Architect Of Brennan's Fabulous Wine Cellar
Jimmy Brennan, 1940-2010
Last Wednesday, while caught in traffic in middle of a rainstorm in East Texas, I got a call from Ted Brennan. His news was grave. Ted's brother Jimmy was dead. When are the services? I asked. They were for family only and had already happened, Ted told me. In fact, Jimmy had died ten days before. Few knew about it. It wasn't in the newspaper until yesterday.
But that seemed right. Jimmy was a very private man. Particularly by the standards of restaurateurs. He left the day-to-day operation of Brennan's on Royal Street to Ted and his other brother Pip. After Pip left the management of the restaurant a couple of years ago, Jimmy became more visible. Indeed, when I went there for dinner one night, I did a double-take when I saw him standing at the corner of the bar, greeting the arriving diners. It was the first time I'd ever seen him at that station.
Not that he was uninvolved. After the break in the Brennan family in 1973, Jimmy came home from Houston (he was managing the Brennan's there) and embarked upon a program that would bring Brennan's a tremendous amount of business and fame. Over a period of years, he filled Brennan's wine cellar with a collection of wine of such distinction that it won the Wine Spectator's top honors every year for a couple of decades.
And those bottles didn't just represent an enormous variety of labels. Brennan's cellar was amazingly wealthy in old vintages from the great wine regions of the world, but especially France. And we're not just talking about the great vintages of the great wines, but oddity vintages of some second- and third-growth Bordeaux.
For example, I recall vividly a 1967 Chateau Cos d'Estournel I had there in the early 1990s. That wine was all of $55. It's incredible then and now that a twenty-year-old claret could go for a price like that. But Jimmy left the prices more or less where they were when he first bought the wines. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was no better wine cellar in New Orleans--and no better bargain. Brennan's wine cellar was Jimmy Brennan's creation and his claim to fame.
I knew Jimmy only well enough to know that he liked to joke around with people, even those he didn't know very well. I hear this is something he picked up from his father Owen, who put the Brennan family in the restaurant business in the first place.
Coincidentally, I was in Houston a few days after hearing the news, and had dinner at Brennan's there. A waiter whose career at Brennan's overlaps Jimmy's tenure in Houston told me, "Customers still ask me about Jimmy all the time, even though he left in 1973," he said. "Everybody liked him. I thought he was a good man."
He died of complications from stomach cancer, a problem he fought for the past decade or more. Jimmy Brennan was seventy when he left us on July 18. The impact of his departure will certainly be felt at the restaurant, where the next generation of Brennans is moving in. I hope the wine cellar will continue its excellence, as a legacy of the man who not only built it in the first place but had to dump it all after Katrina ruined it and rebuild from scratch. The man had both taste and tenacity.