Brigtsen’s turns 40 this year, and the restaurant still will not take a reservation online.
Frank Brigtsen started cooking in 1973 while attending LSU. By 1979 he was apprenticing at Commander’s Palace under Paul Prudhomme, and in 1980 he became the first night chef at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen when that restaurant began serving dinner. Over seven years there he worked his way up to executive chef. When he and his wife Marna decided to open their own place, Paul and the late K Prudhomme helped make it happen.
He went looking outside the French Quarter and found a Victorian cottage on Dante Street that had housed a restaurant called Dante’s By The River. He has described the appeal plainly: the ambiance, the New Orleans feel of the place, the manageable size. Brigtsen’s opened there in 1986 and has not moved.
The cooking is Creole and Acadian, built on Louisiana ingredients and the techniques Prudhomme taught him. Filé gumbo comes with chicken and andouille. Broiled Gulf fish arrives under a crab crust with lemon crab sauce. Roast duck gets a dried cherry sauce, barbecue shrimp sits on a shrimp calas griddlecake, and trout meunière comes with pecans. Des Allemands catfish, shrimp remoulade with guacamole and deviled eggs, and eggplant parmesan with spaghetti bordelaise fill in around them.
Soups and desserts get named as often as the entrees by regulars. Butternut squash bisque and shrimp bisque both have followings, and the pecan pie with caramel sauce and the double chocolate cake end most meals. Seasonal items like Creole tomato salad come and go.
The accolades go back decades. Food & Wine named Brigtsen one of the Top Ten New Chefs in America in 1988. New Orleans magazine made him Chef of the Year in 1994. The James Beard Foundation gave him Best Chef: Southeast in 1998. He received the Lafcadio Hearn Award from the John Folse Culinary Institute and entered the Louisiana Restaurant Association Hall of Fame in 2012, then took the inaugural Paul Prudhomme Award from the American Culinary Federation in 2016, the same year the Times-Picayune named Brigtsen’s one of the ten best restaurants in the city.
Teaching has run alongside the cooking the whole time. Brigtsen has taught culinary arts at NOCCA, the state arts high school, for 25 years, and he spent 15 years leading public classes at the New Orleans Cooking Experience. His kitchen has trained cooks now working across the city.
The dining room is small and the staff has been there a long time, which shows in the service. Guests describe the room as casual and the food as consistent year after year, which is a harder thing to pull off than a single great meal.
Dinner runs Tuesday through Saturday beginning at 5 p.m., with the last reservation taken at 8:30. Reservations are by telephone only, and the restaurant answers from 10 a.m. until closing at (504) 861-7610. The address is 723 Dante Street.
This summer Brigtsen released a new cookbook, Color of Flavor, 376 pages of recipes, photographs, and reflections on the career. The title points at the deep brown of a properly built gumbo.
The Prudhommes staked a young cook in 1986. Four decades on, he spends his off hours teaching teenagers to make a roux, which is one way of settling that debt.
