Begue's was a Creole landmark near the French Market, famed for its gargantuan breakfasts of seafoods, meats, and wines that could last up to four hours. New Orleans' oldest surviving restaurant, the world-famous Antoine's, started out as a humble boardinghouse.
Today, New Orleans is a diversified commercial and tourist center, yet its riverfront is still a significant component of the economy. It has extensive dock facilities along the river and along man-made shortcuts like the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. Exports from New Orleans' vast hinterland include grains, cotton, and petroleum products. Crawfish and catfish production are also important industries, and Louisiana is known for the quality of its rice, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, strawberries, and tomatoes.
Despite some nods to the twentieth century—a proliferation, for instance, of high-rise, high-tech convention hotels-New Orleans still has a foot firmly planted in the past.
New Orleans is anything but a neat, orderly city, and therein lies part of its charm, as well as its great appeal to writers and artists. The French Quarter, one of the city's ten historic districts, is carefully preserved, right down to its peeling paint and cracked flagstones. It is a lively living museum, a business center, and even a residential district, as well as the city's primary tourist attraction.
If you stop in the Quarter near the Vieux Carré for beignets and a cup of chicory-laced coffee, you will be near the site of the original colony of La Nouvelle Orleans, with the same boundaries today as when it was first laid out by French engineers in the eighteenth century.
Bagnets and cafe au lait have been a New Orleans pleasure since the 1800s
The city cherishes its French heritage and loves its legends of voodoo queens and grinning buccaneers. Yet we also take pride in the fact that New Orleans is the first American city in which opera was performed. For the most part, day in and night out, New Orleans is mindful of those qualities that make it unique—on the street or on the plate. We take pride in our food, our music, and our fun; and we wake up each day inviting the world to join us.
Growing Up with Great Food
The grande dame of New Orleans' first family of food remembers the flavors of her childhood
by Ella Brennan
As children growing up in New Orleans, we had an extraordinary culinary experience, and we didn't even know it. We thought everybody else in the world had a mother who was just as good a cook as ours. She was a wonderful cook. And with six children around the table, meals were always a happy time. She spoiled us with good food.
My mother was an intuitive cook, like many women and men here in New Orleans. I remember following her around as a child. She had magic in her hands. Now I say that all great cooks have magic in their hands, and she certainly did. There was nothing complicated about this, believe me. It was the simplest thing she could do.
She didn't have to prepare for weeks or go to the grocery' store with a list. She had a pantry that she kept stocked. And meats, poultry, seafood, the freshest vegetables and fruits anyone could ever want— these were part of our lives as kids, right along with the people who prepared them for us at the little markets or delivered them to our door. Sometimes it's the people I remember even more than the food—but that's okay because who can separate them, anyway?
John, Dome, and Dick Brennan (standing, from left) and Ella and Adelaide Brennan (seated), founders of Commander's Palace.
My mother had a butcher, Mr. Manale, who brought her meat. She had a fish person. The vegetable man, Mr. Tony, came to the front door. The banana man, the milkman, the coffee man—they all came right to our house back then, and they were my mother's friends.
As kids, we got to know them. Mr. Tony used to drive us to school on occasion. These people would always be in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee, having a glass of iced tea. Our house was food-oriented, but we didn't realize it until many years later.
There was a bakery across the street from our school. When my brother Dick was little, I had to go pick him up after his classes. And we'd be throwing the bread back and forth between us all the way home because it was so hot.
My mother's brothers used to fish and hunt all the time. They would always bring back the things they'd caught for her to prepare. I can still hear them whistling as they came through the door, bringing my mother the freshest redfish imaginable. I decided long ago that there's no better dish on earth than my mother's baked redfish with Creole sauce. It was a very light sauce: fresh tomatoes, onions, and green peppers, served with white rice. We were Irish, not French, but my mother was New Orleans.
When we first got into the restaurant business, we were very fortunate to have some wonderful people to help us out. They were all much older than we were, and these kitchen guys adopted us. We spent hours just sitting with them learning. We shared books with them, and they shared books with us.
From its beginning, Creole cuisine has been experimental. It evolved with French settlers modifying their traditional recipes to the produce of the New World. Based on adaptation and innovation, it has been a cuisine of intuition, with recipes often not written down and no hard-and-fast rules. Sometimes in New Orleans there are as many recipes for a dish as there are cooks.
The Brennan family, whose members— gathered here for Christmas—have founded many of New Orleans' best-loved restaurants.
All this has been true at Commander's Palace since we started here. Truth is, I don't like working with people who aren't growing. I don't want to work with people who are satisfied being where they are. I say if it's not broken, let's break it. There's always a better way.
The good New Orleans restaurateur takes and pulls this creative energy out of people. We Brennans didn't know we had it in us, but people pulled it out of us, and here we are. Now we try to pull it out of others. We try to get people to soar.
This Ethnic Gumbo Pot
New Orleans cooking is the product of more than two centuries of immigration
by Paul A. Greenberg
They came by the thousands from lands of desperation to streets they had heard were paved with gold. With dreams of prosperity and fortune, they came from Africa, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Croatia, Germany, and everyplace in between.
When the immigrants arrived in New Orleans throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they brought their cooking styles, their seasonings, and their tastes with them. And over time these influences have merged to become contemporary New Orleans cuisine.
It was as if a giant stew cooked over an open, raging fire for a hundred years, with people of varying skin colors, languages, and rituals taking turns stirring the pot. In the end, there was gumbo—the very real Creole-Cajun dish, and the equally real metaphor for everything New Orleanians love to eat.
Native American herbs and spices, combined with cooking artistry of the culinary triumvirate-French, Spanish, and African settlers—begat Creole cooking. But the true beauty of Creole came from the inclusion of all arriving cultures. West Indians added more peppers and allspice and even new vegetables, such as mirlitons, which continue to grace New Orleanian tables. The Haitians knew how to add just enough bitters