[title type="h5"]Wednesday, November 19, 2013.
Brennan's Gets Almost Ready.[/title]
The day began in a peculiar way, something I will describe in tomorrow's journal. Today, much more important data moves into my long-term memory. Ralph Brennan invited me to take a personal tour of Brennan's on Royal Street, which he will reopen next Tuesday.
But its'a ready sort of open. A dinner for 114 people will go off in a private dining room at Brennan's tonight. This and a few other banquets were booked when reopening day was figured to be in September.
The loss of Brennan's last year to a hard-to-figure bankruptcy, the transfer of ownership to Terry White and his associates, the involvement of Ralph Brennan, and the investment of more money in a single New Orleans restaurant than in any previous adds up to a story that will require a book to tell it fully.
I walk over to the restaurant right after the radio show. Construction is clearly still underway, with a giant dumpster surrounded by chain-link fence standing adjacent to the door. Inside, I am met not by builders, but by hostesses standing at the front desk.
They take me to the space formerly known as the VIP Room. It was what its name suggested: the place where the best customers and celebrities were seared, unless they didn't want to be seen. You took a right at the bar to get there. Now it is a bar--a much larger one than the pre-gearshift restaurant offered, set up not just for having a cocktail but also quite serviceable as a place for casual dining.
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Table top in the first-floor bar at Brennan's.[/caption]
The essence of Brennan's is visible: the tables are topped with clear polyurethane, with what looks like a map of a dense archipelago in a maroon sea. I look more closely, and detect that the islands are pieces of egg shells. It tells a basic truth of Brennan's: no restaurant has sold so many eggs at such a great profit than this one.
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The courtyard at Brennan's a week before its reopening. The turtles that were in the fountains in the back are being cared for by an employee.[/caption]Meanwhile, outside the windows onto the courtyard, I see a dozen men moving flagstones around and cutting them to fit better. This creates clouds of dust and no small amount of noise. They are leveling the surface of the patio. How is it possible that the place will open next week, let alone tonight?
Ralph Brennan appears. Ralph didn't set out to be in the restaurant business. He was a CPA when he undertook to manage the newly-opened Mr. B's in 1976. Now, with seven major restaurants in his purview, few people are more involved in the industry.
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Ralph Brennan with his corporate executive chef Haley Bitterman.[/caption]"Any questions?" he asks me. Where do we begin? I ask. We move into a room that I know was once part of the kitchen. I note that he left the old floor tiles in place. No, they didn't, he says. Those are brand-new tiles, whose faded colors and antique look make them appear to always have been there. And since the building dates back to the 1790s, that illusion is just right.
This room may be the most important part of the restoration. Although the previous manifestation of Brennan's had a substantial frontage on Royal Street, it never had a room that offered a view to the street, or vice-versa. This was the kitchen, and if passers-by witnessed any output coming from the restaurant, it was cooks yelling at one another. Now, if you walk in front of Brennan's you will see diners at their tables. Probably those displaced VIPs.
We move on, and I learn what became of what. The former men's room is now an elevator shaft. The men's and ladies' rooms--which always let antiseptic smells loose into the entry carriageway--are now all the way in the rear of the courtyard, where they are much larger and accessible. But they took over the former Wine Room, which had been adjacent to the wine cellar. It also served for a decade as the home of the Eat Club's annual black-tie Christmas gala. It was also once the site of my bachelor party.
[caption id="attachment_45600" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Brennan's wine cellar, waiting for the racks to be built and the wines to move in.[/caption]
Although the Wine Room is gone, the wine cellar is right where it was. But it looks like a cave walled with ancient bricks, with wine cases two deep covering the floor. This is not quite ready yet, and a lot of wine--the pre-stroke collection was mostly bought up by the new management--is stored off-site.
The second most desirable tables in the old Brennan's were along the large glass walls looking out onto the courtyard. Even though the wall of glass had the look of the front of a 1960s convenience store, it was declared by the preservation authorities as having been in place long enough that they could not be changed much. So they weren't. However, the L Room--across a passageway from the windows, and isolated from the scenery--had its interior walls pulled down, making the room bigger and more atmospheric.
We climb up the service stairs to the second floor, where more dining rooms give onto either the courtyard or the balconies overlooking Royal Street and the grand State Supreme Court building. Everything up there looks as if it had been part of the original 1790s structure. In fact, almost everything has been rebuilt, and very convincingly. The wooden floors at the top of the stairs surely were there before, right? Nope. It's old wood, all right, but came out of a demolished local orphanage.
[caption id="attachment_45599" align="alignright" width="320"]
Brennan's executive chef Slade Rushing.[/caption]
There is a full kitchen on the second floor. There I run into Slade Rushing, the executive chef. He came from his own restaurant MiLa, where he and his wife/co-chef Allison Vines-Rushing operated at the five-star level for years. I don't know what happened to that, but Slade says that Allison is enjoying a break from the business while she mothers their eleven-month-old and three-year-old children.
Slade's kitchen is obviously fully functional. A lot of cooking is going on for the dinner for 114 tonight, but things seem to be eminently under control. But I do learn something that concerns me. I ask Slade about the old recipe for turtle soup, which made what was by quite a bit the best in town. Slade is not aware of this. Neither is Ralph. Hmm. We must get to work to salvage that recipe.
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One of the second-floor dining rooms, with ancient Mardi Gras royalty depicted on the walls.[/caption]
Ralph and I pass through the Pineapple Room, where our Eat Club dinner will be on December 16. It's at the top of the stairs, to the left. The room where the first Brennan's Eat Club event took place in 1996 is to the right. It and an adjacent dining room are very handsome spaces in an extraordinarily well designed, period-appropriate style. The old gasolier in the former Gold Room is gone, but some things are just too old to fix, Ralph was told by the Bevolo gaslight people.
We descend the stairs to the bar. Ralph said that the reason the bar surface is topped with copper is that when he was a young man, polishing the copper was one of his jobs. He recalled running around the courtyard and up and down the stairs when he was a kid, and Brennan's was his second home.
[caption id="attachment_45601" align="alignleft" width="480"]
The new main bar at Brennan's. [/caption]
I get the feeling from Ralph that he harbors at least a little trepidation about the massive project he and his 150-plus staff will shoulder starting on November 25. Even though the location, the traditions, and the fame of Brennan's will go a long way in keeping the house full, twenty million dollars is a big nut.
I project that the achievement of Brennan's in the 1950s through the 1970s, when it was the most profitable restaurant in the world, will shortly commence a second time. I'm not one to get worked up about new restaurants, but I'm giddy about our Eat Club gala as we welcome Brennan's back into the center of the New Orleans restaurant scene.
[title type="h5"]Brennan's. French Quarter: 417 Royal. 504-525-9711. [/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris November 28, 2014 13:01 in
