Ella Brennan, the matriarch of one of the south’s most celebrated restaurant families, who became nationally known for popularizing haute Creole cuisine and superior service at her family’s Commander’s Palace restaurant while mentoring several superstar chefs, has died. She was 92.
In recent years, Brennan had turned over the day-to-day operation of Commander’s Palace to her daughter, Ti Martin, and niece, Lally Brennan, but she remained a presence, living with her sister Dottie in the house next door to the Garden District landmark. Martin and Lally Brennan declined to attend this year's James Beard food awards, where they were honored, saying they needed to stay home to be close to Brennan.
Her legacy as a legend in New Orleans and American cuisine was celebrated on the national scene in recent years. She was the subject of a 2016 memoir, co-written by her daughter, called “Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace: I Don’t Want a Restaurant Where a Jazz Band Can’t Come Marching Through.” The book cover featured a photo of Brennan’s smiling face and was decorated in Commander’s signature colors, teal and white, to match the restaurant’s famous exterior. Brennan was also the subject of an award-winning film, “Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table,” in which chefs, food critics, family and friends extolled her importance to the national restaurant scene.
In both the film and book, Brennan was quick to point out she was never a trained chef, but always a top-rate “foodie.” Her palate and creative flair for redefining the classics of New Orleans cuisine were legendary and the standards she set for service and hospitality in her restaurants helped earn Commander’s Palace the attention of food lovers and restaurant writers nationwide.
In a statement, chef Emeril Lagasse, whom Brennan picked to lead the Commander's Palace kitchen in the 1980s, called her a legend and mentor. "I am blessed to have had the tremendous honor of working for Ella; she taught me this business and forever changed my life and career. She was the grande dame of our business and pioneered our industry, not just in New Orleans but in America. Ella was an extraordinary mentor whose legacy will live on through her family and all those she taught."
“I look at restaurants all over the United States every day and I think she’s up there with the best of them – and maybe even ahead of any of them,” Tim Zagat, publisher of the country’s best-known restaurant guide, once told The Times-Picayune. In that same story, Brennan’s nephew Pip, whose side of the family ran Brennan’s on Royal Street for many years, said simply: "If she's not the best restaurateur in the country, I want to meet the one who's better."
As evidence of that, in 2009, Brennan was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the James Beard Foundation, which presents the Beard Awards, considered the Oscars of the food world. Among the famous graduates of the Commander’s Palace kitchen under Ella Brennan’s leadership, who credit her with much of their success, are the late Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, current Commander’s chef Tory McPhail, the late Jamie Shannon, Frank Brigtsen, Greg Sonnier, Steven Stryjewski and Sue Zemanick, among others.
“She was there to embrace and elevate, not just me but the entire staff,” Lagasse told The New York Times in 2017. “The list of people she has impacted in the hospitality industry in America is endless.”
With Prudhomme, Brennan was credited with reinventing Creole cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s. When he left the restaurant to go out on his own, she said she initially had her doubts about his eventual replacement: Emeril Lagasse. “I was skeptical. He was 23 years old at the time. He absolutely had all this inside of him and had no idea. He had no idea!” she told WWL-TV anchor Eric Paulsen in 2016. “It goes to prove that so many people have this great, great talent but somebody has to work with them, talk to them, be their friend, to make them confident in what they can do.”
In addition to Prudhomme and Lagasse, whom Brennan mentored, McPhail has also earned rave reviews, winning a James Beard award as Best Chef: South in 2013. Brennan’s daughter Ti and niece Lally were honored as members of “Who’s Who of American Food and Beverage” at the 2018 James Beard awards.
A native of New Orleans’ Irish Channel, Ella Brennan was born in 1925, the fourth of six children: Owen (the oldest and fifteen years older than she), followed by Adelaide, John, then Ella, Dick and Dottie. Ella said her first experience in a restaurant came at the age of 19, when she began working in the French Quarter with her brother Owen, “whom I followed around like a puppy dog.” First she worked at his Old Absinthe House on Bourbon St. then at his restaurant, Brennan’s Vieux Carre. Owen Brennan had signed a lease to open a new restaurant on Royal St. when he died of a massive heart attack in 1955 at the age of 45. It fell to Ella and the remaining members of the family to get the restaurant off the ground.
Their brand of personal service and classic French Creole cuisine drew attention from critics and celebrities as well as hundreds of local customers. “America was coming to appreciate dining as entertainment,” Brennan wrote, “and all of the newspapers were just beginning to have columns about food. Brennan’s was an instant success and it never let up for the eighteen years that my siblings and I were there. In the restaurant business in the United States of America, this new upstart was the No. 1 thing everybody talked and wrote about for the entire year of 1956.”
The restaurant’s national reputation included “breakfast at Brennan’s,” a signature meal, and a still-famous dessert – Bananas Foster, which Ella said she developed with the maître d’ one night in 1951 for a dinner to honor family friend Richard Foster. Brennan said she patterned the dish after one her mother made, featuring bananas sautéed in butter and brown sugar.
A still-talked about family split in the early 1970s put Owen Brennan’s wife and young sons in control of the Royal St. restaurant. Divorced and raising two children, Ella Brennan essentially found herself fired from Brennan’s restaurant. “Fired and shown the door. I couldn’t believe it. My siblings joined me in walking out and I didn’t set foot in our beautiful creation for another forty years,” she wrote in her 2016 book. “I don’t like to use the word ‘split.’ I like to say that we got together and decided that the family had gotten too big and that we needed to get these young people into restaurants so they could do their own thing, which was true. But it was definitely a split. It was terrible.” She described the fallout as devastating.
She and her siblings took over Commander’s Palace, which Ella and her sister Adelaide (who lived near the Garden District restaurant) had purchased in 1969. The family took over day-to-day management in 1974, with each sibling playing a distinct role. “We agreed to have one of us there every shift – a Brennan on Duty (BOD),” she wrote. “We knew that a good number of our guests would follow us there from Brennan’s and we were going to make sure they knew that a familiar face would be waiting to take great care of them.” The practice continues today with Brennan’s daughter, niece and other relatives greeting customers at the front door and seeing to their every need in the dining room.
While reinventing herself at Commander’s, Ella’s education in the food and beverage business matured during trips to Europe, where she studied restaurant service, and New York, where she worked briefly at the 21 Club. When she came home with new ideas for what Europeans were calling nouvelle cuisine, she assumed her position as leader of a new generation of chefs and diners in New Orleans. “We didn’t know what to do. I’d been at Brennan’s all my life and when we came up here (to Commander’s Palace) we decided what we were going to do: we’re going to run the best restaurant we know how,” she told Paulsen in 2016.
She said that it was during trips to Europe where she witnessed the food revolution that led to the remaking of Commander’s. “The revolution was that the younger new French chefs were taking the old classics and bringing it into the way we eat today. We just came out of the dark ages,” she said.
Brennan helped lead the charge to make food lighter, pairing modified French cuisine with fresh Louisiana ingredients – for example, instead of almonds for trout amandine, the restaurant would use pecans. The turtle soup and bread pudding soufflé became legendary, along with the restaurant’s reputation for innovation and encouraging chefs to use their imagination, to the diners’ delight. Chef Paul Prudhomme, then a relative unknown from Cajun country, was the first to shine under Ella Brennan’s leadership. In her book she recounts those early days of experimenting with new techniques for old recipes and incorporating Prudhomme’s southwest Louisiana style into a classic New Orleans restaurant. “It became clear that Paul was trying to make us into Cajuns while we were trying to make him into a Creole – and all of us loved every second of it. The end result was something that would shake up the city and ultimately America.”
Those who worked with Ella Brennan cite her amazing attention to detail, her eagle eye for even the most minute of problems and her role as a taskmaster in the Commander’s kitchen for raising the bar for her staff and building an unforgettable experience for diners. Though her hard-charging attitude earned her the nickname “Hurricane Ella” among staff members, she encouraged them to make customer service an art form, setting standards that are rarely matched in even the best of the city’s restaurants today. She and her brother Dick also popularized the jazz brunch, which still fills the restaurant on Sundays, and creates the fun and lively atmosphere for which diners travel cross country to experience.
“When a customer finds Commander’s, generally speaking, they’re with us for life,” she said in 2016. “Commander’s is a restaurant that is joy. People come there for fun, to relax. They want a great meal, the best you can give them, but it’s part of the experience. The young chefs, that was one of the most difficult lessons to teach them. They all had the talent to be friendly and warm and outgoing but they didn’t realize it was part of their job. Somebody had to show them.”
In bringing that style to life, colleagues and chefs she mentored said Brennan could be stern and demanding but was almost always on target. "She managed somehow to be authoritative without being authoritarian,” Lagasse told The Times-Picayune in 2007. "She is extremely demanding but not hard to work for. You have to be Ella Brennan to be both.”
“Well, I guess I was one of those pushy broads,” she told WWL-TV’s Eric Paulsen in 2016. “I had to make the restaurant successful, not only for me but for my family. When I’d sit down with them (chefs), I’d say tell me what you think. Why is such and such on the menu. Why? And forcing them to think that they wanted to be part of something like this, it wasn’t just a job. It’s not a job. If that’s what it is, you don’t belong here because that’s not what we are.”
Other members of the family, including her nephews Ralph and Dickie Brennan and niece Cindy, also opened restaurants in New Orleans, Houston, Destin and Las Vegas over the years. Ralph Brennan bought Brennan’s on Royal Street and reopened it in 2014, which marked the first time his Aunt Ella had set foot in the restaurant since 1969. The Commander’s Palace family of restaurants, as it became known, now also includes Brennan’s in Houston (run by Ella Brennan’s son Alex Martin) as well as Café Adelaide and SoBou.
“Boy, has it been fun,” she said in 2016. “We worked our tails off, but when we finished, we had fun. And while you were doing the work, working with people is one of the most exciting things on earth.”
Funeral arrangements will be private, Brennan's family said.
In a statement, New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell called Brennan one of the city's cultural and culinary treasures.
"For someone who was not a professionally trained chef, Miss Ella appreciated the nuances of authentic New Orleans cuisine and its potential as an economic engine," Cantrell said. "For decades, and more than most, she understood the breadth and depth of the New Orleans restaurant scene, and the result is a variety of dining establishments that make dining in this city an experience. Who can enjoy a weekend brunch at Commander’s Palace...without remembering the music of a jazz combo while feasting on Cochon De Lait Eggs Benedict? She understood that New Orleans food needed to be celebrated in the moment."
Cantrell said that Brennan and the many members of her restaurant family provided "a seat at the table for all of us – New Orleanians and millions of visitors – and made us feel like a part of their own family. She sat at the head of that table."
Gov. John Bel Edwards echoed the mayor's sentiment. "Ella Brennan was an icon in the culinary industry, and she graciously shared her passion for New Orleans and our cuisine with the world. She was a trailblazer with a tenacious spirit who made it her mission to learn everything possible about the restaurant business from the ground up and as a result, she set a standard of excellence that was unmatched. Donna and I send our deepest condolences and prayers to the Brennan family and friends. Ella’s legacy will live on throughout the state of Louisiana.”
-- Archival images and video courtesy “Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table”