Inside Crazy Sista's Kitchen

For Lucy Buffett, whose mind tends to race, riding horses is a favorite way to relax. credit: Stephen Savage

If you covered your ears while Lucy Buffett spoke of her life by the coast, from the softness in her eyes you might think she was telling you about a favorite grandmother. You would not be far off, for as much as anything or anyone in her life, it is the sea that has nourished her, whispered mysteries, convinced her of her favorite truths, and whose old and familiar odors have been the essence of home. It seems fitting that she almost always dresses in the colors of the sea, and it is no wonder that she has moved more times than she can count but has never made her bed far from the water.

More specifically, it is the water that eases down the Alabama River toward Mobile Bay, that idles in the backwaters and swamps and is sucked out finally into the Gulf of Mexico — it is that water and its shores that have so uniquely shaped her.

“It feeds you,” she says almost in a scream, then adds as an afterthought, “literally, too.”

Recently Lucy has gained something akin to fame on the Gulf Coast. Her restaurant, LuLu’s, has swelled in popularity so quickly that four hundred tables now look a little slim. But like a folk artist next to a schooled master, Lucy is formally untrained and therefore far more approachable than your typical celebrity chef. All around the bay area people are quick to tell you how they know her. “Yeah, Lucy,” they say, “you’re gonna like her. She’s one of the real ones.”

It is natural to look at successful people and assume that they carefully followed a charted course to a station at the top; that they are the calculating ones, the do-gooders, the kind of people who use their vacation time to run marathons. But picture Lucy as an eighteen-year-old mother of two; as a thirty-five-year-old mother of eighteen-year-olds, working for fifty dollars a day in Los Angeles. Picture her quitting New York’s French Culinary Institute before the first class began and boarding a boat back South. Picture her this way — a woman who sometimes doubts her instincts but follows them anyway — and you might begin to see yourself. And in her company the only intimidation you might feel is the need to be exactly that self, and this is more like a license than a demand. Why should you pretend you know what you’re doing with your life when she can’t remember where she kicked off her sandals? Why search for the perfect phrase when a four-letter job will get the point across just fine?

The most beloved cooks are probably the ones who learned not so much because of their palates, but because they saw food as the best way to get people to gather around. And hardly anyone on the Gulf Coast has figured out how to do it on such a scale as Lucy Buffett, the sister of iconic beach and folk singer Jimmy. It’s hard to believe that ten years ago she was in Los Angeles working an assortment of unglamorous film industry jobs, quietly harboring dreams of writing a cookbook. She had begun to learn her way around a kitchen when she was a young married mother, freshly expelled from Catholic school for getting pregnant. She learned from a Junior League cookbook, making something called divine casserole — things that fed for cheap.

Over the years her tastes were never refined, only added to. She met a larger-than-life interior designer with a historic home on Mobile’s Jackson Square. The man, Bob Meriwether, collected people, and for all of his finery, his Blue Willow china, and his wine, perhaps the most important thing he passed on to Lucy was that champagne and paper plates could coexist on the same table. There were no rules; it was the company that mattered.

“We were all a little bit lost souls,” she remembers. “We wouldn’t just give a dinner party, we’d do a skit. We just howled and laughed.”

Years later she continued to live for the dinner party. Never quite comfortable in Hollywood, she entertained from her rented place out in Venice Beach, a more affordable area of town with a collection of characters not exactly suited for the silver screen. Lucy was happy. But when her mother got sick she figured it was time to come back to Alabama and do what good children do. If nothing else, she figured, she’d have the calm to finish
her cookbook.

Now, after ten thousand gallons of gumbo served, that cookbook, due out in December, is nearly a reality, and Lucy can laugh at the way dreams are sometimes deferred. When she has bothered to chart a course for her life, so often she has had to abandon it. But sometimes, she’ll tell you, you arrive anyway — by drifting.

Lucy started LuLu’s when she needed an income, ten years ago, in a quiet spot called Weeks Bay, not far from the restaurant’s current home in Gulf Shores. It was a seafood and burger shack, and the locals so thoroughly adopted it that it felt like it had been there for much longer than it had. The music lifted you as you docked, and just about the time you were getting your land legs back, it was time to dance. The restaurant’s motto, “Our job is to help you forget about yours for a while,” was obviously working.

But even when things were small-scale, the stress of it all nearly overwhelmed her. “I didn’t last long in a line kitchen,” she says. “I was sobbing on the floor. I thought I could just sit on the porch and work on my cookbook. It didn’t work out that way.”
Then, almost by default, her childhood nickname became the sort of brand that needs a long-term plan and a sizable staff. In 2001 the state refused to renew her lease of the bayside land. As we know, the restaurant business is deceiving — a full house doesn’t mean a rich owner — and Lucy was nervous. But with the help of a barge, LuLu’s was hauled down the Intracoastal Waterway to a spot where it couldn’t help but become a landmark for tourists.