“Life is just a bowl of cherries, so live and laugh at it all.”
—lyrics by Lew Brown
On those rare occasions in my childhood when Daddy and Nellie would fuss about something, perhaps his racetrack outings or her stinginess with a pie slice, he’d gently mock her with a sigh and murmur, “Poor, poor me.” The more trivial the topic, the deeper the sigh.
I believe it was his way of saying, “Well, if that is all we have to worry about, we’re pretty darn fortunate, aren’t we?” Now, in the twilight of my life, as I look back on decades and decades and decades of incomparable experiences, I’ve taken to murmuring my own phrase: “Lucky, lucky me.”
I’ve said this to myself so many times because I truly believe I’m the luckiest woman in the world. I mean that in every way you can imagine. I’m in my home, surrounded by family who take care of me, and I still have longtime friends with whom I can clink glasses and mull over current events. People who no longer see me in the restaurant every day may wonder, “Are you a recluse?” Recluse? There’s a passing parade in my house—and it’s catered! Just look at the cooks’ shoes lined up outside my back door.
Mind you, I’m not discounting the hours and energy that I’ve invested in nurturing a family, pursuing a career and helping others better their own lives. Those things are the concrete core of my life, and a source of great pride and satisfaction. My goals were to build a business and take care of my family. I worked at it all my life and achieved that.
Rather, I’m talking about the fortuitous circumstances in which I conducted my life: being born into this loving and resourceful family, which happened to steer me into this stimulating and rewarding profession in this endlessly fascinating city in this particularly fertile culinary era in America. I could not have asked for a better launching pad and a richer environment in which to thrive. And the rewards continue to wash over me every time I see a family member or employee or fellow citizen achieve more than they thought possible.
So I say, “Lucky, lucky me.”
Now, I would like to end this saga with my views on topics that are dearest to me and offer my hopes for the future. Having hung in there this long, I guess I’ve learned a thing or two, and I feel pretty good about tomorrow (cue up “What a Wonderful World,” please).
My Family
People give me credit for a lot of things, but one of the things that I am most proud of is how Ti, Lally and Alex have become restaurateurs. They know the business inside and out. They started very young, fell in love with it, and they are still learning to this day. They won’t quit—I promise you they couldn’t even if they wanted to. I couldn’t be more proud of them. Seeing them grow up and fall in love with the same things that I love is rather spectacular. I get tears in my eyes when I look at them.
I know Ti has her dreams. She always wanted to be a writer, but she gave that up when she came into the business. And I know that she mainly did that to take care of me. I know Alex in Houston is hoping his children will go into the business, but you never know. You can’t predict that. You just have to say to them that the opportunity is there. I don’t think it has to be drudgery like it was for us in the beginning. We didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have a business, so we had to build one. But once you get it built, you can have a very decent life if you have partners that work together.
We have a lot of young women in our family, and I’m gratified to see some of them entering the hospitality business. It’s a place where a woman can have a lot of control and find room to grow, as Ti and Lally have shown. I recall talking to my great-niece Katherine, who was preparing to work at Brennan’s on Royal Street after her father, Ralph, and a partner bought the place out of bankruptcy and revamped it. She was nervous and asked me what I thought. I said, “I think you’re perfect, and I really mean that. You have the right background. So just be yourself and have confidence in yourself. If you weren’t able to do the job, I wouldn’t let you.” Now she’s been there more than a year, and I hear she is doing a fine job.
Coming up, I never viewed myself or my career through the lens of feminism, but I was one of the very, very few female managers in the hospitality business until things started opening up a bit in the 1990s. (I later learned that a Madame Begue had run a restaurant on Decatur Street in the mid to late 1800s, so I tip my hat to a fellow local pioneer.) I couldn’t have been more fortunate being in a family business and being my own boss. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when I started, but they let me learn on the job. I think it worked out pretty well.
Still, there were times . . .
All my life the men in my family would say, “Get so-and-so on the phone.” I’d shoot back: “Why the hell don’t you do it? Are your fingers broken?” and ignore them. That’s why I advised Ti to never learn how to type or take dictation, because she might end up doing those tasks for somebody the rest of her life. Ha! Today she runs her own show. I wish she’d been around in 1955 to help me deal with those damn bankers.
Have I achieved all the success that I’d hoped for? Basically, yes. I haven’t reached for goals that were not achievable. There were opportunities that I didn’t take advantage of that maybe I should have, but I don’t regret it. I’m a very satisfied person day to day.
I tell all of the next generation of Brennans that they really have to put themselves into a position where they can take care of themselves. You never know what’s going to happen in the world, especially with jobs, so if you can get your own business, at least you can control what you’re doing while other stuff is going on. So I would like them to be in business for themselves. My granddaughters can go to Brennan’s of Houston if that’s what they want to do, and Dottie’s children can come to Commander’s if they like. If they choose to do something different, they have to be prepared to take care of themselves. They’re young enough now that that message has to be put across to them. They’re not old enough to know that’s what they have to do.
The most important things I want are for them to be good citizens and good parents, to lead a decent life and accept their responsibility to the community.
My Profession
The world changes so much. Even ridiculously simple things change. But somehow, down in my deepest feelings, I think that people will always want to go out and have dinner with friends—enjoy the conversation and the food and the wine. (Oh, the wine! One of the most civilized things that we have left on this earth.) It’s an ultra-privilege. I just don’t see anything happening that would want to make people take a pill for nourishment instead of dining. At least for the next fifty years or so.
The future of hospitality engages my mind all the time. There have been so many changes on every front. We’ve had change in the past, but nothing like this. People are now talking about how we should handle salaries and wages. I don’t remember the public ever getting involved in that before. It’s not that you have any secrets, but people now talk openly about how much you pay and whom you hired and why you hired them. That’s very different from what it used to be, and most of the time I think it’s for the better.
I hope the role of restaurateur doesn’t change a hell of a lot. To me it means hospitality, and hospitality is at the root of our business. To be successful you have to really love and care for people. If you don’t want to be around them, if you’re a loner, then don’t go into this business. And you have to accept that it’s not a nine-to-five job, it’s a way of life. It’s demanding, but so wonderful. If you have to work for a living, the restaurant biz is a delightful way to do it.
When it comes to food, it’s a different world out there—what you serve, how it’s prepared, what’s good for you. They came out with this thing the other day that said processed meat gives you cancer. That may be true, but God . . . the next thing you know it’s going to be celery. I hadn’t had eggs in years because they said it was bad, but now I do. I am so damn glad! I love eggs, as you already know. Could eat them every day. And now the food police have put them back on the approved list. I wanted to hug Julia Child years ago when “they” were warning us not to eat butter, or eggs, or red wine, and on and on. Julia said in the middle of all that in her inimitable style, “There’s nothing wrong with a little butter.” God love her. My point isn’t that everything is wrong, it’s that it’s happening so fast. How do you work all those changes into your everyday life? Was it right yesterday? Is it right today? Just constant change.
There are things on the menu today that thirty or forty years ago you’d never have dreamt of serving. Today it may be organ meats—I call them innards. I saw The New York Times recently wrote about chicken feet. Awful-looking dish, but now they’re doing it all over the place.
You just have to be willing to say, “OK, let’s try that,” and make the leap (within reason). I thought I had eaten eggs every way a person could, and then a couple years ago our chef, Tory, comes up with the five-hour egg. After trying version after version, he cooked an egg for 5 hours in the immersion cooker at 141 degrees. Not 4 1⁄2 hours at 143 degrees. Nope—5 hours at 141 degrees. All I can tell you is it comes out with the consistency of flan and an intense egg flavor. Heaven. Then he serves it different ways, sometimes with mushroom and leeks—I love that one. By God, he can cook. Lucky, lucky me.
I think there’s a lot more to explore in food. Every time I eat an ethnic cuisine I’ve never had, I get so excited and I think, “What can we learn from this?” I see the culinary world going more toward a global cuisine cooked locally. I think the cuisines of China and Asia and the Pacific Islands are just now coming to our attention. People all over the globe are getting ideas and expressing and exporting them.
Of course, unfettered creativity can take you down some strange paths. Molecular cuisine, for instance. In my opinion, when practiced in a restaurant it’s absurd. It’s absolutely to the point of being funny, it’s so bad. Now, if they want to explore different tastes and different products they want people to eat, that’s all right in the laboratory. But that shouldn’t happen in a dining room. I think people go into a dining room to eat a great meal with great friends and enjoy themselves. I think this experimentation, like you’re in a laboratory, is ridiculous.
I’ll never forget the time that Ti took me and Dottie to a very famous place that was known for its experimental cooking. “This is a very modern restaurant, very different—and don’t you dare laugh,” Ti said. They came out with this foie gras in a test tube that you had to suck out of the container. Now, I love foie gras, but this presentation just turned me off like crazy. I had no idea what to do. It seemed so silly. Ti kept saying, “No, no, no, don’t touch it. Our waiter is going to tell you how to eat it. Don’t touch it.”
“OK, so how do you do it? How do you suck foie gras out of a tube? And why, for God’s sake?”
I was trying to be on good behavior but we all just collapsed in hysterics. Check, please . . .
I think it’s unbelievable what these people are willing and wanting to do. But it’s not ready for the public. Don’t put it out there. You may think it’s ready for the public, but the public isn’t ready for it.
What the public will always be ready for is food cooked by talented people who are well grounded in the basics. I wish I had done a culinary school for New Orleans, but now Ti, Dickie and his brother-in-law, George Brower, are trying to do it with their New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute, which is just getting off the ground as of this writing. I think that New Orleans should be the culinary and hospitality capital of America, just the way Detroit is—or was—with automobiles. That’s what I want. Everyone in the business ought to know about the magic we have here and how they can build on it for the future. Learn what we have done, what is possible to do and what more needs to be done.
My City
Most people eat to live, but in New Orleans we live to eat. It’s a town where you get up in the morning and check your lunch plans right away. Then at lunch the first thing you ask is, “Where are you going to dinner tonight? Who are you going to dinner with?” At dinner you say, “Do you have any plans for tomorrow? No? Well let’s go to lunch.” And repeat. New Orleanians’ lives revolve around who they’ll be eating with, where they’ll be eating and what they’ll be having. That’s what the city is about—and what makes my profession so challenging and rewarding.
Needless to say, I was made for this place, and this place was made for me. Lucky, lucky me. It’s a city where the people simply enjoy living. They work hard, they do everything they can to nurture solid families. New Orleans is a family city. I can take you all over this town, and you will see families gathering and doing things together. No matter how much or how little money you have, you eat well because everybody goes fishing and crabbing and crawfishing, and that leads to great feasts in the backyard, usually accompanied by musicians. And the greatest cooks in the world are to be found working every day in the home kitchens of New Orleans—that’s who our city’s chefs compete against, not each other! I think my fellow citizens have the best life in the world.
And it’s getting better, especially after Katrina. New Orleans is growing as a high-tech center. I don’t know a thing about technology, but I know its impact on the economy here is very real. Our hospitals are growing and doing very well. We’re breaking ground on more hotels. Our restaurant scene is so incredibly vibrant, with hundreds more places operating now than before Katrina. We’ve recently redone some of our old theaters, and that’s boosted the cultural scene. We’re attracting young, creative and ambitious entrepreneurs to move here. All of this makes our economy more diverse and stable and less dependent on the energy and tourism industries.
Still, there are some things that make me mad about this city, especially how we’ve let down some of those family standards. Too many families don’t have a situation where the mother and father teach their kids the rules, the rules, the rules. When I was growing up, every family taught proper behavior, and I promise you, you did not break the rules. If you broke them at school, your parents would get called away from their jobs to deal with it—and there would be consequences for the offender. Today I don’t see that nearly as much. I see too many neglected children, and children without a purpose.
I think certain people have become very selfish—interested only in themselves and the hell with everyone else. I know quite a few. So many of our politicians are mean and nasty, and we’ve lost the “civil” part of civilization. Some of this ugliness has been going on for a long time, especially in politics. But when it got down to governing, it used to be that you had faith that a leader would emerge. That faith has been shaken for me.
Our school system is getting better, but it’s still not as great as it should be. We’re late on this, but I’m excited that things are happening.
We need to do something about poverty in this city. Things are good for many, but not for the guy who’s down, down, down. And poverty contributes to crime, which remains a headache for all.
So yes, there are many things we need to keep working on, but I can’t imagine living anywhere else in the world. I see other towns and I think, “Boy, there ain’t going to be a jazz band marching down this street.” And it’s so sad because music brings joy to life and to the community. It excites people and breaks the rules. But lucky, lucky me, we have the best music right here. In my backyard. I’ve got to tell you, I don’t want a restaurant where a jazz band can’t come marching through.