Courtesy of Dickie Brennan & Co.
“Why do kids like PBJ?” Dick Brennan once asked his son, Dickie. “Because it tastes good!”
Replace peanut butter and jelly with remoulade and shrimp, or ravigote and crab, and you’ve got at least part of the formula for the Brennan family’s decades of unchallenged success in defining New Orleans cuisine, particularly at Commander’s Palace. Where flavor combinations should be upheld, they are, and if the Baroness de Pontalba were flung 185 years forward in time to the present-day French Quarter—as she will be on September 7 for the Country Roads Supper Club—she’d do well to orient herself in a Brennan restaurant rather than risk a stroke asking directions in a t-shirt shop or karaoke bar. (But if your father-in-law shoots you for you jewels and your own biographer calls you frumpy, you couldn’t and shouldn’t say no to a daiquiri.)
The baroness will have a few questions about what third-generation restaurateur Dickie Brennan considers Creole, though the trained chef’s irrepressible reverence for the cuisine colors all his restaurants, including Palace Café, Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse, Bourbon House, and Tableau. “The definition certainly has evolved,” said Dickie. “It used to be that Creole was what’s done in the city, and Cajun in the country. But they’ve blended. We’re doing crawfish all over the place.”
Courtesy of Dickie Brennan & Co.
New ingredients and presentations only appear in his restaurants when they make best sense for the dish. Gulf fish, once crusted with imported almonds, now nestles in local pecans. Shrimp remoulade could sit atop shredded iceberg lettuce, but isn’t a fresh cucumber more appealing?
Technology that swept farms and restaurants in the ‘50s and ‘60s didn’t linger in the Brennans’ kitchens. “We had lost a lot of depth in flavor,” said Dickie. “It became really important to us to source the best, local product—when it was in season, and it was peaking. Tomatoes that are mass-produced are beautiful, disease-resistant, and yield 40 percent more on the vine. But they have no flavor.”
A critical eye toward tradition has helped Dickie Brennan, and the generations before and after him, uphold a reputation for restaurants, not museums. If the chef in the kitchen is a relative, he’s earned the toque and has his own ideas for what a Brennan menu looks like next. So proved Dickie, who studied under Paul Prudhomme and worked in Paris and New York before returning to the Quarter. Now his nephew Chef Geordie Brower is home to helm the kitchen at his uncle’s latest venture, Acorn Café, offering health-conscious, contemporary options inside the new Louisiana Children’s Museum in City Park. “I feel like it’s his turn, his generation’s turn,” said Dickie. “We’ll be there to support and give him feedback. I will definitely give him feedback.”
We don’t recommend the Baroness de Pontalba venture as far as City Park in her September visit to 2019—time travelers really should keep a small radius—but if she did, she’d probably like Chef Geordie’s distinctly un-Creole kale caesar. Why? Because it tastes good.
We hope you'll join us for Country Roads' "The Pontalba Experience" Supper Club on September 7 at the Louisiana State Museum Cabildo in Jackson Square. Tickets are available at bontempstix.com.
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