Commander's Palace

The restaurant most visitors picture belongs to the Brennan family. After a family dispute pushed her out of Brennan's, Ella Brennan took over Commander's Palace in 1969 with her siblings Adelaide, Dottie, John and Dick, and she led it until 2018. Known as Miss Ella, she worked front of house and the kitchen alike and built the careers of cooks: Paul Prudhomme joined her in 1975 and Emeril Lagasse in 1983. She won a Southern Foodways Alliance lifetime award in 2002 and a James Beard Foundation lifetime award in 2009.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 2.1 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 2.2 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 2.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.

More markers nearby

• Freret's Folly — steps away
• Garden District — steps away
• Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) — 0.2 mi
• Higgins Boat (LCVP) — 0.7 mi