5/17/2023 0 Comments Absinthe bar new orleans![]() Where Jos Ferrer had allowed customers to post their business cards, Brennan handed out cards for people to sign and tack up. Those who were willing to do so found an Absinthe House transformed, pretty much the same way Tex Avery had transformed the cartoons of the day. His customers were expected to dress well and behave. As for O’Brien’s craps-shooting, underage drinkers and occasional riot, there Brennan drew the line. While the Pirate’s Dream-billed as “the High Brow of All Low Brow Drinks”-never achieved the popularity of O’Brien’s famed Hurricane (which Brennan also knocked off on his menu), at least it was a reliable source of rum, of which it held some four ounces, and maraschino cherries, with which it came liberally festooned. ![]() (Brennan even installed a mirror over the piano, so guests in the back could see Pichon’s fingers moving at lightning speed.)Īnother O’Brien’s touch that Brennan imitated was the paralyzing signature drink. This was a coup-Pichon, who could play anything from Debussy to the Dirty Dozens and improvise a lyric with as much facility, if not quite so much lubricity, as Mercedes and Sue, was perhaps the biggest attraction in the French Quarter, and he brought the crowds in. That’s when Brennan found him and promptly poached him away. Back in New Orleans, he spent a couple of years leading bands on riverboats before settling down behind the piano at Lucien Cazebonne’s Old Absinthe Bar, a block down Bourbon from the Old Absinthe House ( see Part III). After spending the late 1920s and early 1930s playing in various jazz bands in New York and on the road, Pichon got homesick. And yet he had also been trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, paid for by none other than George Gershwin, who had heard the young pianist practicing at a seaside resort in New Jersey and thought he had potential. Walter Pichon (1906-1967) was born in New Orleans and, as a Creole of color, grew up surrounded by jazz, then in its youngest and most vigorous form. For the Old Absinthe House, that combination meant, first of all, that Brennan also secured the services of “Fats” Pichon. eating a hot dog, he did it with a glass of Champagne in his hand. Although he had the same popular touch, he tempered it with a certain elegance: he could fold together pure corn and le bon ton and come out with a seamless confection that was slangy but not vulgar, classy but not stuffy. The main thing that made it so was the presence in the barroom of Mercedes LeCorgne Paulson and Sara Belle “Sue” Wheeler, each seated at her own piano and each equally adept at playing any request a tipsy patron could generate, razzing up the fast numbers with bawdy wordplay and squeezing every last drop of sticky sentiment out of the slow ones. Peter Street, which Robert Kinney identified in his 1942 The Bachelor in New Orleans, an eccentric (and gloriously-illustrated) insiders’ guide to Crescent City nightlife, as “probably the most popular Saturday-night bar in the French Quarter.” Why? “The spirit of Pat’s is robust!” was Kinney’s verdict. Brennan instead took a page from Pat O’Brien’s bar on St. Sure, there would still be music, but it wouldn’t be the anonymous dance band shit Marchese had been putting on. The first thing he did was get rid of the dancing. In 1943, he was able to secure the lease from Johnny Marchese, who had run it as a dance hall since Repeal.įor a guy who had never owned a bar before, Owen Brennan had impressive instincts. It took him a while, but finally he found that fun thing: the Old Absinthe House. That last gig certainly didn’t lose him any friends, particularly when whiskey was tightly allocated due to wartime restrictions. ![]() In 1940, he sold his half interest in the successful Mid City pharmacy/liquor store he owned and started looking around for something a little more fun, in the meanwhile filling in as manager at the Court of Two Sisters restaurant on Royal Street and working as a sales manager for Schenley, the big whiskey company. Owen Edward Brennan was a son of New Orleans’s Irish Channel neighborhood who seemed to know everyone in town. ![]()
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