WOMAN INTERVIEWER: and Where Were You Born

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: And where were you born?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: I was born on December9th, 1954

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Wow.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: at Southern Baptist Hospital on Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: And where were you raised?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Raised right here in New Orleans.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: In the city itself?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: We lived on Calhoun Street for one year after I was born, then we moved to River Ridge, or what became River Ridge.

WOMAN INTERVIER: And where have you lived as an adult?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, I attended LSU university in Baton Rouge. And since then, I've been living in New Orleans, Uptown, in the Bywater, in the Marigny. And I currently live in River Ridge.

WOMAN INTERVIER: Right back to the beginning, basically.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Yeah.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: What is your earliest food memory?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, GrapeNuts® cereal. And it wasn't a pleasant one either.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: It's always one of my favorites.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Could be about two years, and we were visiting my aunt in Miami. And I remember having GrapeNuts® for breakfast and then riding in the car and then having an unpleasant experience.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Oh. So it wasn't just the crunch of it?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: No.

WOMAN INTERVIER: No, okay. What did your family eat on a daily basis?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, my father was raised here in New Orleans, and he was always very proud of his German heritage. And my mother's from Alabama, and she learned to cook Louisiana food. And some German things, I think at his request. And we had a very typical Sunday dinner. Many dinners had roast beef, mashed potatoes, and peas. But she also made, probably her best dish, red beans, which we had at least once a week, and sometimes more often.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Always on Monday?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: That was that's her best dish.

MAN INTERVIEWER: Would she or did they they did red beans, and so there's a nod to New Orleans cooking. But a lot of parents are parents of the '50s, you know, what I call Cheese Whiz parents.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Right.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: But did she cook fresh? Did she cook canned? Did she how did the '50s kind of

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Probably a little bit of both. She also made dishes like catfish and grits, which is still one of my favorites, fried catfish and cornmeal and grits. And it was just wonderful. Chicken sauce piquant, she made occasionally. And she did some German things, like German potato salad, which was really, really good. warm potato salad, bacon and onions. So that was something I remember too.

But we also had you know, Wednesday nights were poker nights for my dad, and that was "pick it" night at home. We can pick whatever we want for dinner as long as it came out of a can. So Chef Boyardee™ was very popular.

WOMAN INTERVIER: You had a big selection of canned

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, you had ravioli or your you know. Usually ravioli.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Were there any special meals, like for special days: Thanksgiving, Christmas?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Oh, yeah. I mean, for the holidays, we always had a big family meal. And the signature dish at the Brigtsen holiday table is oyster dressing. That's something my mom is known for and still makes today.

And it's you know, she only got her oysters from one person, and he made sure to save her some oyster liquor.

And the running family joke is Mom's never happy with it. We always say, "Oh, this is great oyster dressing." And she'll say, "Oh, I didn't like it this year."

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Every year.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: That's her standard reply.

WOMAN INTERVIER: Every year.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: And it's always fabulous.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Tell me about meal time at your home as a child. It's kind of what we went over, but do you mean, like, did y'all sit down at the same time when Dad got home from work or

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. I mean, we always there was a lot of ritual and tradition back then, maybe, you know, not unlike today with a lot of families. But we always sat and ate. We always had French bread on the table regardless of what we were having. And it was a time for family interaction, discussing the day's events or things coming up.

And my dad also had a tradition that he grew up with. We didn't really do it that much. But he always tried to impart some type of education at the table. He grew up, his father always had a dictionary on the dinner table, and every day the kids learned a new word. And although we weren't that strict about it, he always tried to teach us something.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: That's interesting. A good idea, actually.

MAN INTERVIEWER: Do you do you do that or do you do you have kids?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: No.

MAN INTERVIEWER: You don't?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: No.

We have the most irregular dining schedule you've ever seen.

Chefs are like that. We don't eat regularly. It's very hit and miss. The only time Marna and I sit down at home to eat is on Sunday and Monday, because we work nights. So that's our time.

WOMAN INTERVIER: Did you go out to eat much as a kid?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Oh. Where did you go?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, the two most the two places we went to the most are Charlie's Seafood on Jefferson Highway in River Ridge, which it's still there today.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Oh.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: It opened in the '40s, and it was basically a seafood joint and where you buy boiled seafood and but Mr.Charlie, for a time, operated as a fullscale restaurant. And I have great memories of that place. I always got a softshell crab poboy.

And when we were very young, we were too we weren't able to pick our own boiled crabs and peel our own boiled crawfish, so Dad would do that for us. He'd make little plates for us. And then, as we grew older, we pretended like we still didn't know how to do it, so we would continue.

And that was also our exposure to things like raw oysters, which I really did not like as a kid. And I really he tried and he tried, he tried to get me to like them, I just couldn't. But then when I was 21, I fell in love with them, and it's now my favorite food.

And then the other place we ate at a lot was Sclafani's. Charlie's was our Saturday place, and Sunday was for Sclafani's, which was operated by, you know, a New Orleans Italian family, and we always got spaghetti and meatballs and a Roy Rogers for me and a Shirley Temple for my sister.

And they also made great fettucini, which my mother, for years, tried to duplicate. And in essence, later on, I realized it was really just the quality of the ingredients, you know, good cream, good cheese, good pasta and that we have a lot of fond memories of that.

But we ate at a lot of some of the more wellknown New Orleans restaurants. Like, Manale's, we ate at a lot, places like that.

I have this visual memory from childhood of what I consider to be the art type of a New Orleans restaurant, and that is one that has pink and green neon signs outside that says "Steaks, seafood, Italian."

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Uhhuh.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: That's a New Orleans restaurant to me. And the left side of the menu is seafood, and the right side is mostly Italian, and a few steaks at the bottom. And that, to me, is the prototypical New Orleans restaurant.

MAN INTERVIEWER: Would you say that that's different from the rest of America in a sense orwould you

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Oh, undoubtedly. Once I started traveling in my 20s, abroad and then here in the United States, then I realized that not everybody eats like we do. I really thought they did. But, you know, I mean, for us to, for instance, cover the picnic table with newspaper and throw out 40 pounds of boiled crawfish, which we did constantly. We did that all the time. And I thought everybody ate like that, and it's not true.

And the things I realized in traveling was that I think what really, really characterizes Louisiana food is seasoning. Not not spicy per se, but wellseasoned food. And you just don't find that everywhere.

MAN INTERVIEWER: Do you think that's that Italian influence or

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, I think it's I mean, New Orleans has been influenced by so many different cultures over the years, and it's really you know, "Creole" is a very allencompassing word that really I mean, we've had large immigrations of Sicilians, French, German, Irish, African, West Indian, so many different cultures, and somewhere along the way, this thing developed. And it's really driven by an overwhelming passion for food.

And as a chef, I think that, you know, I'm really lucky. Because food is such a great medium to share with people because it touches people on so many levels and emotionally, physically, spiritually, socially so many different levels. And to do that for a living is really quite special. And growing up in New Orleans, it comes kind of naturally, to have that sort of connection with food and what it does to people.

I know my mentor, Paul Prudhomme, his real attraction to cooking was that you could make people happy with food and and he knew that when he was a kid cooking for his family. It changed people's lives literally. It can make their day, you know, I mean.

And and to have that kind of effect and it's not a onetime thing. I mean, eating is something we do every day. It's really one of the great joys of life for everybody. And to to be able do that for a living is pretty special.

MAN INTERVIEWER: At what point? Was it after your travels of the 20s? What point did you start thinking about it, making a living?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Oh. Well, I started working in in food service when I was in college at LSU, and I started in a sandwich shop just to make money for school, basically. And I then went on to another restaurant as a cook, and it was nothing fancy. And then I managed the place for a while.

And after college, when I moved back to New Orleans, I decided to pursue it as a career because it just felt so right. It just felt so natural. I was comfortable in restaurants. I think I was attracted to you know, restaurant life is really sort of a parallel universe to the rest of the world because you're you're often working nights, and there's a part of the world you never see, and that's the 9to5 world, and I didn't feel comfortable in that world. I knew that. And the people that work in restaurants tend to be pretty interesting too, so it felt like a natural thing for me to do.

And I was fortunate enough in the late '70s to meet Paul Prudhomme when he was a chef at Commander's Palace and and he hired me as an apprentice. I had a few years of experience with food, but nothing serious, and not in any really highend restaurants. But he gave me a chance to learn. And that was a turning point in my life.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: And you didn't at that point have, like, any schooling in food, you know, like culinary school, any of that kind of

CHEF BRIGTSEN: No, no. That wasn't even a concern for me because I didn't know they had culinary schools at that time. I studied fine arts, painting and printmaking.

And a friend of mine at that time, after one year of college, said told me he was going to the CIA, and I was shocked. Because I knew he's not CIA material. And then he told me what it was. It's the Culinary Institute of America, which I'd never heard of.

So I'm more of a I guess more of an oldschool New Orleans chef in that I learned on the job. And so many great New Orleans cooks have taken that same route.

And it happened to just it was really sort of magical in the sense that it happened at a time when American food and American chefs were coming into their own and getting recognized for how great they really were. I mean, prior to 1975, you probably could not name one American chef.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's probably true.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Most restaurants, hotels, and resorts, et cetera, were all run by European chefs, which is fine. But I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And people like Paul Prudhomme and Alice Waters and Larry Fortuon(sp) and Wolfgang Puck, all these people, all of a sudden, it seemed, were garnering lots of attention.

And Paul, of course, is simply a phenomena. I mean, the man is you know, he was put on this earth for a reason, and it all came to him. And to be a part of those early years at KPaul's was really, really magical.

WOMAN INTERVIER: I'm supposed to ask you about shopping for food, like, in the early days, like, as a young person. I mean, like, did you go to markets, did with your parents or your mother, just to, like, the WinnDixie or did she go to the French Market or

CHEF BRIGTSEN: I think just like anybody else growing up in America, we shopped at the big grocery stores. But you always had certain items like the oysters, for instance, and the boiled crawfish, we all we only got that at Charlie's seafood. That's the only place we would buy.

And we also, you know, really had a great appreciation for the great seasonal things.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Okay.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: We always had Louisiana navel oranges in the wintertime. That was something we had a case of always. And we ate plenty of them. Things like that that you just kind of take for granted as a kid. As you get older, you sort of appreciate how special they are because they're only here for a short time.

WOMAN INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's right.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: And you learn about seasonality, which, I think, is crucial in cooking.

And even today at Brigtsen's, after almost 17 years, I still do all the foodbuying myself. And it's a big job. It's a big part of what we do. And we've developed over the years relationships with people.

And, you know, this is a food business, but it's really a people business. It's the people that dine with us, the people that work with us, and the people we get food from. They're very important. And so we have a probably a couple a dozen specialists that we work with. We have a shrimp guy. We have an oyster guy. We have a mushroom person. We have local greens from a particular farmer. We have a rabbit farmer. Catfish, we buy directly from the fishermen.

So procuring product in our business is crucial, and those are the building blocks of our cuisine, and so it's important that you source the best that you can and and it's also really fun to develop relationships with people that are trying to do things the right way.

There are easier ways to do it. You know, the food industry, like many industries in America today, have undergone lots of merging conglomerations, big, big, big companies, and some of them are designed to be onestop shopping; in other words, a restaurant can all up and get just about everything they need from one place.

But that's not my style. We change our menu daily. Although it doesn't change that dramatically, it gives us great flexibility. And that's what I really enjoy.

For instance, I have a preference for wild fish. I don't really like farmraised fish that much. And as long as we have fresh, wild, local fish, that's what we're going to use.

MAN INTERVIEWER: And so you're dealing with fisherman as opposed to commercial fishers, necessarily?

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Well, they have to be commercial fisherman for me to deal with them.

MAN INTERVIEWER: Oh, I see.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: But with fish, for instance, if you think about it, seafood, and fish in particular, is the last wild food left on earth. Beef, chicken, all these things, are farmraised, which is fine. But fish is like the last wild food left, and you have to really understand it, how the business of fishing works and, unfortunately, how the politics of fishing works.

But you have to be extremely flexible. If I'm making a menu for something a month away, I can't tell you what kind of fish I'm going to be serving because it changes day to day. And here at Brigtsen's, I mean, we're known to change a fish in a dish in the middle of service because of supply and things like that.

MAN INTERVIEWER: But and you're dealing with farmers, you said, for instance, across the lake or whatever. I mean, obviously, you don't care to tell who they are.

CHEF BRIGTSEN: Oh, I'm very proud of who they are.

I've been dealing with our rabbit man for over 20 years now at KPaul's and here at Brigtsen's. And Dan Crutchfield(sp) at Creek Hollow Farm is his name, and he's in Mississippi. And he used to work in the chemical industry, and he had a lifechanging point in his life, and he said, "This is not the way life is supposed to be." And he became an organic farmer and bought land in Mississippi and proceeded to build up a business for himself, raising rabbits, growing organic vegetables and herbs.