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New Orleans knows how to celebrate and preserve its institutions better than just about any city. From traditions like Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras, to venues like Preservation Hall and Tipitina’s, to musicians like Professor Longhair and Fats Domino, to restaurants like Antoine’s and Galatoire’s, the city’s deep cultural legacies are present in its present to a degree that is impossible to imagine anywhere else.
Ella Brennan is one of these institutions, and Commanding the Table, a documentary that recently arrived on Netflix, tells her remarkable story. With help from his family, Owen Brennan —Ella’s older brother and a native New Orleanian— opened his first restaurant in 1946. The odds were against an Irish-American outsider in the French-dominated milieu of midcentury New Orleans fine dining, but Owen Brennan’s family made the Vieux Carre restaurant a success.
In 1955, as the restaurant was in the process of moving to its current location on Royal St., Owen Brennan died of a heart attack at the age of 45. It fell to his sister Ella Brennan to take over the restaurant, which she did with panache, transforming the stepsister of French Quarter legends like Antoine’s into an institution in its own right.
For enthusiasts of New Orleans restaurants and their history, the Ella Brennan story gets even more interesting in 1973, when disputes with Owen Brennan’s widow led to her being forced out of the restaurant she had made legendary. Undeterred, Ms. Brennan focused her attention on a dilapidated Garden District property she had purchased a few years prior. Located across the street from one of New Orleans’ most historic cemeteries, the original Commander’s Palace had been a restaurant serving unremarkable food in a grandiose building. Both the food and the building needed lots of work, and Ella plunged into the task, hiring the late Paul Prudhomme as chef, and painting the exterior with the bold aqua and white stripes Commander’s wears to this day.
Commander’s is a legendary restaurant, and under Ella’s stewardship, it was also the incubator for some of the biggest names in New Orleans cooking. In 1975, Ella bucked conventional wisdom and hired Paul Prudhomme as the first American-born chef at Commander’s. Today, Prudhomme’s name is synonymous with New Orleans food, but he began as a culinary outsider lacking formal training, and coming out of the Cajun cooking tradition, rather than the Creole staples that had dominated New Orleans dining since time immemorial. After Prudhomme left to open his own place and to be his own brand, Brennan took another chance with an even more unorthodox hire – Emeril Lagasse of Fall River, Massachusetts – arguably the most famous US born chef alive today.
Not all of the realities this documentary reflects are as appetizing as reading the menu at Commander’s. Beyond wealth of seafood and produce the region offers, the hallmark of New Orleans cooking has always been its integration of disparate cultural influences into a distinctive culinary vocabulary. With the exception of legendary restaurateur Leah Chase, everyone who speaks on camera in this documentary appears to be white. There are many people of color in evidence cooking and serving, but by and large, Commanding the Table leaves the reader guessing at their roles.
However, the film does engage more directly with another painful truth – the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. More than a decade later, the demographic and economic changes wrought by that storm continue to unfold, but the story of Commander’s reopening after 13 months is one of the most compelling threads in this narrative.
Commanding the Table is a documentary that is worth watching because it tells the story of a remarkable woman who prevailed as a businesswoman at a time when it was rare for a woman of her class and station to run a restaurant. Even in 2017, restaurants owned and operated by women are far more unusual than they should be. As the documentary details, after Owen Brennan’s death, his bank was reluctant to extend the same loan terms to a woman. Thanks to support from family members, vendors and contractors, Ella was able to open Brennan’s at the Royal St. location. Skittish bankers were far from the only obstacle facing a female restaurateur, and it is a tribute to Ms. Brennan’ remarkable vision and courage that she was able to become an integral part of the culture of fine dining in New Orleans for seven decades and counting. If you enjoy stories of badass matriarchs, and you want to give Fury Road a break, stream Commanding the Table.
Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.
