From ‘girl restaurateur’ to ‘Hurricane Ella’
Memoir,documentaryexplorecolorfullifeofEllaBrennan
As the doyenne of the New Orleans restaurant scene — first gaining fame with game-changing Brennan’s and later with the celebratory Commander’s Palace — Ella Brennan has spent almost her entire life rolling out the red carpet and striking up the band for generations of locals and tourists alike.
She’s been called many things over the years. A hospitality innovator and revolutionary restaurateur. A star-maker (she helped launch the careers of Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse, among others). An unyielding, unerring perfectionist. And a formidable human force who earned the nickname Hurricane Ella.
But she’s also simply Miss Ella, the Irish Channel-born girl who made good, bringing world-class dining to New Orleans and who, at 90, is the now retired matriarch of a family-held dining empire that includes some of the Crescent City’s best restaurants and Brennan’s of Houston.
It’s that inimitable Miss Ella we meet in “Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace,” a new memoir written by Brennan and her daughter, Ti Martin, and in a new film “Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table” from director Leslie Iwerks. The latter will be screened Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as part of the Houston Cinema Arts Festival.
That the book arrives at the same time as the documentary has created something of an Ella Brennan moment. And yet if it were up to Brennan, who deflects attention from herself, neither project might have happened at all. She had to be prodded into participating.
“Mom doesn’t like ‘moments.’ She doesn’t understand the interest,” said her son, Alex Brennan Martin, proprietor of Brennan’s of Houston. “But yes, she is most definitely having a moment, and she’s sort of coming around to it.”
For many, it’s high time she did. Because hers is a true American success story almost cinematic in nature (speaking of which, there are hints there may be a feature film in the works).
The short story: Brennan was born in New Orleans in 1925 and grew up during the Great Depression in a big Irish family (six children) with a father who worked as a shipbuilding supervisor and a homemaker mother who was such an accomplished home cook she “had magic in her hands.” After graduating from high school in 1943, Brennan enrolled in business school to learn secretarial skills. Four months later, she quit. Then the French Quarter came calling.
Her older brother whom she idolized, Owen, 15 years her senior, offered her a job as a bookkeeper at his bar, the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street. Even though her mother detested the lascivious nature of the French Quarter, Brennan was off to the races. She took to the bar business, and the neighborhood, as naturally as whiskey to a Sazerac. In 1946, her brother and father, also named Owen, purchased a restaurant across the street from the bar. The Vieux Carre, as it was called, launched Brennan’s career; she turned a truly unremarkable restaurant into something quite wonderful by improving the food first, then service, then the wine menu.
In time, the Brennans were looking to grow. Brother Owen found a space for sale at 417 Royal he thought would make a good restaurant, and the family worked toward opening Brennan’s in May 1956. But six months before it was set to open, Owen unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age 45. With so much effort already invested in the project, the entire family had to soldier on despite devastation, mortgaging their homes and borrowing money wherever they could to complete Brennan’s.
Brennan’s debuted as a hit and proceeded to redefine the French Quarter dining experience. National publications descended on the restaurant, along with Hollywood celebrities, singers and musicians, comedians, politicians. For more than a dozen years, the family enjoyed the prosperity that came with running the city’s top eatery. Brennan went out into the world to educate herself on the business she was getting so good at — and the world also came to Brennan’s.
But the golden glow would soon be tarnished. Owen’s widow, Maudie, butted heads with Brennan and her siblings. Maudie eventually wanted to be the boss and for her sons to run Brennan’s (together they controlled 52 percent of the business), Brennan writes in her book. In 1973, Brennan was fired from her duties at the restaurant she helped create. Her siblings joined her in walking out. It would be another 40 years before she entered Brennan’s again.
Brennan was 49 and in need of a second act. Fortuitously, she and her sister Adelaide — a vivacious dynamo often tricked out in sequins, furs and jewels — had purchased Commander’s Palace in 1969. The two threw themselves into transforming a coasting restaurant with a boring menu into the family’s flagship. At Commander’s, Brennan forged her way as a culinary pioneer whose championing of haute Creole cuisine redefined the New Orleans restaurant scene and brought the city international respect. The chefs she nurtured to superstar status are testament to Brennan’s ability to constantly up her own game.
“She really believes in something very old school called the common good. You’re supposed to be everything you’re capable of,” said daughter Martin, who’s now the proprietor of Commander’s Palace along with her cousin, Lally Brennan. “She has a way of making people feel they’re able to be more than they think they can. That’s her greatest gift.”
Both the new book and the film are peppered with colorful history and anecdotes about a great lady and her place within New Orleans and its now-thriving restaurant industry. “I don’t even know if she owns a pan,” Lagasse says in the film, “but she has one of most amazing palates of anyone I’ve ever run into.”
It’s a palate she built herself as a “girl restaurateur,” as one publication called her early on, who was determined to make it in a male-dominated profession.
Brennan ends “Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace” on notes of hope for both the restaurant profession and the city she’s lived in her entire life. And she offers a closing observation: “I don’t want a restaurant where a jazz band can’t come marching through.”