A porphyrin-phospholipid conjugate with quenched fluorescence was utilized to serve as both the Raman dye and a stabilizing, biocompatible surface coating agent on gold nanoparticles. Through simple synthesis and validation with spectroscopy and confocal microscopy, we show that this porphyrin-lipid stabilized AuNP is a novel SERS probe capable of cellular imaging. To date, this is the first use of porphyrin as a Raman reporter molecule for SERS based imaging.