The 75-Year-Old New Orleans Dessert That Still Sets the Dining Room on Fire

Born from a booming banana trade, Bananas Foster became a midcentury tableside sensation. Today, the flambé hasn’t lost its heat.

By

Wayne Curtis

Published on September 13, 2026

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Bananas Foster being made at Brennan's. — Credit:
Photo by Chris Granger for Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group

Ordering tableside-prepared Bananas Foster at Brennan’s Restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans provides a surplus of memories — the skill of the table captains marshaling the blue flames, the intoxicating aroma of caramelizing brown sugar.

Also memorable is the complete lack of interest among other diners in the dining room. Those at nearby tables eat their Eggs Hussarde and turtle soup and continue their quiet conversations, as if there isn’t actually a towering wall of fire rising scant yards away. Perhaps ours is an era simply inured to spectacle, but the more likely explanation is that Bananas Foster is served here so often that few bother to watch.

“It’s been the thing that everyone talks about,” proprietor Ralph Brennan says of a dish that was Instagrammable before Instagram existed. Brennan estimates that upward of 70% of the tables at any given meal will place an order for Bananas Foster. The restaurant prepares it about 70,000 times a year, using about 18,000 pounds of bananas and 2,500 bottles of rum. Pausing to watch each time it’s made here would be like pausing to admire every single flower in New Orleans City Park.

Bananas Foster was invented at Brennan’s in 1951, five years after the restaurant was opened by Owen Brennan, patriarch of the family behind many of the city’s most beloved and enduring restaurants. The dessert is said to have been created by Owen’s sister Ella Brennan, and chef Paul Blangé at Owen’s request, and named in honor of Richard Foster, then chair of the New Orleans Crime Commission. (That a flamboyant dish was named after someone charged with cleaning up vice in the city seems very on-brand for New Orleans.)

That the dish arose here in the 1950s seems almost preordained. Bananas had been introduced to America in the 19th century, and many Americans first encountered them at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. (It is said that guards had to be posted to keep visitors from trampling the banana plants on display.) A single banana cost a dime — about $3 today — and was eaten with a knife and fork.

Gene Bourg for Food & Wine, October 1989

Brennan’s: Loads of classy local color fill this handsome late-18th-century building in the heart of the French Quarter. The smaller dining rooms upstairs, done in the mid-19th-century mode, are exceptionally elegant. The lush, illuminated courtyard is visible from most of the rooms and is a dramatic backdrop at dinner. The big deals are the original bananas Foster (sautéed in butter, brown sugar and banana liqueur) and the Creole breakfast menu, centering on an array of elaborate poached egg dishes drenched in hollandaise and matched with such compatibles as creamed spinach, artichokes, Canadian bacon and fried trout.

— Gene Bourg for Food & Wine, October 1989

By the midcentury mark, the banana had been thoroughly democratized. It was now the people’s fruit, cheaply available in its own disposable packaging. New Orleans was the epicenter of the banana trade, home not only to the United Fruit Co., which at one point controlled as much as 90% of banana imports, but also to Standard Fruit, founded by Ralph Brennan’s maternal great-grandfather. These firms went on to become Chiquita Brands and Dole Foods, respectively.

The abundance of bananas in New Orleans also coincided with an era of showy restaurant fare, when setting food afire was a display of high culinary aspiration.

“This was a period when flambé was the order of the day, with Café Brûlot and stuff like that,” says Mark Plotkin, a rainforest ethnobotanist who made Bananas Foster during a high school summer job at Commander’s Palace — another New Orleans institution owned by members of the Brennan family.

“That’s one of the beauties of Bananas Foster,” he says. “Anybody can make it. You can’t screw it up.” The most essential part of the dish, he says, involves neither ingredients nor proportions, but presentation. “The show was part of the recipe.”

“It really is a simple dish,” says Brennan. “But when you get enough of them ordered at the same time, it becomes a challenge.” Brennan notes that Bananas Foster tends to be self-replicating: one table orders it, another sees it, and orders come cascading in as table after table decides this would be a fitting way to conclude a meal.

Linda Merinoff for Food & Wine, January 1989

Try the classic version from Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, or for a less rich but still delicious variation, use tropical coconut sherbet rather than ice cream, as is offered at Bayamo, a Cuban-inspired restaurant in New York City. Select thick and relatively straight bananas when you make this dessert, since the very thin, more curved ones are difficult to turn without breaking.

— Linda Merinoff for Food & Wine, January 1989

Since originating in New Orleans, Bananas Foster has spread far beyond the city. In the late 1950s, the noted food writer Duncan Hines offered up a recipe for home cooks in his nationally-syndicated column, noting that if you didn’t have a chafing dish, you could prepare it in a skillet. “Of course this does not show off your skill at the table,” he warned.

Brennan says that a couple of years ago, he and his wife attended a presentation of local dishes at a cooking school while traveling in Morocco. At the end, dessert was presented: Bananas Foster.

Ralph Brennan, current owner of Brennan’s.
Photo by Eugenia Uhl for Ralph Brennan Restaurant Group

“It was not the same, but very similar,” Brennan says, explaining that the skin was left on while cooking, and the banana spooned out afterward. No one at the school knew of Brennan’s connection to the dish, and no one believed its New Orleans origin story. “They really didn’t,” Brennan says. “The chef came out, and he absolutely didn’t believe us.”

Seventy-five years after Bananas Foster first appeared, it shows little sign of slowing. It has survived the demise of the flaming tableside food era. (“At any party, chafing dish fare always adds distinction,” Katherine Wright, a food columnist for the Billings Gazette, enthused in 1969.) It survived the fall of the showy signature restaurant dish. And so far it’s surviving the GLP-1 era of diminished appetites.

Brennan says he hasn’t seen any decline in interest, for what he believes is a simple reason. “So much of what we do is celebration,” he says. And in New Orleans, there is always room for celebration.