But, legend she is; icon, too; matriarch, if you will, of a restaurant dynasty that extends from Commander’s Palace in the Garden District of New Orleans (where Brennan spends most of her time—she lives next door), rambles on down to Mr. B’s Bistro and Dickie Brennan’s in the French Quarter, backs up to Foodies Kitchen, a to-go grocery-café in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, and then meanders west to Houston and thence to a brand-new Commander’s in the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas.
Like it or not, all of this is mostly her doing, her influence: Commander’s isn’t Commander’s without her presence; ditto the other places. Even though she doesn’t visit them very often, she is there in spirit. You could, if you were of a mind, change the name of Commander’s Palace to Ella’s Place and you would not find anyone to object.
Commander’s is not a one-woman show. Never was, never will be. Yet, a difference exists, one-woman show or not. “You’ve got to understand,” she tells me. “People here just happen to work with a pushy broad.”
We will not talk of Commander’s menu here, except to note
that from Paul Prudhomme to Emeril Lagasse to current chef Jamie
Shannon, it is what it has been ever since the restaurant opened in 1973: creative
haute creole, forever in a state of flux. We won’t talk of décor or ambiance
within its six dining rooms; not of covers or revenues. Says Brennan about
revenues, “It’s not that I won’t divulge,” she says, “it just doesn’t make any
sense to me. People think if a restaurant is big, it can’t be any good.” But we
will talk of a business philosophy and its relevance to the extraordinary
success of what food writers and foodies everywhere insist is one of the finest
restaurants in the country, to this always on their list of the top 10 restaurants in the country.
Brennan talks of “New Orleans Southern Hospitality” as if it were an inviolate temperament; a God-given right, the exclusive domain of Orleaneans. It exists, therefore it is. It’s in the air, as much a part of New Orleans and Commander’s as jazz.
“You cannot pretend: you either like people and want to make them happy or you don’t,” she says. “People know when you’re fooling with them. Our business is to make people happy. If we hire you and you aren’t willing to accept that responsibility, you’re not going to be happy working here and I'll be one of the first to let you know that.”
She loathes status quo; embraces change, knowing that from one day to the next, there will surface this inevitability: that some piece of the menu or service must be re-examined and fine-tuned to improve and rework it to meet the wishes of customers whose dining-out consciousness is shaped not by common sense, but by caprice.
Brennan has been in this business for 55 of her 75 years, 38 of them at Commander’s.
“We will not let Commander’s become old. We travel everywhere; we read everything. We work on the restaurant every day. If we aren’t doing this or that as well as we should, we work at it.”
She worked at it with Prudhomme, with Lagasse; and now, with Shannon.
Brennan reminisces: “First week with Lagasse, I took him by the hand and dragged him into the dining room. He said to me, ‘I don’t need to do this; I can’t do this, that’s your job. My job is in the kitchen.’ And I said, ‘Get the hell out of here, meet these people, know these people.’”
Emeril Lagasse: can you believe that? Told—forced—to be sociable, to be extroverted. (For more on Emeril, see May 1999: Emeril Lagasse.)
Prudhomme and Lagasse: they came, they cooked, they conquered. That wasn’t enough for Brennan. She taught them everything they needed to know about running a restaurant. They became more than chefs; they became restaurateurs. And then they left.
“Of course they left: Paul, Emeril. They grow and go. What’s wrong with that? When you bring people aboard, you shirk your responsibilities if you don’t bring them along as best you know how. I will grant you this,” she says. “No matter where Emeril goes, Commander’s will always go with him.”
When Commander’s opened, the mission was to run the best restaurant in the country. “Some people seem to think we are getting there,” she says.
Footnote: This column was for the magazine’s
Annual Legends Awards, a short-lived series that died quietly soon after my
essay appeared. The first sentence, “I
can’t handle being a legend,” is what Ella said when I called to tell her the magazine
had selected her to receive the award and had asked me to talk to her about it.
Jamie Shannon,
Commander’s exec chef at the time this article appeared, died of cancer Nov.
2001. When I interviewed Ella, I knew Jamie was ill and Ella knew that I knew,
so we agreed not to talk about it. Tory McPhail, who had been with Commander’s
New Orleans on and off (he worked Commander’s in Vegas for a while) ever since
Emeril hired him as saucier in 1984, was named exec chef to replace Shannon in
2002.
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