen in Tennessee has taken off, he said.

Savannah, he said, gets about 14 million visitors a year. “The restaurant in Gatlinburg rivals what we do that our restaurant in Savannah,” he said. “That’s incredible to me. I never expected that.”

The Deens are about to open another restaurant in Myrtle Beach with the same business partners with whom they opened the one in Gatlinburg, he said. They’re about to open a second location in Savannah “that we’re really excited about, called Paula Deen’s Creek House,” he said.

The family also has Nashville, Orlando, and Branson, Mo., in its sights.

Asked whether Albany might ever be considered, Deen noted that he is asked that question frequently. “Who knows, it’d be nice to have a place in Albany,” he said. “That would be fun.”

A part of the Deen family’s success, however, has been bringing their Southern-style home cooking to places where it’s less common. “A lot of people cook just like my mom, just like our family,” he said. “This is just regular old food to everybody in this room. When you’re in a town like Savannah where you have all these people coming to visit from different parts — they’re from all over the world, coming from everywhere — they want to get the real thing.”

Deen said another big factor in the family’s success has been timing.

“Savannah’s gone through its ebbs and flows,” he said. “We got into downtown Savannah when it was just on the upswing. Not a lot of people were moving downtown. We made the newspaper in Savannah because we decided to move our business from the southside, a small location, to downtown.

“As luck would have it, a fellow named John Berendt was to write a book called ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ and you talk about timing. … It just exploded right before our very eyes.”

The Deens also were a feel-good story in Savannah, where residents recommended their restaurant to tourists who came after the novel and film were released.

“People knew us,” he said. “The locals there supported us. They knew the story about my mom, who was raising two sons and recently divorced and that she battled agoraphobia. It was against kind of all odds to start this business with little to no money, little to no real restaurant experience and people just got behind that. The locals would stand in line to get into our place.”

Asked if he had any other passions he might pursue, Deen said, “None that are going to pay me anything. I play the guitar. I practice jujitsu. I lift weights and I run.”

But he did say he had an idea for hanging out with his pal Hatcher, one he might have to talk Hatcher into (it also might inspire Brown if Deen ever were to have another go at “Cutthroat Kitchen”).

“I want to go hang glide,” he said, “where you literally jump off the side of the mountain.”

The final installment of this second series of AMA dinners is set for May 20 at the residence of Hope and Bruce Campbell. Holly Chute, executive chef for the Georgia Department of Agriculture and Economic Development, will be the celebrity chef. Tickets are $200 for AMA members, $250 for non-members. Contact (229) 439-8400 or visit www.albanymuseum.com.