Every city has hotel bars. New Orleans has hotel bars where the room itself is the reason you came. These four are worth visiting whether or not you’re a guest, and in some cases worth building an entire evening around.
The Carousel Bar, Hotel Monteleone
The Hotel Monteleone has been on Royal Street since 1886, built by a Sicilian cobbler named Antonio Monteleone who bought a small hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville and spent the next several decades expanding it. Ernest Hemingway drank here. William Faulkner honeymooned here and wrote portions of “The Sound and the Fury” during the stay. Tennessee Williams was a regular. Truman Capote once told the bar’s patrons that he had been born inside the hotel.
The Carousel Bar itself opened in 1949 in the space formerly occupied by the Swan Room supper club, where Liberace had performed a decade earlier. The concept is exactly what the name suggests: 25 seats arranged in a circle, rotating slowly on 2,000 steel rollers powered by a quarter-horsepower motor, completing one full revolution every 15 minutes. The bartenders stand still at the center. You move around them. The fiber-optic ceiling simulates a night sky. The red-and-white striped canopy overhead looks like a carnival tent designed by someone who took the job seriously.
The house cocktail is the Vieux Carré, invented by Hotel Monteleone head bartender Walter Bergeron in the 1930s, a potent mix of rye whiskey, cognac, sweet vermouth, Bénédictine, and bitters. The 25 carousel seats are the most coveted in the French Quarter, so arrive at 11 a.m. when the bar opens, or accept that you’ll be waiting. An adjoining lounge with booths and live piano runs nightly. The hotel is at 214 Royal Street.
The Sazerac Bar, The Roosevelt Hotel
The Roosevelt opened as the Hotel Grunewald in 1893 and was renamed in 1923 in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt. Governor Huey Long took up residence on the 12th floor and conducted much of his political business from the bar downstairs. When the bar’s owner Seymour Weiss opened the current Sazerac Bar in the late 1930s, he paneled the walls in African walnut sourced from a single tree and commissioned New Orleans artist Paul Ninas to cover them in murals…