Breakfast at Brennan's, New Orleans

We went to "Breakfast at Brennan's" last Sunday. Brennan's Restaurant on Royal Street in the French Quarter has what is probably the most well-known Sunday brunch in town. While which Sunday brunch is the best may be arguable, nobody can deny that Brennan's is very popular and quite good.

Since we've got small children, we decided to go to brunch later in the afternoon, so we booked reservations for 2:00pm. Brennan's starts seating folks for brunch at 8:00am on Sundays, and the last seating is at 2:30pm. On a typical Sunday, they'll serve over 500 of the various poached egg dishes that have become their trademark. We were earlier getting the kids dropped off at my mother-in-law's place in Gentilly, so we decided to just head down to the Quarter and see what was going on. After taking a bit of a roundabout walk from the car to Brennan's, we arrived at the front door of the restaurant around 1:45pm. We were greeted by a matire 'd, and were immediately seated. The later seating time worked very much in our favor, since the hectic pace of a packed restaurant had eased off a good bit by the afternoon.

Brennan's is very unimposing from the front, which is typical of many buildings in the French Quarter. When the Quarter was first being developed in the 1700s, the streets were where the horses were tied up and the garbage thrown out. You built your home around an interior courtyard, as an escape from the street. This type of architecture tends to throw visitors to the city a good bit. They don't expect the elegance they see when they get inside. We were seated at a table-for-two on the gallery that runs around the courtyard. This gallery used to be an open-air affair, but the restaurant has since glassed-in the courtyard side to make for comfortable table seating.

We were immediately greeted by our waiter, who took our drink orders and gave us menus. The drink prices were my only real gripe with the afternoon. I had a bloody mary and my wife had a mimosa, and the bar tab came to $9. That's just too high in my book, bordering on something you'd find in a clip-joint. Brennan's certainly is no clip-joint, and the other prices are within reason, but first impressions go a long way. Our drinks came fairly quickly, as did a wine list when I requested one. The Brennan's menu offers "suggested wines" for just about every dish, but these suggestions are quite vague, listing just a varietal in some cases, a varietal name and a winery in others, but no vintages at all. The menu clearly says you're welcome to look at the wine list, which is what I did. There was a bit of a time lag between when we got our drinks from the bar and when our order was taken, because it looked like they were treating the four tables-for-two out on the gallery as one larger table as far as the kitchen was concerned. I've often heard restaurant people assert that tables-for-two don't make much money for the house, and that some restaurants go so far as to discourage parties of two by telling out-of-towners that they're all booked up. Since the location of these small tables was such that they had to be tables-for-two, Brennan's gets around this by serving them all at once. This meant we had to wait until the others at these tables were seated, got drinks, etc. We were in no hurry, and the extra wait was only about 10 minutes, so I let it slide. It gave me a chance to fully explore the breakfast menu.

Brennan's breakfast menu includes a wide range of a la carte items, including grillades and grits, several veal dishes, omelettes, even a steak or two. The centerpiece of the menu, and the most popular, is the fixed-price ($35) meal that usually revolves around one of the poached-egg dishes. These egg dishes are essentially variants of Eggs Benedict. Here's a quick breakdown of some of them:

Eggs Benedict -- Canadian bacon and a poached egg on half a Holland rusk, topped with hollandaise sauce.
Eggs Ellen -- Poached eggs on salmon filets, topped with hollandaise sauce.
Eggs Hussarde -- Holland rusks topped with Canadian bacon, then marchand de vin sauce, then poached eggs, then hollandaise sauce.
Eggs St. Charles -- Breaded and fried trout filets topped with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce.
Eggs Sardou -- Creamed spinich toped with artichoke bottoms, poached eggs, and hollandaise sauce.

This is a sampling of the dishes; there are about half a dozen more. My wife Helen choose Eggs Hussarde, and I went for Eggs St. Charles. The fixed-price meal includes an appetizer and dessert. For appetizers Helen picked the baked apple in cream and I had the onion soup, and we both ordered Bananas Foster for dessert. We ordered a bottle of Koala Chardonnay from Australia. Even though I asked for a wine list, this thing caught my eye off of the regular menu, it was decently priced ($19/bottle), so I figured what the heck.

Once the orders were taken for all four of the small tables, things got moving. We were immediately brought some good, warm cap bread to munch on. The wine shortly followed, and wasn't bad at all. The appetizers came out in good order. Helen's apple smelled full of cinnamon. My onion soup was brought out in a small metal container, similar to what you find at a hotel for room service. Our waiter poured the soup into a china bowl to serve it at the table. This reminded me of a bit of Brennan's trivia--the restaurant's kitchen is one of the smallest in the city for a restaurant of its size. Because the restaurant used to be a private home, the layout makes getting hot food from the kitchen over to the dining rooms on the opposite side of the place difficult. Keeping things in metal and well covered does the trick, as the soup was still steaming when set in front of me. Brennan's onion soup is a hearty beef stock, lots of onions, and french bread croutons. No heavy layer of cheese on top that you'll find at other restaurants, but good all the same. Helen's baked apple was a good bit ligher, but the natural sugar of the apple and the cinnamon sprinkled on it made the cream in the bottom of the dish just wonderful to slurp up.

There was yet another pause for synchronization as the four tables completed their appetizers, but the wait staff was quite attentive, keeping water glasses and coffee cups filled. I guess I'm just too much of a New Orleanian, but I declined coffee until dessert. We chatted and picked on the bread while they got everything together, and the entrees appeared at the end of the gallery. My Eggs St. Charles were excellent. There was one nice-sized (8-10 inch) fried trout filet, upon which was set two poached eggs that were smothered in hollandaise sauce. I could smell the green onions and beef stock in the marchand de vin sauce on Helen's Eggs Hussarde, and for a brief moment, I almost regretted not getting that dish. Not a problem, of course, since there was so much food that I was easily able to swipe a good taste of hers. More fresh hot french bread came out with the entrees, and we dug in. The yolks Brennan's poached eggs tend to be on the runny side. This is OK by me, but if you like your eggs a bit more cooked, you should speak up. My trout was excellent, and would have made a great meal in itself. The eggs were cooked just right. Helen's Eggs Hussarde was quite good. Marchand de vin sauce is one of my all-time favorite things to eat, whether it's on eggs, steak, or chicken. The combination of that sauce and Eggs Benedict is really neat.

The wine was a buttery chardonnay, not overly sophisticated (which was not unexpected from a less expensive bottle). As usual, the wine was overchilled, a not-uncommon thing to have happen in New Orleans. I invariably take the bottle out of the ice bucket and set it on the table after the waiter opens and pours the first glass. On days like this one, the service was leisurely enough that the wine warmed up a bit and didn't have that cold bite to it.

My second minor gripe to the afternoon came as we were finishing up our eggs. We had ordered Bananas Foster for dessert, and it appeared that several folks at the other small tables had done so also. The logistics of preparing the bananas at tableside for these tables were just too much, so the waiter made the dish at the end of the gallery. Had I realized this, I would have sat Helen down on my side of the table, since I had the perfect view to watch the waiter flame the dish as he prepared it. She had to turn around and almost missed the event. The dessert was served right after the dishes were cleared and the french bread crumbs were scraped off the table. Brennan's is one of those classic New Orleans restaurants where you don't get a bread dish. You just break off a piece of the loaf in the basket and put it down on the tablecloth. No problem, no breach of manners, the waiter just scrapes the tablecloth and you're back in business. Our Bananas Foster was good, but Helen complained that I use more bananas at home when I make it than Brennan's serves. (This is probably true, since I deliberately let a banana or two go over-ripe as an excuse to prepare this sinfully rich dessert at home.) I'm not a big enough coffee drinker to tell you which brand I had with my dessert, but it was good, strong New Orleans-style coffee with chicory.

It was good that the place was in no hurry to get rid of us, because we were stuffed. We lounged at the table for a few minutes, and it was time to settle up. The bill came to $100 even for the meal, wine and tax, and the bar tab was $9. I tipped the waiter $21, so the total came up to $130. As meals at New Orleans restaurants go, this is on the high side. Last time we went to Galatoire's a few months ago, we got out for under $100, and the same for Tujague's and Mr. B's. Of course, we ordered a $19 bottle of wine, when we'll opt for a single glass each on other occasions.

I've mentioned the problems I had with the meal as I've gone along. It's interesting that we didn't experience the one major gripe I've heard from others over the last few months. I'm a big fan of Breakfast at Brennan's, and I've received one or two negative comments when I have recommend this meal to folks on rec.food.restaurants. The comments usually mention that people felt they were treated in an assembly-line manner, and were rushed along. I guess coming later in the day helped with the crowd situation, although our waiter and the bus staff were all very professional. Judging by the other waiters I saw around us in the other rooms, this is a first-class staff. Things might get rough when they're really packed, but I suspect that problems are the exception rather than the rule. The only other negative to the meal is the fact that Brennan's has all but eliminated a dress code for brunch. Time was that you'd require folks to dress up a bit for brunch (nice casual clothes, no jacket required but many men would wear one). The crowd at our meal looked like they were a cut above "no shirt, no shoes, no service." You could easily tell the tourists from the locals, not because of the Banana Republic shopping bags, but because the locals ladies had on nice pants or dresses on, while the touritst were in shorts and tennis shoes. There's really something incongruous about people dressing like absolute slobs in such elegant surroundings, but I suppose this is the price one must pay when a city caters to visitors like we do.

We considered another drink out on the courtyard, but decided it might be better to head out and walk off some of this wonderful meal. We took another roundabout route back to the car, passing along Woldenberg Park on the river, where there was a small Latin festival going on. Nice music, and the food smelled interesting, although neither of us were exactly in an eating mood. With that, it was time to return to the real world and rescue Granny from the kids.

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