Frank: A Love Story

Why do we love restaurants? One answer may lie in a small house at the outer edge of New Orleans. There you’ll find the great statesman of Creole cooking and the spiritual heir to his mentor Paul Prudhomme. Over a 50-year career, Frank Brigtsen has won all the top accolades and the respect and affection of his regulars, peers, and staff — all while weathering a catastrophic flood, a destructive oil spill, and a worldwide pandemic. But cooking is a full contact sport.

Words by Michael Oates Palmer | Photos by Cedric Angeles

He found his place.

He had looked at 10 other spaces. Nothing was quite right. But when he approached the white shotgun at 723 Dante Street, he had a feeling. One step inside, and he knew. This was where his restaurant would be. 

He was 31 years old, and he was still working in the kitchen of one of the most famous restaurants in the country, the restaurant that said, here’s what we in Louisiana have to offer, and in so doing, paved the way for regional cuisines everywhere across America. He would be working there up until the very week before his own place opened, when Chef Paul would hand him his last paycheck and say, “You better open quick.” 

He knew he didn’t want to be in the French Quarter. When K-Paul’s began, it was only locals, businesspeople from the neighborhood coming for lunch. But when it became a sensation, the out-of-towners took over. Locals stopped going. He would open a K-Paul’s for locals. To have that, it had to be uptown. 

He knew he wanted it small. He had handled high volume at Commander’s Palace; he knew he could do that — a night of 500 covers. But he didn’t want to. A smaller space would be personal. Cook the food to order, get it out hot. He told the real estate agent he didn’t want anything more than 75 seats. But this house couldn’t even fit that. Maybe 50? Perfect. Two seatings a night meant 100 covers. 

It would feel like a neighborhood restaurant. Because that’s what it was. It would feel homey. Because it was a home.

Just before it opened in March 1986, they would ask Frank Brigtsen what kind of restaurant it was going to be. He didn’t really have an answer. 

He would just say he wanted a great New Orleans restaurant.

He knew what that meant.

Frank Brigtsen in his restaurant on Dante Street, New Orleans.

• • •

What is it about a restaurant in a house? 

You feel like someone invited you into their home and whipped up a little something, just for you. 

And if it’s not just a house, but an old house? You feel the history rise from the walls, as the ghosts join you at the table.

It took a while for me to find this restaurant in an old house at the city’s edge. I came late to New Orleans, but, once hooked, I made up for lost time, coming back every year. I found my favorites, the must-returns. But on each new trip, I left slots open — eating your way through New Orleans requires strategy as it does antacid — both for brand-new spots and classics I had somehow passed over. 

Like a boy and his baseball cards, I was a completist. I’d ask my local friends before each visit: Where next? What am I missing?

One friend didn’t blink. You would really like Brigtsen’s.

I’d seen it on lists. They mentioned Frank Brigtsen as a protégé of Paul Prudhomme, arguably the first celebrity chef, inarguably the one who put Louisiana cooking on the map. But I hadn’t gone. Maybe because I assumed a 30-plus-year-old restaurant would be stuffy or staid. Maybe because it was on the other side of town from where I usually stayed.

Then one night, the same friend drove me up a quiet street in Riverbend, a neighborhood far uptown. We were just a few feet from the train tracks and, beyond them, the levees that protect the city from its defining river. I looked up at the house. It was hard not to find it charming from the curb. 

Inside was not the most beautiful restaurant I had ever seen. There was the wall-to-wall carpet, a blue-green one shade away from billiard felt. There were the walls painted in powder blue and pale yellow. There was at least one piece of flamingo art. It felt a little dated.

But there was also a warm woman in her 60s behind the maître d’ stand, who greeted us with a smile as she looked into a large reservations book to find my name, written in pencil.

The restaurant’s tables were scattered across three rooms and the enclosed front porch. Seated in what was once a living room, I looked around, conversation coming from every table. 

Something was different here.

Two hours later, I took the last bite of a pecan pie in caramel sauce. It was a dessert which, after finishing, you either make an unintelligible grunt of approval or an all-too-intelligible shout of a word you shouldn’t use in polite company. I recall doing both. 

For a moment, I felt angry — no one but myself to blame — that on so many visits to New Orleans, it took me until now to find this.

I looked across the table. “Why didn’t you tell me?” 

My friend gave me a look. “I’ve been telling you for years.” 

But mostly, I felt that rush of new love, what relationship experts call limerence. After settling the bill, I stood up from my chair and stormed the kitchen. I wanted to thank the man responsible. (Yes, I had a couple of drinks. But I hadn’t had that many drinks.) I wanted to let him know how much I loved what he was doing here. I wanted to tell him that I would tell everyone I knew back home how good this all was, how special this all was.

Converts, after all, are the greatest zealots.

Inviting and unpretentious but serious about its culinary craft, Brigtsen’s has everything writer Michael Oates Palmer could want from a restaurant.

• • •

The first thing to celebrate this New Year’s Eve: There is no special New Year’s Eve menu at Brigtsen’s. 

There are no party hats. No confetti or noisemakers, either. The later seating won’t go late. When the clock strikes midnight, everyone will be elsewhere. 

It’s 5 p.m., the start of the first seating, and I’m seated at the chef’s table, down the side gallery from the maître d’ stand. Hung along the hallway are totems and talismans of a near 40-year history. The medal for the James Beard Award, Best Chef: Southeast, a placard announcing Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs. 

I spot a prayer candle of the chef in a crown and Mardi Gras beads. Above my table is a small painted sign: GOT MY MOJO WORKIN’. Next to the Beard is a small painting of a yellow Labrador retriever. The kitsch makes it clear: we don’t take ourselves that seriously.

Closer to the front door hangs a black-and-white photo of a young couple, sweetly smiling from the steps of this house. The man, in chef’s whites and a toque, rests his hands on the woman’s shoulders. But they’re not alone. To the left of them, just a step down the stairs, stands a heavy-set bearded man, older than them, resting one hand on a cane. He smiles the widest of all. In his white cap, white tie, white suit, he could be their guardian angel.

My server tonight, Amanda, has short hair, tattoos, and earrings the size of small chandeliers. She brings me my cocktail, a Pink and Sparkly, a blend of tequila, sparkling rosé, and grapefruit. “Like if a Paloma and a French 75 had a baby,” she says.

She takes my order. I’ll start with the filé gumbo with chicken and Andouille sausage. But just a cup, not a bowl, because then I’ll have the veal sweetbreads, with mushrooms, capers, and lemon roasted garlic butter. Then the roast duck  à l’orange with dirty rice. When I finish my entrée, I will order the pecan pie. 

There are worse ways to close out the year. There are few better places to do so: this city, this restaurant. No noisemakers needed. This feels festive enough.

I take a sip, and take in my surroundings. Restaurants have been through so much these last few years. Maybe nowhere more so than New Orleans. 

I think about why some restaurants work for us and others don’t. Why we return to some again and again. Why some last, despite the hurdles in a business that has only become harder. 

I think about why this restaurant works. It begins with this: everything is here tonight that I could want from a restaurant.

Everything, that is, except Frank Brigtsen himself.

• • •

“He’s a badass. He’s a pillar. And he doesn’t act like it,” says Sara Roahen. 

Roahen lives in San Luis Obispo, but for years worked in New Orleans as a food critic and writer. Her Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table (2008) is my favorite book about the Crescent City, one I give to friends planning first trips here. 

She has interviewed Frank Brigtsen several times over the years. But that doesn’t mean she feels any closer to knowing him.

“I can get really excited about eating at his restaurant and what he does with his food,” Roahen says. “But Frank as a person is a bit of a mystery.”

I think about this as I drive to River Ridge, a suburb 15 minutes from the restaurant. At a time when young chefs can obsess over image, brand, and empire, it’s rare — even quaint — for a chef to let his food speak for itself. But mystery makes you wonder more.

The single-story ranch house is still draped with Christmas lights. Frank’s wife Marna welcomes me inside, her energy and smile younger than the age on her driver’s license. More than 40 years ago, she followed her sisters to New Orleans, the last stop on a trajectory that began in Williston, a small town in North Dakota, a half hour from the Montana border. As she shows me to the dining room, we’re joined by the yellow lab from the painting. Bella is very friendly and very well-fed. 

In walks Frank. His enviable head of graying hair, usually slicked back, is as thick as ever, his kind eyes large behind his glasses. It’s the only time I have seen him in person where he isn’t in his chef’s whites. It’s also the only time I’ve seen him connected to oxygen. Frank was hit hard by the flu around Christmas, and it exacerbated his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. 

A lifelong smoker — he smoked filtered Camels until “I quit last week” — he was diagnosed with COPD five years ago. When the flu took a turn, Frank drove himself to urgent care. They sent him in an ambulance to the hospital, where he spent four nights. He was discharged three days before we met.

Frank turned 70 in December 2024, but even with the tubes in his nose, he’s still a tall, striking man, with the good looks of a 1940s film noir contract player. I wasn’t sure what to expect when he emailed me from the hospital. Given what he has just gone through, he looks good, if subdued.

But we have good reason to be subdued. It’s New Year’s Day: I woke to text messages, worried I was anywhere near the early morning attack in the French Quarter, where a terrorist drove a pick-up truck into a crowd, killing 14. 

Frank and Marna watched the news this morning, until it was too much. They switched channels to Turner Classic Movies, finding needed distraction in “A Hard Day’s Night.” 

New Orleans headlines over the last 30 years read like a Job-worthy gantlet of tests. Hurricane Katrina, of course. But also Deepwater Horizon, the aftermath of 9/11. Covid. Now this. 

From across the table, Frank shakes his head. “I don’t want anybody to call me resilient anymore,” he says. “I don’t want to have to be. Y’know? I’m watching some news conference. And I’m thinking, ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say it. He said it!’ It’s like ‘thoughts and prayers’ and the shootings.”

Two days later, I’ll read a headline in The New York Times — “New Orleans Was Called Resilient After Attack. It Didn’t Need the Reminder.” I will hope Frank didn’t see it. 

But now he takes a sip of tea. He rests his cup.

“But we are willing to fight for this place.”

Frank mastered classic New Orleans dishes, then made them entirely his own.

• • •

He was born a fourth-generation New Orleanian. 

His great-grandfather came to New Orleans from Norway. Frank’s father, Frank Brigtsen, Sr., was a war hero, landing at Normandy the day after D-Day. He earned two bronze stars. Like many of the Greatest Generation, he didn’t talk about what he saw or did once he came home. 

Ernie Yelverton, a country girl from Uniontown, Alabama, moved to New Orleans for nursing school. While working in Baptist Hospital, she treated a patient fighting ovarian cancer. The patient had a son. That’s how Frank’s parents met.

Frank Sr. was a brick salesman, a very good one. He was so good, his boss bought him a model home in River Ridge as a bonus. The young family moved there when Frank Jr. was a few months old; the second child and first son, he’d eventually have two more siblings.

His father started his own company. In the 1960s, if you built a house in Jefferson Parish, it was made with Frank Brigtsen brick. The elder Brigtsen was an extrovert in a way his son was not: quick with a joke, active in Rotary Club and golf club, a guy who bought a boat as a business expense so he could entertain clients. 

Frank’s mom was a great cook. Ernie learned to please her husband’s palate: gumbo, red beans and rice, oyster dressing at Thanksgiving. But hers was a hybrid Southern-Creole kitchen: she made fried catfish and grits, too.

It was a happy childhood. There were Sunday trips with his father to the amusement rides at City Park. There was cabbage ball, popular in New Orleans, a glove-less cousin to baseball with a larger ball. There were regular dinners out, the family dressing up to go eat Italian Creole. 

And there were the fishing trips. He loved that time with his father. They would leave at four in the morning, coming back in the afternoon with two full ice boxes, sometimes 40 speckled trout! His mother would ask Frank to clean the fish. Using a pocket knife, the 10-year-old would work under their carport until dark.

He went to Catholic schools the whole way through. His senior year at De La Salle, he took a half-day class called Humanities that changed how he looked at the world. He soaked up Martin Luther King Jr. like a sponge; he wrote about apartheid in South Africa for his term paper. More and more, the status quo irked him. “What it created in me was a great sense of not just equality, but that everybody deserves a chance,” he says. “Everybody deserves an opportunity to become the person they want to be.”

I don’t realize yet how this will come up as if it were both credo and mantra. Everyone deserves a chance. Everybody deserves an opportunity. 

Young Frank’s own future seemed full of opportunity. Then, overnight, everything changed. 

When Frank was 17, his father suffered a debilitating stroke. Only 52, he lost the use of his entire left side. Ernie Brigtsen tried to run the business, but they soon sold it. She returned to nursing to help with the family’s finances. Frank Sr., despondent and depressed, turned to drink. “He was home for the next 25 years,” Frank says. “And it was not pretty.”

As the oldest son, did he feel pressure to stay in New Orleans and help run the family business? It’s hard to imagine Frank — a self-described shy teen and introvert — as a glad-handed salesman. “He expected a lot out of me,” he softly says. “And I could not deliver. I was 18, and I was ready to get out.”

Even now, he harbors some guilt over the need to go his own way. That became harder when he made another decision. He had done well at math and drawing in high school and planned to major in architecture. But a few weeks before leaving for Baton Rouge, he switched his major to fine arts. 

His father was furious. Architecture was at least a trade. But fine arts? He wasn’t going to pay for that! So he cut Frank off.  

Frank now understands the impasse as a generational divide. And his father wasn’t alone. When his mother discovered poetry Frank had written in his bedroom, she threw it all away. The hurt’s still there, the pain of not being understood, this many years later.

Behind her husband’s back, Ernie Brigtsen slipped Frank a little money to cover tuition. At LSU, he studied drawing, painting, creative writing. He also learned how to drink: his favorite art teacher would convene class at a bar at 11 a.m. He grew his hair long. He was free. 

Well, sort of free. If he wanted any spending money, he needed a job. He joined two buddies at a Blimpie sub shop. He’d meet his first wife there; they were too young, and the marriage only lasted a few years. 

Next, he cooked at a pasta joint. The manager was skeptical of the hippie art student. Until one LSU game day, when Frank did 740 covers in five hours. His manager revised his opinion, promoting Frank to night manager. Frank hated it. The introvert found the greet-and-seat of it painful. 

“Everybody in our industry makes this decision,” he says. “Am I going to be front of the house or back? The servers make really good money. I’m back here sweating and slaving for a lot less. But I like this.” 

After five years, Frank left LSU without a degree. He headed back to New Orleans. Things with his father hadn’t changed; he only went home if he had to. But he found an apartment uptown and a job as a prep cook. 

When that restaurant sold to a new owner, Frank quit. When his apartment building sold, he was evicted. Then his car died. He asked his mother if he could move home. Tail between his legs, he was soon sitting in his parents’ living room with a bottle of Scotch and a pack of cigarettes. After two weeks, he knew it was an untenable situation. 

One morning, Frank picked up the want ads. Something caught his eye.

Commander’s Palace Now Hiring
Creole Chefs or People Willing
to Learn Creole Cuisine

He asked his mother for a ride.

• • •

When Brett Anderson moved to New Orleans in 2000 to be the restaurant critic of The Times-Picayune, there was no shortage of people eager to share with him their thoughts. And they had a lot of thoughts.

There were the locals who lined up to tell the new guy what he didn’t understand about New Orleans. Which seemed to amount to: We only care if the food’s delicious. We don’t care about that other bullshit.

But more annoying were the warnings from colleagues in the national food media. “They told me I would get bored quickly,” Anderson says. “That it’s a town where a thousand chefs all make the same 10 recipes.” 

From Anderson’s very first visit, Brigtsen’s countered that stereotype. It continued New Orleans food in the tradition, but was completely personal. Frank’s take on meunière, gumbo, remoulade are all uniquely his, says Anderson. “He’s one of the last of a dying breed, where you can see the classic repertory of New Orleans cuisine in the hands of a really brilliant interpreter.” 

To elaborate, Anderson points to another art form with deep roots in New Orleans. “Think of it as jazz. Not everyone’s version of ‘Summertime’ is the same. Authorship isn’t everything. Frank’s restaurant, as much as any other restaurant, taught me that. As a chef, you can express yourself through interpretation.”

Since 2019, Anderson has written for The New York Times, where he continues to hail Frank Brigtsen’s food. Brigtsen’s earned a spot on the Times 2021 Restaurant List, “the 50 places in America we’re most excited about right now,” as well as 2023’s “25 Best Restaurants in New Orleans Right Now.”

In those lists and in our conversation — full disclosure, Anderson is a good friend — he salutes Brigsten’s expert blending of Creole and Cajun. “It’s fusion food that never crosses state lines.”

I remember my first visit. The flavors came not as uppercuts to the temple, nor so subtle you worried you missed something. Every sauce left you tearing off a hunk of the Leidenheimer loaf to sop up any drop still on the plate. 

This was mature, smart, soulful cooking by someone who knew what he was doing. When you talk to Frank, it becomes clear how much he’s thought about cooking (a lot) and how much it’s been informed by 50 years in kitchens (see above). 

Brigtsen’s is known for the roast duck and the speckled trout meunière. But the dish Frank wants to walk me through is his broiled gulf fish with crab crust. 

“In the late eighties, crusted this and crusted that was a buzzword in menus,” Frank says. So he decided to make a fish that had a crust similar to fried fish. Without actually frying it. 

He made a crab dressing, then put it really, really thin on top of the fish, cooking it under the broiler to get it brown and crusty. The menu describes it having a lemon crab sauce. Frank lists the components: “Onions, celery, leeks, bay leaf, sliced fresh lemons, a couple pounds of fresh jumbo crabs cooked, cooked, cooked, with crab stock on top to double the flavor, a little turmeric to make it yellow because it’s lemon, and blond roux to give it body. Then strain it all.” 

The result? A rich, velvety, buttery lemon crab flavor. Frank smiles: “I’m a sauce guy.”

A conversation with Frank Brigtsen is full of animated faces, sound effects, gestures (including, when necessary, flipping the bird), and emphases. Just because he identifies as an introvert doesn’t mean he isn’t a charming storyteller. But talking about his creative process, he becomes even more enthusiastic. 

“Creating a recipe, I already have a sense of where I’m going. Then, as I put it together, ‘What if I … BOOM!’ And that is creativity,” says Frank. “That’s why I love pot cooking. I could make soups and gumbos all day.”  

For Frank, to be a Creole chef, and practicing its blend of French, Spanish, West African, Native American, and Southern culinary traditions, means not just being familiar with techniques, but history. It’s not always a pretty one. 

“When you make a gumbo, you’re carrying hundreds of years of heritage,” he says. “And if it’s okra gumbo, you’re carrying the history of slavery — of Africans who smuggled okra seeds in their hair when they were put on slave ships, not knowing where they were going, but they brought home with them. 

 “And so I honor that when I eat okra gumbo. I think about the cruelty of slavery every single time.”

You can find Frank’s okra gumbo on the menu in the summer, when okra’s in season. But it’s not just about great ingredients, but what you do with them. Which brings us back to that pecan pie. “When you get a really great ingredient that you want to showcase, don’t cover it up. Double down.” 

In the pie, raw pecan pieces will roast in the oven as the pie bakes. But in the filling, he also mixes in ground pecans he’s already roasted. “So you get that deep roasted pecan flavor already. They float up underneath the larger ones,” he says. “If you buy pecans, 15 dollars a pound, and start eating them out of the box, you’re wasting your money. Roasting is where the flavor is.”

What would he would tell a first-time visitor to order? 

“If this is your first time to Brigtsen’s, your first taste should be the butternut shrimp bisque,” Frank says. It’s a dish that brings people back.

Frank only discovered butternut squash when a Los Angeles charity event in the 1980s introduced him to produce unseen in Louisiana. Soon, like a black market smuggler, he was procuring, and like a mad scientist in the lab, he was experimenting.

“Creole food is not hot and spicy,” he says. “Creole food is well seasoned. What we in Louisiana do not like is flat-tasting food, where there’s something missing in the middle.” 

So he uses two peppers — white and cayenne — not to make the bisque spicy, but so that each leaves a different taste on the palate. The result is what he describes as a progression of sensations — a start, middle, and finish. That sensation, he says, makes you want more. 

“It leaves a memory.”

• • •

Ella Brennan had something to prove.

In 1969, she bought a sprawling, decaying restaurant that sat across from a cemetery. But Commander’s Palace struggled, leading to a fractious family split: Ella got fired from Brennan’s, the restaurant her late brother Owen had started and that she helped run. So she and her brother Dick retrenched, overhauling Commander’s in hopes of creating the premier New Orleans restaurant — and in doing so, eclipsing Brennan’s and the family members who expelled them.

Then, in 1975, she hired Paul Prudhomme as executive chef.

This was notable. Not necessarily because of any reputation Prudhomme brought to the table. He had only moved to New Orleans a few years earlier, working in kitchens at French Quarter hotels, including the one where he met a server, Kay “K” Hinrichs, who became his wife.

It was notable for where he was from.

“I remember picking up the newspaper, and seeing on the front page, ‘Ellen and Dick Brennan hire Cajun chef at Commander’s Palace,’” Frank says. “It was front page news that they hired an American Cajun.” Before Prudhomme, Commander’s had only hired French chefs.

A native of Opelousas, a historic city two-and-a-half hours northwest of New Orleans that calls itself the Zydeco Capital of the World, Paul Prudhomme wasn’t just any Cajun. At Commander’s, with the Brennans’ blessing, he began to execute a new French-Creole cuisine, unafraid to draw from the bounty of Louisiana — including Cajun ingredients that had only recently been seen as too “country.”

He replaced the almonds in the Trout Almondine with pecans. He added Andouille sausage to the gumbo — now so commonplace, it’s hard to imagine New Orleans without it. As Brett Anderson explains, “Frank has told me that the first time Tasso ham ever came inside the Orleans Parish line was when Paul Prudhomme brought it in his truck to Commander’s.” 

“For all intents and purposes, Paul Prudhomme introduced Cajun food to New Orleans,” says Anderson. “Those two styles of food, Cajun and Creole, are now so intertwined in New Orleans restaurants for so long, there is no border.”

This was the world Frank Brigtsen would enter that day in August, 1978, when his parents drove him to the Lower Garden District to answer a want ad. On the patio of Commander’s, he and 30 other hopefuls filled out applications. Then he was brought in to speak with Chef Paul. 

Prudhomme wasn’t even 40, but he was regal — rotund in size, bearded, a dead ringer for the comedian Dom DeLuise. He didn’t ask the standard job interview questions. He wanted to have a real conversation. He wanted to get to know Frank.

After an hour, Prudhomme said, “Good, Frank. Come back next week. We’ll talk again.”

The next week, the crowd on the patio was whittled down to a dozen. Again, Frank was brought in to talk to Chef Paul. Again, it lasted an hour. “Great, Frank. Come back next week. We’ll talk again.”

The next week, Prudhomme had culled the group to five. In their conversation, toward the end, Prudhomme asked him where he saw himself in 10 years. What did he want out of life?

Frank had never verbalized it before. “I’d like to have my own little place one day,” he said.

Prudhomme considered him. “We’re going to give you a chance, but you have a choice,” he said. “We’ll hire you for the broiler station. You’ll be paid good money. And we’ll expect a lot out of you.”

Prudhomme paused. “Or, you can start as an apprentice in the pantry and make very little money. But you can expect a lot out of me.” 

Frank couldn’t say pantry fast enough. Over the next months, he worked his way across every station, excelling at each opportunity. Along the way, he absorbed the education that would inform a lifetime. “I did not go to culinary school. I went to the school of Creole hard knocks,” he says. He learned not just from Prudhomme, but “the greatest Creole chefs you’ve never heard of,” the line cooks.

While still working for the Brennans, Prudhomme opened a small spot with his wife in the French Quarter in 1979. They named it K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, a portmanteau of their names. It was only open Monday through Friday, only for lunch, no reservations. But though it was casual, it was by no means unserious. Something big was starting to happen there.

Frank was setting up for a Sunday brunch at Commander’s, six months into his time there. Chef Paul watched from a nearby stool. 

“Frank?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“How do you feel about sauces?”

“I really like them.”

“Let me rephrase that. How would you like to come work for me at K-Paul’s, and let me teach you the nuances of sauce making?”

Another opportunity. Frank didn’t blink. 

Prudhomme was still under contract at Commander’s for another few months. He’d go into K-Paul’s at five in the morning, start the pot cooking, set up the line. Frank would arrive at 10:30 a.m. They’d talk over the lunch menu. Then Prudhomme would leave for Commander’s, leaving Frank to cook with only a pantry helper and a dishwasher.

But Prudhomme brought Frank over for a purpose: help open K-Paul’s for dinner. Frank has often told the story of the night he watched Chef Paul mosey into the kitchen, season a piece of redfish, drag it through butter, and drop it into a smoking hot skillet. Through a cloud of smoke, Prudhomme turned it, put it on a plate, and had Frank take the very first bite of blackened redfish at K-Paul’s. 

It was the best fish he’d ever tasted. And it was one of the reasons the restaurant didn’t just become a hit. It became a phenomenon. 

This was helped by the prodigious personality and ambition of its chef and owner. Prudhomme soon became a superstar, thanks to guest spots on talk shows, his popular cookbooks, even a food company that sold Cajun Magic and other spice blends nationwide. Blackened fish and chicken soon became ubiquitous on menus across the country.

And just as at Commander’s, Frank found new opportunities to prove himself. One from 1980 stands out. Prudhomme and K had left for New York; the chef was making his first national TV appearance on “The Today Show.” 

It snowed that day in New Orleans. Not much, but being New Orleans, the mayor declared a state of emergency that afternoon, asking all downtown businesses to close so employees could get home safely. 

Frank called Prudhomme in New York and explained the situation. “The mayor’s asked us to close. We’re here. What should I do?” There was a pregnant pause on the other end. Then Prudhomme said, “Frank, do what you think is best.”

They opened. Frank even made them open 15 minutes early, welcoming customers waiting outside. (With no reservations, patrons would line up, hoping for one of the 50 seats.) Frank felt that “if we’re going to do it, let’s fucking do it.” 

They did it. 254 covers across 50 seats. It was a record, beating the previous one by 40 covers.

A few days later, Prudhomme returned from New York. “I’m in the kitchen, and Chef comes strolling in with his cane, this shit-eating grin on his face.”

“I heard you broke a record,” said Prudhomme.

“Yeah. I did.”

More than 40 years later, Frank still savors it. Prudhomme obviously saw something in him, bringing him over from Commander’s. But was this the moment when Frank earned the chef’s favor for life?

Frank is moved thinking about it. “He believed in me. He gave me a chance. My dad wouldn’t give me a chance. He did.”

It’s not just respect, admiration, or creative awe for Prudhomme that’s evident. It’s also filial love. Belief in us — is there a greater gift from a mentor? Or, for that matter, a parent, even a surrogate one?

Prudhomme once called Frank out from the kitchen. Frank found him seated in the dining room with a few guests. “Frank, I want you to meet Michael and Ariane Batterberry,” said Chef Paul, introducing Frank to the founders of Food & Wine. “And this is our executive chef, Frank Brigtsen.”

As Frank tells the story, he goes slack-jawed, reliving his shock.

Had he been given the title of executive chef before this? 

Frank shakes his head. No. 

This was how he found out he was named executive chef? 

Frank nods. Yes. 

But what did he think his title was at this point? 

Frank shrugs. “I just walked home every Friday with my 200 in cash.”

As Prudhomme’s rocket soared into the stratosphere, Frank enjoyed the ride. In the sweltering summer months, Prudhomme would sometimes shut K-Paul’s down, opening shop in San Francisco or New York for a month, a precursor to pop-ups. Frank would go, too. Prudhomme would fly around the country to charity events. Frank would go, too.

Sitting at his dining room table, Frank appreciates how fortuitous his timing was. “The development of my career happened to coincide almost exactly with the development, appreciation, and acknowledgment of regional American cuisine starting around 1980,” he says and then rattles off the marquee names: Paul Prudhomme. Alice Waters. Larry Forgione. Wolfgang Puck.

But something even more fortuitous was about to unfold.

Sandy Hanson came from San Francisco for Mardi Gras and fell in love with the city. Her friend K Prudhomme hired her as one of K-Paul’s’ first servers. A few years later, Sandy’s sister Rhonda followed from San Francisco, becoming a K-Paul’s bartender. 

But it turned out there was a third Hanson sister, who had followed her siblings out from California. Frank invited Sandy and Rhonda over to see his new apartment in the French Quarter. When they rang the doorbell, Frank went out onto his second-floor balcony to greet them down on the street. Standing with them was Marna. “We made eye contact. That was it. We knew right then and there.”

Six months later, Frank moved in with Marna and her sisters in their house in the Bywater. In the summer of 1985, when K-Paul’s opened for a month in New York, Frank proposed over Champagne and views of the city at Windows on the World. They wed that October.

As for Paul Prudhomme, he was not through giving Frank Brigtsen opportunities. He moved Frank into purchasing; Frank saw this as a hurtful demotion. What he didn’t realize was that Prudhomme was training him for what was to come.

One day, Prudhomme called him out to his table. K, who headed the front of the house, sat there, too. 

Frank had now worked for Prudhomme for seven years. Chef Paul could be demanding and tough. But Frank had seen that if you worked hard, Prudhomme would help you along the way. Frank saw him do it so many times. Even so, he didn’t know what this was about.

“Sit down, Frank.”

He did as told. 

“We think you’re ready to go out on your own.”

Yes, Chef.

“We remember that time you burned your hand so badly. But you kept one hand in the sink and continued to cook, as otherwise you would’ve had to close.”

Chef Paul remembered that?

“We remembered that time it snowed, and you opened anyway and broke the record.”

They remembered that story, too. They remembered every story. Frank now saw it: the Prudhommes saw him. 

Paul Prudhomme smiled at his chef. “Let’s make this happen.”

• • •

Homey. It’s a quality that’s hard to define, but you know it when you feel it. The food is key to that, of course. But what about what’s not on the plate? What about service and atmosphere?

At Brigtsen’s, it begins with Frank and Marna’s presence. The restaurant owners are actually in the restaurant. This, along with the setting and size, gives it all the cozy vibe of a Mom and Pop restaurant. 

Larry Miller and his wife, chef Nina Compton, own and run two acclaimed culinary additions to New Orleans in the past decade: Compère Lapin and Bywater American Bistro. 

Miller remembers his first visit to Brigtsen’s. “It very much felt like you were in somebody’s home,” he says. “It’s not just the décor. It’s that Frank’s wife and her sisters work there, too. It felt like being at somebody’s house for an extremely good dinner party.” 

So it’s Mom, Pop, and two aunts. Marna is CFO and co-owner, while one sister, Rhonda Madach, is general manager: they tag team on all things financial and administrative. The other sister, Sandy Hanson, works there, too, all three taking turns at the maître d’ stand. With their reservation system, one of them will be there during the day to answer the phone. 

Yes, phone. There’s no OpenTable or Resy account. When you make a reservation at Brigtsen’s, you call their number and talk to someone, who enters your name, in pencil, into the Book of Life. Brigtsen’s doesn’t require credit cards for reservations. “I want an honorable agreement,” Frank says. He and Marna want it all to be personable. His guests like the human connection, so the book will remain.

It’s a choice Frank and Marna have made that could be described as analog. There are others.

Let’s start with social media. Oh, Frank has it. And he uses it. But at a time when a restaurant’s Instagram might be written by a social media manager or publicist, Frank’s Instagram posts are clearly written by the man himself. (He only hired a publicist once, for the restaurant’s 10th anniversary. Nice person. It fizzled.) 

Sure, he posts photos of food. But here’s a video capturing the sound of cicadas outside his house last August. Here’s a lizard peering over a lawn chair by his pool. Here’s a yard sign calling for New Orleans to VOTE FOR WOMEN’S LIB AGAIN. 

At a time when so much chef content feels manicured, his is refreshingly DIY. It reminds me of what a friend said about Bob Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One. It was too eccentric — with pages upon pages devoted to books on the shelves of the Greenwich Village apartment where a pre-fame Dylan couch-surfed — to have been ghost-written by anybody else.

At Brigtsen’s, there’s no TV showing Saints games at the bar. But that’s because there’s no bar. Well, there’s a service bar; you can order cocktails — this is New Orleans — with a focus on spirits and beer from Louisiana and Mississippi. But there was never room for an actual bar, and that’s fine by Frank. “To me, the cocktails, the beer, the wine, all that is complement to the food,” he says. “But I don’t want people hanging out here drinking. That’s not what I’m in it for.”

The white plates and stemware are utilitarian. The menus are simply printed, inside embossed leather folders; the descriptions of the dishes are low-key, no florid prose trying to sell you on each ingredient. “Lobster bisque.” That’s it: that’s the description. “Roast duck à l’Orange with dirty rice.” Ta-da!

Want to know more about the dish? That’s why you have servers, who will describe it with their own knowledgeable, unscripted impressions. 

They don’t hover to take things off the table too soon. They don’t bring out the second course before the first is done. You feel attended to, but not smothered, given the space to enjoy at a pace that feels comfortable.

And good service means your regulars feel remembered. “The hallmark of hospitality is knowing your guests,” says Frank. “We know that’s the table you like, and how you like your old-fashioned made.” 

The atmosphere extends to how the rooms are arranged. The tables aren’t placed so close to each other that you’re on top of your neighbor. You easily hear your companions, while still feeling the buzz throughout the house. And it may add to the homey feeling that some interior decorator hasn’t designed the space within an inch of its life.

This all has an unexpected, but not undesirable, effect. When we think of a romantic restaurant, we expect candlelight and white tablecloths. But that can feel as forced and trite as a dozen red roses — or a Valentine’s prix fixe. With intimacy that it comes by honestly, Brigtsen’s is wildly, if stealthily, romantic.

And if some elements feel dated, is that necessarily a bad thing? Brett Anderson doesn’t think so. “What’s wrong with revisiting food that people loved 15 years ago?” he asks. “I love new restaurants, I love old restaurants. I love restaurants, period. This desire to only eat at new places that are so-called hot, I don’t understand. That’s not real appreciation if you’re only interested in checking out the places that are hard to get into.”

Maybe one man’s dated is another’s timeless. And maybe Frank says it best. “Old school is good school.”

(Left to right) It’s the work of three sisters that keeps Brigtsen’s both grounded and humming: Marna Brigtsen, Rhonda Madach, and Sandy Hanson. Brigtsen’s does not have OpenTable or Resy accounts. Customers call by phone, and their names are entered, in pencil, into the Book of Life.

• • •

Paul Prudhomme negotiated the lease. He set them up with a lawyer, an accountant, a real estate agent. Even lent them the money. 

Them. Unlike her sisters, Marna had never worked in restaurants. She worked as a court reporter. But Frank, influenced by the partnership he watched between Chef Paul and K, convinced her: It would be fun — an adventure! Plus, they’d bring Sandy and Rhonda along.

They didn’t take out ads. K-Paul’s was so hot, Frank hoped the momentum would rub off. Opening night was a Thursday. The house was packed with their friends, family, Prudhomme — and Frank Sr. It was a stamp of approval from the father who had been so sweet when Frank was a child, only to become so tough when he was a teen. It didn’t heal the hurt. But it didn’t mean nothing.

That summer, they received their first review, from The Times-Picayune. It was a rave. Five beans, the highest rating on the newspaper’s unique scale. They were off and running. 

In 1988, Food & Wine published its first Best New Chefs list. Today it reads like a culinary dream team: Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Rick Bayless. And Frank. 

His road to a Beard, the Oscar of the restaurant world, was more circuitous. He had been nominated six times. Six times he and Marna headed up to New York. Six times he came back empty-handed. It was always held the weekend closest to James Beard’s birthday, May 5. Which was also the second weekend of Jazz Fest.

When on the sixth try he watched as the winner began his acceptance speech thanking his publicist, Frank decided: I’m out. The next year, when he was again nominated, he decided to stay home. He went to Jazz Fest instead. Sure enough, he won in absentia. 

But despite the laurels, all was not perfect. Some habits were catching up with him. The restaurant business and hard living go hand and hand. But in hedonistic New Orleans? Excess can be an inevitable workplace hazard.

Frank started drinking scotch in college; he later moved to vodka. By the time he was 39, he was caught in a work hard, drink hard cycle. Every night, he’d have a drink after work before heading home. Until one night, he got a wake-up call: a DUI. After that, he quit drinking at 40.

The restaurant steadily sailed into its second decade. Until all New Orleans restaurants learned the hard way how tied their fortunes were to out-of-towners. 

“For New Orleans, 9/11 was no picnic,” says Brett Anderson. “Tourism came to a halt. And when tourism grinds to a halt, New Orleans is pretty silent.”

But as Frank remembers, the harder hit he took after 9/11 was more a spiritual one. He found himself asking the big questions. “I became introspective: what I do for a living, what possible difference could that make in the world? I make food and put it on a white tablecloth. It seems so trivial.”

For a while, he went through the motions. Just slugged it out. Then, about three months in, he started to notice the guests in the dining room beginning to smile again. 

It hit him how important his work is. “My job, my mission, my life’s work has been to give people a bubble of joy. Forget all this. Sit down. Celebrate what’s good in life with your family and friends. Make some good, sweet memories through food,” he says. “And that reconstituted my self-worth in a big way.”

It was a crucial epiphany. He had no idea how much he would soon need it.

• • •

Twenty years can seem like a long time.

Then you talk to friends who lived through it, and it’s clear that the trauma of  The Storm, as they still call it, lingers.

Brett Anderson was part of the Times-Picayune staff that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. For almost three years, Anderson wrote about the storm’s impact. He only returned to reviews in July 2008, once restaurants had recovered enough that reviewing them felt fair. 

In remembering back to those first weeks and months after Katrina, Anderson describes a New Orleans on faintest life support. “Eighty percent of the city had been flooded. Block upon block of houses, completely destroyed,” he recalls. “The city almost entirely vacant. No hospitals open. National Guard serving as a police force.”

But it was the city’s restaurants, he says, that showed that it was possible to recapture what had been there before. 

“People could come home from having evacuated. Go to a house that had been destroyed. Notice that houses in all directions were, too. You might have uncertainty whether it’d be worth your time to try to rebuild your life here. You decide to get dinner at one of the handful of restaurants that had reopened. And you have a ball.”

“I don’t think you can underestimate how emotionally uplifting that was, to see restaurants put the cart before the horse in terms of the economic recovery. And demonstrating it doesn’t have to be a fatal blow.”

When Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, Frank and Marna were lucky: their home was fine, there was no flooding nearby, the restaurant survived OK. They had safely evacuated to a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, where they watched what unfolded on the hotel TV. 

Frank’s goal was to be open for New Year’s Eve. That gave them four months. Like every restaurant in town, they needed new refrigeration. More than a month without power had left their walk-in cooler beyond salvaging: “It was like the planet Mars.” 

They opened Thursday, two days before New Year’s Eve. The neighborhood was still empty and dark. All the staff returned, except one who moved away. Frank and his cooks worked out of a refrigerator truck his seafood wholesalers had loaned him. 

On New Year’s Eve, they offered a special menu. Many regulars came, even a few from out of town. At 8 o’clock, some customers asked Frank and Marna if they would pose with them outside, by the Brigtsen’s sign. As they stood out on the front steps, Frank could hear something. 

It was faint at first, but slowly grew louder, until it was unmistakable: a brass band.

Then he saw it, coming around the corner: 80 people, marching in the street, playing horns, beating drums. “They walked out in front of the restaurant, stopped, and welcomed us home.”

As Frank gets to this part of the story, he sees that my eyes are no longer dry. “Marna and I did that, too. We looked at each other and just wept. ‘This is why we’re here, honey.’ It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. And so fucking New Orleans.”

He asked the friend who led the band if they’d come back every night for the next three weeks. “They would come in the back through the kitchen, we’d be beating pots and pans, they’d walk through the dining room with washboards, horns, and drums. Every night,” he says. “Brass band music brought me home.”

The first Mardi Gras after the storm was special, too. He was riding in the Krewe of Carrollton the Sunday before Carnival weekend. The parade started on Napoleon, then turned onto St. Charles. 

As Frank and his fellow Krewe members threw beads out to the crowds, instead of hearing the usual — “Throw something!” — he heard something else, again and again.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Frank Brigtsen, an enduring fixture of the New Orleans community, earned the title of King of the 2022 Krewe of Lafcadio, a Mardi Gras krewe that celebrates NOLA’s food culture.

• • •

Something still nagged at him.

Katrina made Frank realize that the culture he loved was vulnerable and fragile. He had to do something to protect it. He couldn’t let it slip away.

He called up a friend at the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux. Soon he was teaching Contemporary Creole Acadian Cuisine, and in doing so, teaching culinary students, many Louisiana natives, the importance of their heritage. 

Thibodaux is 45 minutes from New Orleans. Frank drove there and back, one night a week, for 17 years. But he didn’t stop with Nicholls. 

For 12 years, he taught as the Chef-in-Residence for the Culinary Arts program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), the tuition-free conservatory high school in the Faubourg Marigny. He somehow found time to teach weekly classes to the public, too.

At both Nichols and NOCCA, he’d begin every class with a half hour lecture placing Creole cuisine in the context of those who birthed it. He’d speak about German and Sicilian immigrants, enslaved Africans, Isleños who migrated to Louisiana in the 18th century from the Canary Islands. He’d explain how the filé used to thicken gumbo came from the ground sassafras that Choctaw and Houma tribes used to thicken their stews. Or he’d teach how Yaka mein — long a popular New Orleans hangover remedy — was a dish African Americans adapted from the noodle soups of Chinese immigrants. Frank wasn’t just teaching his students how to cook, but how food carries our cultures forward.

Teaching was the best education. It made him verbalize what he already knew and research what he didn’t. He only retired from it two years ago; meaning, he stopped teaching courses. You quickly realize Frank never stops teaching. He peppers our conversation with maxims, gems, and kernels:

If you treat every plate like it’s going to your mom, the Pope, or Julia Child, you’ll be successful.

Remember Frank’s Three Ts: orchestrate temperature, taste, and timing. 

If you know the varieties of fish, you’ll know what to substitute when your first choice isn’t available.

Sara Roahen describes Frank as her living, breathing gumbo teacher. When she interviewed him as part of an oral history project, he took her minute-by-minute through his gumbo preparation. “It was stunning. And his process became the way that I do it at home.”

He started his roux on a stove, but then cooked it long and slow in the oven. It may have been a move born of convenience — from a hairy night at K-Paul’s where he had to free up some burners — but it led to what Roahen sees as a superior roux.

Frank also showed Roahen how to cook the seasoning vegetables in two stages — cooking two thirds down until they start to brown, then adding the last third and cooking until tender. Just like with the pecans, the double layering makes for deeper flavor.

“Then, mind-blowingly, he adds his filé powder to the sauteing vegetables,” she says. Most recipes Roahen read would add filé at the very end. When she tried it Frank’s way, it made for a better gumbo.

His favorite classroom is still the kitchen. He tells me he spoke with his chef de cuisine, Nick Cooke, that morning. (Cooke has worked for Frank for almost two years. Sixteen years ago, he was a student in one of Frank’s first classes at Nicholls.)

Cooke said he’d run out of pink peppercorns for the veal sauce. Frank discouraged him from running to get more today. Instead, tweak the menu. Make it work. “Just make plain brie sauce with no peppercorns,” he told him. He encouraged Cooke to take his own creative initiative. Just as Prudhomme had encouraged him.

When I visit the impossibly small kitchen, the camaraderie among the cooks is palpable. To Frank’s credit, it’s a kitchen diverse in both race and gender, a friendly team, serious about the work — and the opportunity. Frank’s kitchen acts as the equivalent of a teaching practicum or medical residency.

Not all residents are patient. Frank remembers one cook who kept itching to switch stations. After three months of sauté, he’d ask, what else you got? Then after three months of grill, again, what else you got?

Frank took him aside. The cook had made a dish how many times? 100? 200? That’s nothing. Frank told the cook he hadn’t yet internalized it, where he could go by instinct. “Come ask me what I got when you’ve made it 2,000 times. When you don’t have to think anymore. When you’re in the skillet.” That’s the craft of what cooks do, he says. And Frank loves it.

“I never get tired of making trout meunière. Ever.”

• • •

Frank was never interested in an empire.

Oh, there were opportunities. A national chain wanted to open 200 restaurants. After six months of negotiations, Frank killed the deal. He didn’t want to travel that much. 

One of the principals called the next day. “I can’t believe you’re giving all this up for that little joint,” he said to Frank. That’s when Frank knew he made the right decision.

But every night on his drive home, he’d pass a restaurant he’d known all his life. Frank’s first memory was sitting in a high chair at Charlie’s Seafood, his mother peeling him boiled crabs. A mile from where he grew up, the space had sat vacant for months. Frank didn’t want a second restaurant, but he wanted to bring Charlie’s back because of all it meant to the community.

Frank’s reinvention opened in 2009 — and was an immediate hit. But four years in, the landlord tried to force Frank and Marna into signing a much more expensive lease. Frank balked: no thanks. The landlord terminated their lease on a technicality. Frank refused to bow down, and they kept the owner tied up in court for years.

During Charlie’s run, Frank faced a crisis larger than any rent increase. On April 20, 2010, an explosion on Deepwater Horizon, an oil-rig in the Gulf of Mexico, led to the largest marine oil spill in history. 

Brett Anderson remembers that disaster shattering a trust still reeling from Katrina. “Every night, you turned on the news to find a live cam of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico that went on for months. You’d listen to the government and oil companies saying it’s not going to be that bad. What do you mean, ‘not that bad’? It hasn’t stopped!”

The spill led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sea creatures, as well as an existential threat to the livelihoods of the fishermen who depended on them. But it also threatened something intrinsic to the New Orleans way of life.

“Seafood is our culinary treasure,” says Anderson. “This is not farming country. This isn’t Napa Valley. What we have in terms of a natural asset is the seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.”

Frank describes Louisiana as having four seasons: shrimp, crawfish, oysters, and crabs. “We have this plethora of seafood, year round, the widest variety you could imagine,” says Frank. “It’s like giving a struggling artist free access to all the paints and brushes he or she could possibly ask for, our palette is so rich.”

In the aftermath of Deepwater, he could pivot at Brigtsen’s. But no local seafood was a big problem for a spot called Charlie’s Seafood. He was forced to look elsewhere for fish — sometimes as far-flung as Bangladesh. It was months before they could get anything local.

They shuttered Charlie’s in 2013. Brigtsen’s still stood strong, maybe stronger for having weathered Katrina and the oil spill. But the hardest test was to come in March 2020, when the pandemic shut down restaurants coast to coast.

There was a massive contrast between the response to Katrina and the new realities of Covid. “Katrina left people feeling like they had a toolbox to deal with adversity,” says Anderson. “In Covid, that toolbox was worthless.”

“What we do in the restaurant business is put people in small rooms at tables with other people, and ask them to drink, eat, and converse,” says Frank. “The most dangerous thing you can do in a Covid environment.”

In early May, the state decreed that restaurants could reopen for business at 25 percent occupancy. But when local TV news interviewed Frank, he told them he wouldn’t re-open yet. He didn’t think it was safe. His staff was on unemployment. There would hopefully be a vaccine soon. He would wait it out.

He was speaking his mind. But he also recognized the bully pulpit he wielded. In reflecting on it, he uses the word that has come up frequently in our talks. “There are times when I recognize my opportunities. To facilitate people. To represent. There’s a certain power there.”

Meanwhile, Marna had an idea. A few years earlier, they had assembled a makeshift cookbook to help a friend raise funds for storm recovery in Houston. Why not write a cookbook to help us? Frank had always resisted writing an actual cookbook. When I stop cooking, I’ll write, he’d say. Now he couldn’t cook. 

So he compiled “Stay-At-Home” Cooking. It included recipes for Brigtsen’s classics — shrimp and okra gumbo, his delicious Caesar. But what made it charming were the introductions to the recipes — some offering anecdotes, some tips, but like his social media, all authentically Frank. 

The photocopied result resembled stapled publications sold at indie bookstores and record shops. Says Sara Roahen: “Frank basically made a zine.” 

Marna and Rhonda turned a bedroom into a shipping and receiving department. The cookbook sold for $25 a pop, and did so well, they published another volume in the summer. Frank says the books helped keep them afloat.

By August, their PPP loans allowed them to re-hire every single employee. “We paid them $18 an hour to sit and wait for the phone to ring,” he says. “But they had their jobs.”

Brigtsen’s only offered take-out until mid-November, when the PPP money ran out. Frank reluctantly opened the dining rooms after that. But it was still six months after other restaurants had opened.

Frank looks back on that timeline with deserving pride: “I did what I did for the right reasons. I did what was best.” In doing so, he made an unmistakable statement to those who worked for him. “We have never been a restaurant that has a lot of transition,” he says. “We get good people, and we want to keep them.” 

But starting that first summer of the pandemic, Frank hid a private struggle. Sitting in his backyard, away from his restaurant, he felt adrift, depressed.

After 25 years of sobriety, he started to drink. “It’s a despondency where I just shut off and go sit in my truck and get drunk.” 

After what he describes as a couple of ugly events, he went into an outpatient program in November of 2020 — all on Zoom, every day for three months. But after a relapse, he checked into a private recovery facility in town. That’s where it clicked, where he found the light again.

What he realized was, he wasn’t there to get sober. He was there to get happy. If he could find happiness again, he didn’t need alcohol.

After the program, he was soon in the dining room, chatting with customers. Marna said out loud what he himself was starting to feel: He’s back!

He’s been sober for three years. Where does he now find his happiness? “It’s something I have to work at. You have to look for it,” he says. “But the main thing in sobriety is clarity. Your sensors are reawakened to accept joy.”

His happy place was once his boat, where he’d spend most Mondays, fishing the same Breton Sound where his dad would take him. But after Katrina, he sold the boat; the water made him too sad.

He still loves horse racing at the Fair Grounds. And he has found joy somewhere new. Frank and Marna’s house is at the dead-end of a quiet, private street. He likes to sit outside by the pool most mornings. There, he’d been seeing and listening to birds for 25 years without ever giving them much thought. Now he was curious.

A friend recommended he download the Merlin app, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. With its sound ID, it’s the birder’s version of the Shazam app used to identify songs. Merlin also lets you make a list of the birds you’ve spotted. Frank excitedly hands me his iPhone to show me his.

In his enthusiasm, I see the 10-year-old excited for tomorrow’s fishing trip. “Look how many birds in my own backyard. A hundred-and-ten different species!”

He finds joy at the restaurant, especially interacting with guests, whether regulars or rookies. And he still finds joy in his city, his hometown, which, for all its dysfunction and decay, still loves a good time.

Larry Miller met Frank soon after he and his wife Nina Compton moved from Miami Beach to open Compère Lapin in 2015. They became fast friends. 

Miller sent me a video he re-posts to social media almost every year. During a Mardi Gras parade, Miller faces the camera, while behind him, oblivious to being recorded, is a man in a baseball cap, beads, sunglasses, and a purple, green, and gold tunic.

Frank Brigtsen joyfully dances — like no one’s watching — to “Rhythm is a Dancer” by Snap!

Miller’s caption speaks for anyone who watches it: “This will never not make me happy.”

Over the decades, Frank and Marna have run the restaurant like an extended family.

• • •

There’s an old Nick Nolte movie I love, “North Dallas Forty,” where the first minutes have no dialogue: just Nolte’s character, an aging wide receiver, waking up the morning after a game in deep pain, flashing back to every hit he took the night before, as he limps to the bathroom.

I think about that scene when I hear of the afflictions of aging chefs. Cooking, too, is a full contact sport.

Frank walks me through the ailments that go well beyond his recent hospital stay. It starts with severe stage 4 osteoarthritis in his back. He’s had it for 30 years. It’s not fixable: it will keep degenerating. But he tries to manage the pain. He’s worked with a physical therapist through a healthy back program at Ochsner Medical Center. That’s helped. But right now, he’s good for two hours in the kitchen. Then he hits a wall.

He was diagnosed with COPD five years ago. If you think the smoking that led to that is unconnected with a job in a kitchen, you haven’t spent much time with cooks. He has an inhaler, though in the six hours I’ve spent with him, he only reaches for it once.

Three years ago, when Frank was in recovery, he was in a group therapy session, sitting on the floor. When he stood, his knee gave out, and he collapsed: a torn meniscus. He’s avoided surgery so far.

“It’s not just being on your feet. Or lifting a heavy pot or box,” he says. “It’s the act of shaking skillets, lifting constantly.” He pantomimes the lifting and shaking of pans. Then he points to the underside of his arm. “Nobody uses these muscles. We do. And it takes its toll.”

It’s the question that comes for all of us: when do you hang up your spurs? 

Frank’s struggles during the pandemic point towards how much of his identity was tied to his work. But in addition to his physical pains, it’s just become harder to run a small independent restaurant, especially with post-pandemic inflation and shrinking margins.

“If you want to make what people call real money in a restaurant, you need to take advantage of economy of scale,” says Brett Anderson. “You need multiple restaurants, you need bigass restaurants, you need to leverage yourself with better pricing. When you run a Mom and Pop shop, you wall yourself off from the opportunities to make actual money.”

Frank and Marna don’t have a pension or retirement plan. They don’t own the restaurant’s building — they almost bought it in the 1990s, but they backed out over parking issues. They have some savings and Social Security. But retirement? “It’s been our number one conversation the last four years.”

Frank is at the younger end of the generation of chefs that gave America its auteur-driven restaurant culture. It’s unclear what the succession plan is for any of them. “We don’t know what it looks like for those restaurants to survive beyond the people who started them,” says Anderson. “There’s no model for that. Not only do we not know what will happen to Brigtsen’s, but what’s going to happen to Chez Panisse or Daniel?”

Frank and Marna wouldn’t hand the restaurant over to just anyone. Ideally, it would be someone they trust, someone who had worked in Frank’s kitchen, where they could back out and have some passive income. But it’s clear it pains Frank to risk any dent to all he and Marna have built. 

While it might not be clear yet how soon he will retire — the 40th anniversary in 2026 could make a good punctuation mark — and what the fate of the restaurant will be, what’s clear is who will be his partner for all that follows. The restaurant might be called Brigtsen’s. But the name would still be accurate if you lost the apostrophe.

In our talks, Frank describes Marna as a blessing, “such a strong woman,” a soldier. “We are, number one, very well-matched. But you have to be patient, understanding, compassionate. Marna’s had to forgive me for many mistakes, mostly alcohol-related,” he says. “But she’s still here with me. We are in this together. And always will be.” 

Frank may keep his retirement plans close to the chest. But the man himself is less of a mystery. 

He cares about his work and those who work for him, culinary traditions and his role in keeping them alive, and the health and happiness of his city, state, and their people. 

All this he does with an artist’s empathy, a storyteller’s knack, a statesman’s sense of purpose, and a deep love for where he’s from. With these values, the brick salesman’s son built something beautiful and lasting on the strongest of foundations.

Near the end of our conversations, Frank remembers a line from that five beans review way back in 1986: Frank is reinventing Creole cuisine.

“I felt, ‘Wow, that’s lofty.’ I didn’t set out to do that. I just wanted a good New Orleans restaurant,” he says. 

“Thirty-eight years later, I’m considered a traditionalist, preserving Creole cuisine. I’m doing the same thing. It’s the perspective that’s changed. And I like this mantle much better.”

Frank and Marna are true partners in the business. “We are in this together. And always will be,” he says.

• • •

When I first read the sentence in the late novelist James Salter’s Light Years, I reached for a highlighter. Even though it would be easy enough to remember the three words.

Life is meals.

We celebrate, we mourn, we fall in love, we break up, we catch up, we connect in restaurants. 

The pandemic revealed how much we take them for granted. When we had to stay home, we yearned for all they bring us. When they were so under threat until aid stepped in — with plenty closing anyway — we absorbed what we would risk losing were they all to disappear.

But as I sit across from a friend in the shotgun house, I recognize that one more reason I love Brigtsen’s is that one day it will be gone.

You can already miss something while it is still here. I felt that way when my grandparents were alive. I loved them so much, I knew our time was short; I could miss them even as they sat across from me.

It is not unlike how you love New Orleans even more because its future is tenuous, because you know when you’re enjoying that most unique city, it all may be living on borrowed time.

Maybe Frank and Marna will find new partners for Brigtsen’s, and give a young chef an opportunity the way that Chef Paul gave them theirs. 

If they do, it will be different. And that’s OK.  

“Something Frank believes in is that New Orleans food always changes,” says Brett Anderson. “And if Brigtsen’s is gone, as sad as that might be to think of on a human and culinary level, it doesn’t mean that the New Orleans that Frank and Marna fell in love with to make New Orleans food their life and career — it doesn’t mean that’s gone.”

While I can, I am happy, then, for each chance to enjoy a meal at this great New Orleans restaurant. Which is to say, this great American restaurant. 

While I can. Starting with tonight. 

We will enjoy the pan-fried speckled trout with pecan gravy. We will savor the barbecue shrimp, in their rich dark sauce of butter and Worcestershire. We will end with the sweet potato bread pudding, and after we finish it, we will both drop forks on plates as if to say, that’s it, that’s all she wrote. We will do all that.

But first, we each order a cup of the butternut shrimp bisque.   

I take a spoonful and bring it to my lips. I take my first sip.

 I feel the texture of the tiny diced shrimp against my tongue, the sweet of the pureed squash. I taste the layers of pepper. I clock the progression: the start, the middle, the finish. 

Just like he said. 

It leaves a memory.  ◊