Recent Reviews

John Mariani, National Food Writer

The new kid in town derives from New Orleans' premier restaurant family, the Brennans who run Commander's Palace, Mr. B's Bistro, the Redfish Grill, and several others (but not Brennan's, which is another side of the family.) These days different members own different restaurants rather than all sharing in each, and Dickie Brennan (along with Lauren Brennan Bower,
and Steve Pettus) has already had great success with the Palace Café and Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse. Their new enterprise, The Bourbon House (144 Bourbon St.; 504-522-0111; www.bourbonhouse.com ) has longevity written all over it.

It's a big, open, friendly place attached to a hotel they do not run; There's a fine bar on the corner and a gallery on the second floor, all of it done with a polished New Orleans flair with wrought-iron bentwood chairs, and French windows. Service has already been honed to a fine edge-an ideal amalgam of professionalism and friendliness-and the winelist is already a very solid one with breadth and depth.

Indeed, the emphasis here is on seafood, prepared simply, based on Creole seasonings (not Cajun), and served in abundance. Start off with fried eggplant-sweet, tender, not mushy-or some delicious, tangy shrimp rémoulade or deviled crab baked in the shell, then move on to the day's catch from the Gulf topped with buttery pecans or with almonds with meuniére sauce. Baked fish à la Grieg adds a sauté of that great crabmeat to the dish, with more butter sauce. If you do want meat, no problem at all: You'll love the huge pork chop grilled with a nice sear on the outside, served up heartily with dirty rice and red-eye gravy. And you can't go wrong with the 14-ounce, skillet-cooked Angus rib-eye, a juicy, flavorful slab of beef with great pommes frites and a side of rich Béarnaise. For dessert don't miss the Pontchatoula strawberry shortcake served in a buttermilk biscuit.

And that's what I like about the South and the new Bourbon House, especially when a complete dinner can be had between $19.95 and $22.95

Brett Anderson, Restaurant Critic, Times Picayune

Talk of "reclaiming" the French Quarter from tourists is common among New Orleanians, particularly those who live in and around the Quarter. These talks often lead to plans of action. The most radical proposal I've heard involves moving the rowdiest stretch of Bourbon Street to an enclosed facility near the airport. This set-up, the thinking goes, would cleanse the neighborhood of cheesy bars and the attached unsavories, who would presumably be too drunk to notice or care that they were singing karaoke in Kenner.

A more modest approach would be to leave the urban restructuring to Dickie Brennan. He already has a good head start. Among the current generation of hard-charging restaurateurs, no one's demonstrated a healthier understanding of how the Quarter's history coexists with its present. For starters, he's unafraid of the Quarter's raffishness. Both Palace Cafe and Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse are grand, airy visions of tiled French elegance that relate to their belly-of-the-bedlam addresses (Palace is on Canal between Chartres and Royal streets, the Steakhouse on Iberville off Bourbon) with a boisterousness that's purely Vieux Carre. These are restaurants for people who wear serious suits to work, who live large on their down time and who crave an air of tradition even when they're dining in a new restaurant.

All of the attendant Brennan sensibilities are on display at The Bourbon House, his new restaurant on Bourbon Street. Brennan has the square-jawed, wide-shouldered presence of a football-player-come-businessman, and watching him stride through the place on a packed Saturday, it becomes clear how much he lords over. The restaurant is vast, encompassing a bar, oyster bar, lounge, dining room and second floor banquet area.

Big, but inviting. Brennan originally conceived of the Bourbon House as a local equivalent of a Parisian brassiere. While he went with a New Orleans-style seafood concept instead, one can see signs of his original idea, from the handsome tile work paving the floors to the full-figured, Art Nouveau lamps that cling to verticals and drop from the ceiling like low-hanging fruit. Interspersing matte wood with shiny brass and marble, the space is so well staged it's practically assured a spot in some future book of Kerri McCaffety photographs.

The Bourbon House's menu has a pronounced seafood bias, so it's perhaps fitting that the surf outshines the turf. Is it me, or are the oysters this season especially good? I've been eating the ones at Bourbon House with a flute of house bubbly, savoring the tingles of copper and sea before the flesh turns creamy on the tongue.

You can get oysters unadorned or topped with dollops of caviar, but I prefer the heaping plateaux de fruits de mer, which includes all of the above as well as steamed mussels on the half shell, kissed with honeyed vinaigrette; crab fingers; spiny lobster; pink, shell-on shrimp with a particularly herbaceous cocktail sauce; a salad of marinated crawfish tails and another of stone crab knuckles freckled with green onion. Barely 3 months old, The Bourbon House is running arguably the best oyster bar of any white tablecloth restaurant in New Orleans.

Tom Fitzmorris, New Orleans Restaurant Critic/Food Writer

Dick Brennan, Sr. once had a plan for cleaning up Bourbon Street. 'After five p.m., jacket and tie.' He was serious. Although it sounds good to me, you and I and he all know that the rule would never fly. So his son Dickie, who has continued many a project that his dad didn't get around to before he retired, hatched a different plan. They opened a grand, if casual restaurant on Bourbon Street. And in that block, at least, the level of civilizations and substance has risen by quite a bit.

The Bourbon House is a handsome property. Its ceiling rises high above a formal-looking dining room with as many windows onto Bourbon Street as the wall could supply. It was built from scratch on the ground floor of the new Hotel Astor, on the footprint of the old Woolworth's. As good as the place looks, the style is casual: dress, presentation, and prices. But not as casual as the words "seafood house" imply. Although you can come in here for a fried seafood platter, that's clearly the first rung of a menu that climbs higher than most seafood specialists, into an aerie just this side of gourmet. If you have a good memory, the menu at the Bourbon House will seem familiar. It includes a great many dishes popular at Commander's Palace 15 or 20 years ago--a time when Commander's was, in my opinion, at its culinary peak. Some of these are terrific items that haven't been seen since they fell off Commander's menu. This gives the food here at decidedly retro character, although I don't sense anything self-conscious about it. They apparently feel (as I do) that certain classics are too good to have been neglected this long...

Lorin Gaudin, Food Writer, New Orleans Magazine

Dickie Brennan has done it again. Bourbon House is a classic New Orleans restaurant reminiscent of times past - but with a modern edge. The restaurant is large with tiled floors, café tables, flat-screen televisions and a huge projection TV in the front. Diners stand in front of an immense seafood bar for freshly shucked oysters or plateaux de fruits de mer (a tower of seafood that includes a spiny lobster and a delicious seafood salad with a bit of chile pepper). There are huge windows everywhere for viewing Bourbon Street's show. In the main dining room, the mirrors, wrought iron and large globe lights (Love 'em? Hate 'em? Get in on the debate.) give the feel of a French brasserie. Bourbon House offers breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner. Breakfast and brunch standouts are the pain perdu and the breakfast buffet, which includes some really good sausage gravy (good over house-made biscuits). The crab cakes and eggs are nothing short of decadent.

The lunch menu includes poor-boys on Leidenheimer French bread, great salads and many of the dinner menu items. Appetizers include oysters Bienville, Rockefeller and en brochette. The warm bacon and onion tart is flavorful, if a bit rich, and the seafood gumbo is nice. Salads are an interesting combination of classic and modern: Grilled asparagus is served with mizuna and shaved red onion, then splashed with Jack Daniels/Creole-mustard vinaigrette. I am very fond of the Caesar-like house salad with rustic garlic-Romano dressing, and I will always, always order the hearts of romaine salad with house-made Thousand Island dressing; it is topped with generous amounts of bacon, chopped egg and Spanish olives.

Celebrate the return of Shrimp Chippewa, a stew that was popular at Mr. B's. Bourbon House has brought it back slightly tweaked with wild mushrooms - delicious. The baked fish Greig has copious amounts of lump crab meat and a light Creole meunière sauce. All the seafood dishes are treated lovingly... Fried shrimp and oysters are lightly battered and crispy, not greasy, served with freshly made pommes frites. Among dessert standouts are the homemade sorbets and ice creams, whose flavors include banana-pecan, Creole cream cheese, double-fudge Blondie (beyond sinful) and my personal favorite, the lemon Creole cream-cheese cheesecake. By the way, the coffee is rich, dark and hot.

Paul Greenberg, WHERE Magazine

Our vote for the best new local beverage? The Frozen Bourbon Milk Punch at Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House.