Lucy Buffett of LuLu’s restaurant has published a book, but don’t call it a cookbook.
Lucy Buffett grew up in Mobile, Ala. When she was 10, she started cooking in her grandma’s kitchen in Pascagoula, Miss. Now she owns an insanely popular restaurant called LuLu’s in Gulf Shores, Ala., where there’s often a two-hour wait with a line out the door.
Her new cookbook is titled, “LuLu’s Kitchen: A Taste of the Gulf Coast Good Life.”
So I asked, “What exactly is Gulf Coast cuisine? What do you people eat over there?”
Buffett laughed. “It’s fried seafood and gumbo, baby! It’s Southern, but it’s Coastal Southern.” she said. “It’s all about fried shrimp and fried fish and fritters and oysters. It’s the food of my family and my culture.”
The menu at LuLu’s is bigger than a New York deli’s, more like a smalltown phone book. The restaurant serves 4,000 customers a day. Its bank of eight deep-fryers goes full blast from lunch to last call.
“LuLu’s Kitchen: A Taste of the Gulf Coast Good Life” isn’t exactly a health food cookbook.
“LuLu’s Kitchen” packs 120 recipes for guilt-ridden dishes like Mama’s Favorite Oyster Loaf, Sunday Brunch Crabmeat Omelet with Pepper Jack Grits, Margarita Glazed Cornish Hens, Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding with Vanilla Custard Sauce, and drinks such as LuLu’s Painkiller.
Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding? That’s not just a guilty pleasure, that’s a life sentence. The most popular dish at LuLu’s restaurant is the Big Fry Basket, spilling over with fried grouper or snapper, fried shrimp, fried oysters, crab claws, french fries and hush puppies.
“I know that sounds like a lot, and it is, but it feeds two people,” Buffett said. “Gulf Coast cooking is catching on. We have thousands of people come here from Houston. They save up their calories, then come here on vacation and eat our fried shrimp.”
Buffett only serves seafood from the Gulf of Mexico. No farm-raised shrimp from China here.
She’s Jimmy Buffett’s little sister. The “Margaritaville” legend gave her the nickname “LuLu” when they were kids. She spent years cooking in restaurants in New York and Los Angeles before moving back to sweet home Alabama and opening her first dive burger joint at age 46.
“I had never worked for myself before,” she said. “All I wanted was for this restaurant to support me so I could take care of my aging parents. I was a single mother for a lot of these years.”
For five years, she “did everything in that restaurant,” back in the kitchen and hostessing out front, barely getting by. Then she lost her property to a government project.
So she put the restaurant, all of it, including the palm trees out front, on a barge and sailed it along the Intracoastal Waterway to Homeport Marina in Gulf Shores, Ala. The new LuLu’s opened on Fat Tuesday in 2004.
Yeah, this restaurant did a little better. Long lines of locals and tourists. A gift shop. A playground for children. A menu that would take you longer to digest than the Big Fry Basket.
No surprise, LuLu’s sells a lot of Cheeseburgers in Paradise and frozen margaritas. Family, you know.
“I didn’t set out for the restaurant to be a big suc- cess. But I did choose not to limit the possibility of what it could become,” she said.
Buffett opened a second LuLu’s last year in Destin, Fla.
Brother Jimmy wrote the forward to “LuLu’s Kitchen: A Taste of the Gulf Coast Good Life.” The cookbook hits book stores and online booksellers Tuesday.
During our phone interview, I kept calling “LuLu’s Kitchen” a cookbook and Buffett kept telling me it’s not a cookbook. At least not a regular “how to” and “how much” recipe book.
“It has the 120 recipes, but I’m not a great teacher. I’m a storyteller,” Buffett said. “My dream was always to be a writer. I wrote the book because I wanted to talk about my childhood and characters of the Gulf Coast. I published it myself so I could cuss a little.”
Buffett wants to be upfront about something. This book originally was published in 2007 with the title “Crazy Sista Cooking: Cuisine and Conversation.” “I decided to write the book with the idea of selling maybe 5,000 copies in the restaurant. I made the decision after we sold 100,000 Tshirts in one year. What got me going was my daughter telling me, ‘Mom, just tell it like it is. You are dating your third ex-husband for the fourth time.’ We sold 70,000 books. When she decided to write a second cookbook (“Gumbo Love” will come out next year), her publisher asked to reprint the first book. The book is similar to her brother’s albums. It’s got funny stories and Southern charm, some proud sentimentality, with a wink of good-natured mischief. Two pages are devoted to how she didn’t like sandwiches as a child, but she’s learned to love a good burger every now and then. She’s right. It’s not a cookbook, or at least it’s more than a cookbook. I read “LuLu’s Kitchen” cover to cover, and I have no intention of ever preparing a single dish in the book. I got lost in Buffett’s stories, between recipes for Creola Blackened Grouper Green Mark’s Sandwich Tomatoes,Day After with Cousin Thanks-Fried giving Turkey Gumbo and Josie’s Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. It was the first cookbook I ever read in bed.