There’s a tragic aspect to the end of every life. One hopes that the brighter qualities so outshine the darkness the the person’s life is celebrated gladly. Ted Brennan, who died on Wednesday, August 3, 2016 at the age of sixty-eight, had that balancing act pretty well accomplished.
Ted and his two brothers owned Brennan’s on Royal Street, one of the most successful, original, and loved establishments in the world history of the restaurant business. But three years before his passing he had to watch his restaurant pulled out from under him. It was a professional and personal disaster, one from which there didn’t seem to be any escape.
But Brennan’s was so much a part of Ted’s life that, even as his health gave out (Parkinson’s), he had plans in the works to open a new French Quarter restaurant with his son Teddy. It was such a reach that, frankly, I never thought I would see Ted Brennan’s On Decatur actually open. It hasn’t, yet, but all the pieces seem to be coming together for a fall opening. The plan includes Chef Lazone Randolph, the brilliant man who orchestrated the kitchen at Brennan’s for decades. I am ready to be very pleasantly surprised.
Ted was in his twenties, the youngest of Owen Brennan’s boys, when the three of them took full control of Brennan’s from their aunts and uncles in 1973. With their mother they already owned the place, having inherited it after father Owen died young in 1955. It was Owen and his siblings that had built Brennan’s into the fantastically popular and profitable restaurant it had become. (These aunts and uncles moved to Commander’s Palace, where they had to start all over again, and did–brilliantly.)
By 1973, Ted and his two brothers were already heavily involved in Brennan’s operation, and they were ready to run the establishment their way, without having to check in with Aunts Ella and Adelaide or Uncles Dick and John in every decision. The two sides of the family would never reconcile their differences.
The dining room that Ted Brennan oversaw.
That was okay with Ted, Pip and Jimmy. Pip eased into the nuts and bolts of general management. Jimmy became the man with the key to the wine cellar, which would become one of the best in America. Ted, with his good looks and sense of humor and hospitality, became the man standing at the entrance, making sure the VIPs and regulars were well cared for. I heard it said more than a few times that Ted most resembled his father Owen, who was one of the most convivial and best-liked hosts in New Orleans. Indeed, in almost all my meals and interviews at Brennan’s, Ted was the man I spoke with. Only once did I have dinner with the three of them at one table.
Two anecdotes about Ted and his personality: He showed up for a radio visit with me one afternoon. He walked into the studio with his finger on his lips. He pulled his hand away and shook it negatively. He pointed to his throat, then shrugged his shoulders. “What’s up?” I asked, puzzled. He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote on it, “I can’t talk. Laryngitis!” He can’t talk in an interview on the radio? Then he started laughing at me for falling for that.
Second anecdote: I was having dinner at Brennan’s one night, enjoying a half-dozen oysters casino. The dish is almost too simple: oysters baked on the shells with cocktail sauce and a slice of crisp bacon. Ted came up behind me and said, “Just like a stupid Irishman!” he said. “Eating oysters with hot ketchup and bacon. Hah!”
I looked up. “So why do you have it on your menu if it’s so awful?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I like them too!” He didn’t have to tell me that he also was strongly Irish.
During their heyday from 1973 until just into the 2000s, the Brennan brothers had a simple business model. They knew it was a gold-laying goose, and they took very good care of that bird. They rarely made major changes in the menu. They were very generous with their friends and regulars. One staffer was responsible for contacting any friend of the Brennans who was having a birthday, and inviting the celebrant in for dinner.
For about ten years in the 1990s, they sent me a can of beluga caviar for Christmas every year. It would be clearly unethical for me to accept such a gift, but they wouldn’t take it when I tried to give it back. This led to my beginning a charitable dinner I would chef on Twelfth Night every year. The first of the ten courses was always beluga caviar atop savory waffles, courtesy of Brennan’s.
When we began the Eat Club dinner series in the 1990s, our first Christmas Eat Club dinner was at Brennan’s. To say that the wines and food they served us were far more valuable than what the Eat Clubbers had to pay is a gross understatement.
And then, in 2011, I was told that Brennan’s couldn’t do the Eat Club Reveillon dinner that year. Same thing next year, and forever after that. I would not have guessed that this was because Brennan’s was having financial problems. But that was the deal, all right.
And then Jimmy Brennan died. This clicked in one of several unusual agreements among the brothers as to what would happen if one of them died, retired, or otherwise left the scene. I have heard a few versions of how this worked, but most of them say that ownership in Brennan’s could not devolve to anyone other than one of the three brothers. The next development: Ted and Pip were taking legal action against one other. And then, they were all cast out, as new owners of Brennan’s cleared the deck, paying by far the highest price in the history of the New Orleans restaurant business.
And Ted was on the street. But he swore that he’d be back, with Teddy and Lazone, to re-establish his idea of what Brennan’s is supposed to me.
It gives me a sour feeling to review those desperate days for the Brennan brothers. Only Pip Brennan remains of the trio. Pip’s sons are in the restaurant business, but not here in town. I dearly hope that Teddy gets his father’s restaurant open this fall. I would give me something to smile about when I think of what happened to my friend Ted Brennan. Quel dommage!
Monday, August 1, 2016.
All Day In The Big, Hot, Wet City.
Another month goes by with the same options: it’s either blistering hot outside, or a thunderstorm is dumping torrents of rain and disturbing the dogs with its thunderclaps. I drive through a bit of the latter as I head over to the radio station very early. I still have no internet at home, and my subscribers are all over me with emails asking whether I am still alive. (I’m not kidding.)
Trying to build out a website on a computer different from the one I usually use has all kinds of problems. No matter how hard I try, I always forget to bring four or five critical files. That blows half the morning, but I do get an imperfect NOMenu Daily out by showtime.
I also have a little time for lunch, a meal I almost never eat on the South Shore. I check a few shops in the immediate vicinity of the station (which is across the street from Mother’s), and wind up at Commerce, on the corner of Camp and Gravier. I have been eating poor boy sandwiches here almost as long as the place has been in business, since 1965. In the late 1960s and again in the mid-1970s, I worked in offices less than a block away, so I know where Commerce is coming from. My feeling about it is that it’s a somewhat updated version of Mother’s, and not nearly as busy. The clientele is about the same: people who work in the big buildings that haven’t yet been turned into hotels. And, come to think of it, a few hotel guests, too.
The only major change is a new sign out front–very slick, compared with the old one which, if I remember right, touted Royal Crown Cola.
Otherwise, the tile-floored room is split between a bar and a cafeteria line, with tables filling the open space along the windows. The lady on the other side of the steam table is a classic New Orleans cook. “What you gonna have, Baby?” she says to me. “We got nice red beans, and gumbo. And roast beef and ham and salads.”
She swishes her spoon across the pan of red beans. They look good. “You want smoke sausage or hot sausage, Baby?” Hot sausage, please. It looks like the kind of chaurice that Vaucresson makes. I get a lettuce and tomato salad, and a couple of pieces of buttered French bread.
Red beans and chaurice at The Commerce, Camp and Gravier.
The beans and the sausage are as good as they look. I surprise myself by eating all of both. A flavor in the sausage stays with me for days.
Seems like the place has a lot of regulars. Glad to see the old joint still keeping the faith.
I go back to to the station with time for a twenty-minute nap, right there on the floor of my private office. If anyone asks me why I’m in there with the lights off and the doors locked, I tell them it’s my meditation routine before the show every day. Everyone accepts this.
Commerce Restaurant. CBD: 300 Camp. 504- 561-9239.
Pecan Pralines
The trend toward making pralines in flavors like chocolate and pina-colada is interesting, but my favorite flavor of pralines is praline-flavored. When pecans are falling from the trees, it’s fun to make a million of them and keep them for the holiday season.
You will be melting sugar here. If that stuff splatters on your skin, it will burn all the way to the bone (or seem to). It is essential to use a candy thermometer to make pralines, because it’s critically important that the temperature of the mixture reach 238 degrees–and not go much beyond that mark. Also, although you will probably use a cookie sheet to cool the pralines, the best thing of all is a marble slab.
1 cup sugar
1 cup (packed) light brown sugar
3 Tbs. butter
2/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
1 1/2 Tbs. vanilla (my favorite: Ronald Reginald’s Melipone vanilla, available from the Sno-Wizard outfit.)
1 to 1 1/2 cup pecan pieces, to taste
1. Combine everything except the vanilla and pecans in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Stir with a wooden spoon as you cook, being very careful not to splash. Scrape down the sides of the pan any sugar granules that may get up there.
2. When the mixture turns translucent, add the pecans and the vanilla. Continue to cook and stir. The mixture will begin to brown slowly. The whole trick to making good pralines–and it is tricky–is to get them off the heat at the right point. The reading you should see on the candy thermometer should be the “soft ball” temperature, about 238 degrees. It will take about 15 to 20 minutes.
3. With a large spoon, drop some of the praline mixture onto a cookie sheet, parchment paper, or a marble slab, making discs about two inches across. Allow to cool. Remove with a very thin spatula and wrap tightly.
Makes 16-20 pralines
Pecan Pralines @ Rib Room
Pralines per se are best made by praline shops like Aunt Sally’s and Laura’s. But quite a few restaurants make them for one reason or another. A table near the maitre d’s stand at the Rib Room always has a plate of pecan pralines, to which you may help yourself. Free! The plate of pralines depletes rapidly on Fridays at lunch, a big day for the Rib Room and its regular customers, going back decades.
Rib Room. French Quarter: 621 St Louis St. 504-529-7045.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
August 5, 2016
Days Until. . .
Satchmo Summer Fest Begins Today
Coolinary Summer Specials End 26 Three-course dinners $39 (or less). All the menus can be found here.
Food Calendar
Today allegedly is National Mustard Day. I’m all for mustard. I don’t think we use it nearly enough. Here in New Orleans, we’re lucky enough to have a home-grown, unique variety of mustard that gives many of our dishes a distinctive flavor. One of the most ubiquitous sauces in Creole cookery–remoulade, in all its different colors and recipes–includes a good bit of Creole mustard.
Mustard is made from the seeds of a member of the cabbage family native to Europe. The seeds contain oil, so when they’re crushed they become a paste. When water is added, a sulfuric compound in the seeds reacts to give the sharply flavored mustard bite. It fades away unless something acidic (vinegar, usually) is added.
Mustard has been used to flavor food in Europe since ancient times. Mustard seeds come in many colors, but yellow is not one of them. The yellow color in prepared mustards and Colman’s dried mustard powder comes from the addition of turmeric. The plant that grows mustard seeds is also eaten as greens. But that’s another flavor, another matter, for another day.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Mustard, Pennsylvania is a small exurban development of houses in the wooded hills twenty-one miles southeast of Pittsburgh, not far from the YoughioghenyRiver. The nearest place to look for a hot dog to put the mustard on a potential hot dog is the Eagle’s Landing restaurant, two and a half miles away.
Edible Dictionary
mostarda, n.–As the Italian name suggests, this thick sauce contains mustard–but not enough of it to make mustard the dominant flavor. The most important part of the many kinds of mostarda is fruit, sugar, and herbs, and pepper. Its most celebrated use is as a garnish for the Northern Italian dish bollito misto, the Italian answer to the New England boiled beef. The New Orleans equivalent of mostarda is that mixture of horseradish and ketchup that old-time restaurants serve with boiled brisket (like Tujague’s and the Bon Ton make.
Deft Dining Rule #261
If the mustard a restaurant brings to the table is coarse-ground brown stuff in a little dish (as opposed to yellow stuff in a plastic squeeze bottle), you’re in the right place to eat sausage.
World Food Records
On this date in 1990, a one-hundred-layer cake was baked and assembled. It measured 1214 inches high. It was the showpiece at the Shiawassee County Fair in Corunna, Michigan. They must have a lot of time on their hands around there. A rumor that the purchase of all the candles needed to top it caused the price of birthday candles to spiral uncontrollably has not been confirmed. Near as I can tell, this still holds the record for the world’s highest cake.
Eating Around The World
This is Independence Day in Burkina Faso, a former French colony previously called Upper Volta. It’s a landlocked nation just south of the Sahara desert. The French influence on the food there is evident, but for the most part the diet of the average Burkinabe is grain-based: rice, wheat, and millet. They eat gumbo, their version being a stew made from okra. An unusual staple food is néré seeds, eaten at most meals, usually fermented and rolled into dark-brown, nutty-tasting balls.
Food Namesakes
Theodore Sturgeon, the author of a number of science fiction books, died on this date in 1985. . . The rural philosopher and poet Wendell Berry was born today in 1935. He writes about how wonderful it is to live in the country, a sentiment with which I concur.
Words To Eat By
“You are what you eat, and who wants to be a lettuce?”–Peter Burns, British musician and cut-up, born today in 1959. He was talking about vegetarians.
“Mustard’s no good without roast beef.”–Chico Marx.
Words To Drink By
“The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.”– Mignon McLaughlin, American writer.
Existential Zip Diner
You must know the essence of nothingness. Or something like that.
Click here for the cartoon.