A Day with the Cocktail Chick

By Maggy Bacinelli

Ti Martin emerges through a black door labeled “NO.” The gold lettering warns staff heading towards the kitchen of Commander’s Palace that the door is for exiting, as Martin, the restaurant’s co-owner, has just done. The adjacent “YES” door is for entering. Maintaining order in the graceful Victorian mansion where Commander’s first opened its doors in 1880 requires straightforward instructions.

It’s difficult to miss Martin as she weaves between carefully balanced trays and 25-cent martinis, the city’s best-kept lunch secret. Tall, thin and fair-skinned, she wears a peach-colored leather jacket that almost matches her hair. She greets me with a smile and handshake as warm as Commander’s fabled bread pudding soufflé.

“It’s good to see you,” she says.

The moment is brief. “If you don’t mind, I have to run around here for a few minutes,” she continues. And while she doesn’t run, I nearly do to keep up with her. Back into the kitchen, she whizzes by chefs, line cooks and servers, addressing each by name. Momentum is setting her pace.

On this day in April, a longtime dream of Martin’s will become a reality. By five o’clock, if negotiations go according to plan, the New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute (NOCHI), a new educational venture spearheaded by Martin, will close on a $6.2 million deal to purchase the Louisiana ArtWorks building. NOCHI will at last have a home.

For centuries, New Orleans has been an international destination for food and tourism, but it has lacked an educational institute dedicated solely to culinary arts and the hospitality and tourism industries. Martin hopes NOCHI will serve as a space for culinary and hospitality innovation, collaboration and growth. With advanced and intermediate culinary programs, the institute will offer local high school graduates a higher education alternative while helping to meet the city’s growing demand for chefs, food-service workers and hospitality professionals. The institute will also serve as an incubator for food startups and hospitality entrepreneurs in what Forbes called 2013’s “fastest growing city in America.”

To develop NOCHI’s curriculum, Martin enlisted Tulane University, the University of New Orleans, Xavier University and Delgado Community College. That cross-school collaboration is rare, but bringing people together is one of Martin’s many talents.

“I was raised to be an ambassador for New Orleans,” she explains as we vault through the back of the kitchen en route to her office. A member of the city’s most iconic restaurant family, she describes her life as “one big collaboration.”

PROUD TO CALL IT HOME

Martin grew up in restaurants, she says, learning everything she knows about running one from her mother, the legendary Ella Brennan. After earning an undergraduate degree in business from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she enrolled in the MBA program at Tulane University, where she learned many of those same lessons Ella taught her, only in fancier terms.

“Mom said making a friend, Tulane called it relationship marketing,” she recalls.

After earning her MBA, Martin relocated to Houston and spent two years working in the real estate industry. Feeling nostalgic for home, she dreamt up an idea for a new business, a food products brand inspired by New Orleans. In 1986, she returned to the city and launched Creole Cravings, a line of soups, seasonings and condiments with a distinctively New Orleans flavor. She later sold the company to McCormick.

“I think it was important for me to leave,” she says. “I came back knowing New Orleans was where I wanted to be.”

In 1991, Martin and cousins Dickie and Brad Brennan co-founded the award-winning Palace Café, the first of her many restaurant ventures.

At the same time, Martin also started to become more involved in the community. In 1994, she worked with the Young Leadership Council to launch the Proud to Call It Home civic pride campaign. Today, the campaign’s bumper stickers can still be seen on everything from aging cars to Mac laptops in coffee shops frequented by hipsters.

In 1997, Martin and cousin Lally Brennan joined the leadership team of Commander’s Palace, marking the start of what would become a fruitful professional partnership. The pair went on to co-found Café Adelaide, the Swizzle Stick Bar and SoBou as well as co-author In the Land of Cocktails: Recipes and Adventures
from the Cocktail Chicks, a collection of recipes, mixology tips and stories from their many years in the restaurant business.

Following Hurricane Katrina, Martin renewed her commitment to the city she loved, serving on the boards of dozens of organizations that helped rebuild the city. As a member of the New Orleans Aviation Board, she helped oversee a $350 million renovation of Louis Armstrong International Airport in preparation for Super Bowl XLVII, an event she says helped motivate the hospitality industry.

In recognition of her lifetime of business success and community involvement, the Freeman School named Martin the 2014 Tulane Distinguished Entrepreneur of the Year. In accepting the award at this year’s Tulane Council of Entrepreneurs Awards Gala, Martin explained her philosophy of community involvement. “To me, New Orleans is just another member of the family,” she said, “and when you have a family member in need, you stop what you’re doing and help.”

COMMANDER’S COMMANDER

The color scheme in Martin’s office — bright yellows and reds — was chosen to match one of her scarfs. That was Lally’s idea. In addition to being Martin’s business partner and cousin, Lally Brennan is also one of Martin’s best friends. Later, as I sit at Café Adelaide’s Swizzle Stick Bar waiting for Martin to finish a meeting, the bartender gives me his perspective: They are equally smart business women, he says, but Lally is the softie.

“Ti is really sweet too,” he adds. “She’s just very…”

“Focused?” I ask with a mouthful of shrimp and okra gumbo (not surprisingly the best I’ve ever had).

“That’s the word,” he says. “The two of them make a perfect team.”

I see that focus throughout my day with Martin. Back at Commander’s, back to running around, we pass through the restaurant’s courtyard. Fully bloomed foliage lines the perimeter, and umbrellas shade tables in New Orleans’ ethereal springtime haze. Without notice, Martin eases her pace and falls in lockstep with a server. Touching his shoulder as they walk, she whispers something about a shirt needing “TLC.” He replies emphatically that he’ll take care of it. Martin nods a closed-mouth smile and resumes her pace.

Be it a patron left unattended in the lobby or shirt left untucked on a server, Martin lets no mistake get by. Her expectations are straightforward, and her decisions are as well. An admirer of Jack Welch, she too believes that the bottom 10 percent of staff performers should be let go each year.

“You can’t ever let up,” she tells me. “But if you are going to hold people accountable all the time, you have to be the head cheerleader, too. And I’m the head cheerleader.”

That balance has helped create a company culture she’s extremely proud of.

“We strive for excellence, we’re devoted to each other and our people’s growth, and at the same time, we have fun,” Martin says. “Because I really do believe, life is meant to be lived,
not endured.”

Not coincidentally, that’s also the tagline of Martin’s newest restaurant, SoBou, which Zagat named one of the 25 Most Important Restaurants of 2013.

Like everything else about the business, Martin says she learned her leadership style from her mother. For Ella, “It was always about being the best, and the biggest enemy of the best is the good,” Martin says. “But it was also always about the team, always about the common purpose.”

LOOKING FORWARD

Martin has a file she uses to keep track of the city’s growing number of national rankings. She calls it the “Can you believe they said that about New Orleans?” file. Included among those accolades are biggest brain magnet in the United States, second best city for jobs, best city for school reform, third best city for tech job growth, and one of the greatest comebacks in American history. She worries, though, that as memories of Katrina fade and the city moves from recovery to normalcy, the community will lose its drive to keep improving. And so she challenges New Orleans every chance she gets to double down and dream big, to make public and private stretch goals.

“Let’s have a second hard push after we’ve come so far with our first push,” Martin said in her Entrepreneur of the Year speech. “Let’s create jobs and build careers, continue our education reform, support and fund charitable causes, and one-by-one, motivate groups to fight greed, corruption and bad manners. And in that process let’s have a damn good time.”

After our day together, Martin drives me home to Mid-City. She lives nearby and insists that she had planned to stop there anyway to let out her dog, Dusty Springfield, before returning to work. As we head home, she elaborates on that “second push” she spoke about.

“What I would love is for the city to focus on 2018, the 300th anniversary of New Orleans, as our next deadline,” she says. “Meaning all our nonprofits, companies and schools would ask themselves, ‘What does my organization look like in 2018?’”

Martin says NOCHI will open on a full-scale in 2016. “And by 2018,” she adds with an excited grin, “my hope is that NOCHI will host some kind of international celebration with food from New Orleans’ past, present and future.”

And because a day with Martin guarantees a kind of engineered serendipity, just then her phone rings. It’s a call from one of her staff to tell her that the Louisiana ArtWorks Building sale was finalized. The New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Center has its home.

“You see that?” she nudges me. “Yesterday I really put the pressure on — told ’em to drop everything and make this happen. But today they called me first, because they knew
I would cheer.”