Breakfast at Brennan's with a Brennan
Associated Press
by Mary MacVean
NEW ORLEANS - The oversize, laminated menu at Brennan's lists 15 "eye-openers." There's brandy milk punch, Mr. Funk of New Orleans, absinthe frappe, or the Sazerac, made with bourbon and "a little mystery."
But Ted Brennan will not be lured by these or any other mysteries on this sunny spring morning. The waiter brings a Diet Coke to his table overlooking a courtyard.
In classic dieter's fashion, Brennan follows that with Eggs Bayou Lafourche - poached eggs on andouille Cajun sausage and Holland rusks with hollandaise sauce - and then a slice of dark chocolate "suicide" cake. Dessert, he says, is his favorite part of the meal.
It's breakfasts like these that lead Ted Brennan to note that he could stand to lose about 20 pounds and soon will return to one of two diets he says work - a low-carbohydrate regimen or a commercial program that requires prepared food he found pretty awful.
And it's breakfasts like these - big, groaning, rich breakfasts with Creole, Cajun and French accents - that have made the restaurant his father opened in 1945 famous.
It's just 10 a.m. on a Saturday, but many of the 550 seats at the sprawling old French Quarter mansion that houses Brennan's are taken. You can eat lunch or dinner here, but it's breakfast that tourists know and locals who can spare three hours for a morning meal love.
Breakfast at Brennan's takes its cues from a pre-Civil War tradition in the nearby French Market, Brennan says. After an early start to the workday, the merchants would break around 10 or 11 o'clock for a three-or four-course breakfast that would include egg dishes, meats, dessert and wines.
In the 1950s, his dad opened one room for similar morning meals. "It took about 10 years to really catch on," he says. Now, locals come on the weekends, but weekdays are mostly tourists.
"It would be hard to go back to work after a three-hour breakfast with eye-openers and wine," he says.
It might be hard to go to work the next day, in fact. The menu suggests a traditional Brennan breakfast ($50): oyster soup Brennan, eggs Benedict, sirloin with fresh mushrooms and hot French bread, bananas Foster (a flaming dessert made tableside), coffee. Suggested accompaniments: a $35 bottle of champagne and a $4.75 cocktail called absinthe suissesse, "guaranteed to put you in the mood for this carefree old city."
"One thing about this place, you don't leave here hungry," said Brennan, as he leans back in his chair, well aware of the understatement.
So much for the old coffee cart and factory made danish.
Despite his protestations, Brennan, wearing a conservative navy blue suit and tortoise shell framed glasses, looks fairly trim for someone who owns a place that checks your cholesterol counter at the door.
"When people come here, diets be damned," he says. "We never got into the low-fat, health conscious mores of the '70s and '80s."
A modest assessment. The grits, for example, taste so sensual because, he says, instead of adding butter before serving, they're cooked with lots and lots of it. Even the virtuous seasonal berries are served with double cream. Of the 12 egg dishes, every one has cream or butter or both as a prominent ingredient.
Then there are the Oysters Rockefeller.
"You know what I like? You get the taste right here," he says, stroking his neck, just beneath his right ear.
Two restaurants, his and Antoine's, he says do it properly: "It's just sautéed vegetables, and one of the vegetables is not spinach." The right ingredients, besides oysters, are green onion, celery, parsley, bread, Tabasco, Pernod and "tons of butter," he says.
This and other secrets to Brennan's kitchen are revealed in a new book, "Breakfast at Brennan's and Dinner, Too" by Pip, Jimmy and Ted Brennan (published by Brennan's Inc. $27.50).
Brennan is having breakfast with a reporter to publicize the book, which tells the history of the restaurant, including the brothers' version of the schism that divided among family members the Brennan empire of restaurants: Brennan's, Commander's Palace, Mr. B's, Bacco.
'One thing about this place, you don't leave here hungry.' - Ted Brennan
The book is dedicated to Owen Edward Brennan, patriarch of New Orleans' first family of food, who died in 1955, when Ted was just 7. It is time, says Brennan, now a father of three himself, "to pay tribute to our father and get his story in writing."
Ted, the youngest of Owen's sons, says all the brothers considered other careers. "But when it came time, you realize what was in your blood."
He had spread his wings to San Francisco, in the late 1960s. But while it might seem an easy shift from the Big Easy to the Haight, Brennan found he didn't quite fit in.
"I was no hippie," he says.
Oysters Rockefeller a specialty - Brunch at Brennan's would not be complete without it.