Breakfast at Brennan's
Physicians' Travel & Meeting Guide
by Lucius Beebe
When the late Owen Edward Brennan-founder of the fortunes of the House of Brennan, in the Rue Royale, in New Orleans - first undertook to promote and popularize breakfast in a public restaurant, his Friends of whom there were many, shook their heads and confidently looked forward either to Brennan's bankruptcy or to a profound and immediate change of gastronomic heart. This was considered a mild view when his friends found that the menu would include a prescribed gin fizz, a claret, a champagne, fruit in brandy, and a dessert flamed in kirsch and strawberry liqueur in addition to such robust matters as broiled pompano, hot French bread, lamb chops with béarnaise sauce, exotically shirred eggs and Café Diable.
Even in New Orleans, a town where time means nothing and a great tradition of leisurely gastronomy obtains, this sort of thing was flying in the face of battle Creek - where processed butcher's paper is widely packaged as breakfast food - not to mention the defying of an entire generation of Americans who have been conditioned, by means of one of the greatest national swindles of all time, to a breakfast of orange juice and Melba toast.
Brennan was goaded into prandial rashness when a lady novelist of some local fame had celebrated a rival restaurant in a novel called Dinner at Antoine's. friends, growing with Owen at this invidious partiality, came up with the alliterative of "Breakfast at Brennan's." The founding Brennan promptly ran up a collation that would have assured him of the patronage of Henry VII and began advertising it as "an old New Orleans tradition dating from the great days of the Creoles," although the ink wasn't dry on the menus.
Brennan said that if nobody would eat his breakfasts he damn well would himself and promptly had his portrait painted opening a bottle of the best champagne. The portrait was prophetic, and it hangs today in a place of honor in a new and enlarged Brennan's much of whose fame, fortune, and felicitous repute derived from Owen's stewpot vision of what the morning of a civilized man should be devoted to. Under its benevolent regard, champagne corks mutter decorously of a Sunday morning and on weekdays, too, in an overture to a recurrent symphony of shrimp remoulade and Café brulot that is making Owen's heirs and assigns rich...