When a restaurant opens, it is designed to reflect the tastes of that moment. The menu, ambience, and service styles are all tailored to suit the customers’ expectations. A special few eateries not only get to serve guests for a few years but go on to thrive for generations. In New Orleans’ French Quarter, these are called the “grande dames.” The youngest of those storied restaurants, Brennan’s, turned 75 in 2021, and it still has a lot more to offer than its most famous dish, Bananas Foster.
Owen Edward Brennan launched the restaurant on Bourbon Street in 1946 but soon relocated it to its current space on Royal Street: a 1795 building, constructed by artist Edgar Degas’ great-grandfather. To suit the style of the times, Brennan’s was built to emphasize its tropical courtyard. Those first decades saw the development of what would become some of the restaurant’s most notable dishes and traditions, like Breakfast at Brennan’s and flaming tableside productions Filet Stanley and Bananas Foster.
In 2013, Owen’s nephew, Ralph, and business partner Terry White purchased Brennan’s and embarked on a multimillion dollar renovation and reinterpretation of the historic restaurant. As they modernized the space by enlarging the main dining room and shifting the kitchen to create a larger bar area (the Roost Bar), among many other changes, they kept a close eye toward respecting the past.
“One of the things we wanted to do was open the restaurant to the street,” says Ralph. “It goes back to my days many, many years ago at Mr. B’s Bistro, [where] they have those windows that wrap around the corner, and over the years, I always wondered why the kitchen [at Brennan’s] was in front and people couldn’t see into the restaurant [from the street]. At one point, I found this story where my uncle was quoted as saying he [had originally] wanted more seating around the courtyard.”
Since the reopening, many of those time-honored dishes remain on the menu, like Eggs Hussarde (with house-made English muffins, coffee-cured Canadian bacon, and both velvety Hollandaise and rich Marchand de Vin sauces) and Crepes Fitzgerald, one of the restaurant’s tableside preparations with light crêpes and a seasonal fruit filling. A few new notable dishes have emerged from past chef Slade Rushing and his successor, Ryan Hacker, including Shrimp Quenelles (a sophisticated and thoughtful combination of New Orleans barbecue shrimp and the city’s historic love of quenelles) and Mississippi Fried Rabbit, which is served with caramelized potatoes and onions, eggs over easy, and red-eye jus.
Ryan notes that one of the peculiar challenges for Brennan’s and the other grande dames is that they don’t just have to serve outstanding food in a lovely environment, but they also must contend with the memories of their faithful clientele, who will inevitably compare the flavor and experience of today’s tableside Steak Diane against the one they remember from 20 years ago.
“I think the importance of what we were doing didn’t set in until we opened the doors [in 2014],” says Ryan. “The second guest who walked in said something to the effect of ‘We’re here for our 50th anniversary, and we came here for our wedding,’ and that’s a unique challenge when you’re trying to set not only the expectation of a new restaurant, but having the expectation of people who have been coming for generations and generations. It is a fine line that I find incredibly interesting to walk.”
- ½ pound fresh extra colossal shrimp, peeled and deveined
- ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
- ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 4 cold extra-large egg whites
- 1 cup heavy whipping cream
- Garlic Purée (recipe follows) (optional)
- Barbecue Sauce (recipe follows)
- Warm French bread, to serve
- 4 cooked extra colossal shrimp, to serve
- Cut shrimp into chunks; place chunks in the work bowl of a food processor, and process for about 30 seconds. Add salt and nutmeg, and process until mixture is smooth, 1 to 1½ minutes. (Be careful not to overprocess.) Add half of egg whites, and process until mixture is smooth, about 1 minute, stopping to scrape sides of bowl. (Be careful not to overprocess or mixture will become warm.) Repeat with remaining egg whites. Add cream, and process for 1 minute. (Mixture should be very smooth.) Cover and refrigerate overnight.
- Bring a large stockpot of salted water almost to a boil over medium-low heat.
- Using a spoon, mold shrimp mixture into quenelles (egg-shaped dumplings), and lower them into boiling water. Poach until slightly firm to the touch, 2½ to 3 minutes. Turn, and repeat. Using a slotted spoon, remove quenelles, and let drain on a cloth napkin. (At this point, quenelles may be wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated overnight.)
- Divide Garlic Purée (if using) among 4 warm pasta bowls. Divide Barbecue Sauce and quenelles among bowls. Serve immediately with warm French bread for sopping up sauce.
- 4 ounces garlic cloves (about 3 small heads garlic)
- 2 cups whole milk, plus more if needed
- In a small saucepan, bring garlic and water to cover to a boil over medium heat. Drain water and refill pan with cold water. Repeat procedure twice.
- Add milk to garlic, and cook over medium heat until garlic is cooked through and completely soft, about 20 minutes. Strain garlic through a fine-mesh sieve. Transfer to the container of a blender, and purée until smooth. Add milk, 1 tablespoon at a time, if mixture is too thick.
- 4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- 3 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper
- 4 teaspoons Creole seasoning
- 1 to 3 tablespoons beer* (water can be substituted), divided
- 2 teaspoons fresh garlic, minced
- ½ lemon, seeded
- 12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter (preferably European-style), cut into ½-inch cubes
- In a heavy-bottomed 10-inch stainless steel saucepan, heat Worcestershire sauce, pepper, Creole seasoning, 1 tablespoon beer or water, and garlic over medium heat. Squeeze juice from lemon half into pan; add squeezed lemon half. Reduce heat to medium-low, and add cold butter, a few cubes at a time, swirling pan until butter is melted after each addition. Simmer until light brown and creamy. Add up to remaining 2 tablespoons beer or water if a thinner sauce is desired.
