At Antoine’s, the oldest restaurant in New Orleans, nearly every nook and corner tells a story. There are rooms upon rooms, decorated with paraphernalia and photos that beg for an explanation. The Dungeon Room, at one point in history before the restaurant’s founding in 1840, held prisoners during a period when the Louisiana Territory was under Spanish rule. The Mystery Room is so named because during the Prohibition era, patrons would be served a “mystery” cup of booze in a coffee cup. The room was only accessible through a secret door in the women’s restroom. In four rooms named after Mardi Gras “krewes”—social clubs that organize the grand parade in New Orleans—kings and queens are crowned on the eve of the big event. And, fittingly for a city that prides itself on its cuisine, there’s a food club called the Escargot Society that still regularly hosts its meetings in a dedicated section of the restaurant.
Antoine Alciatore worked as a sous chef in some of France’s most beautiful hotels. When he came to New Orleans and decided to open a “pensionne”—a type of inn that provided meals and lodging to travelers—Alciatore applied the same cooking techniques to the local bounty.
“He was a sauce guy,” said Rick Blount of his great-great-grandfather. Blount, 65, is the fifth-generation owner and CEO of the legendary restaurant. He explained that Alciatore taught his sauce techniques to chefs who later opened their own restaurants in the city. Back then, the dishes they served were considered French food. Today, it is known as Creole cuisine. Asked to describe it, Blount said that compared to French cuisine, New Orleans’s gastronomic invention has more layers of flavors. The different waves of settlers and immigrants each contributed to the flavors that make up Creole cuisine. “They all have a finger in the pot,” he said, from the spices found in the Caribbean, to the ingredients used by West African slaves, to the sausage-making traditions of Italian and German immigrants.
Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, attributes the rise of a distinct set of culinary traditions here to a difference in how the French viewed their colony. As opposed to the English, who viewed the American colonies as separate from the mother country, the French viewed the Louisiana Territory, which they first claimed in 1682, as a part of France itself. In New England, settlers had a hard time adapting to local game and produce. In New Orleans, “this was France. If you ate an alligator, it was a French alligator,” Williams explained. The difference in attitude “meant that they explored all the food that was here. And they incorporated their own French tastes that they brought with them.”
Different techniques, seasonings, and ingredients from the people who passed through the entrepot were incorporated, creating a cuisine that is as robust in flavor as the histories that inform it. “The French didn’t feel that that was inappropriate … as long as it tasted good,” Williams said, because the French were more invested in the artistic pursuit of cooking than the provenance of its elements. Dishes like gumbo became a universal language for households in New Orleans, with each family serving its own version on the dinner table. “You come to my house, you recognize my gumbo, … it’s different from your gumbo. That’s OK.”
The menu at Antoine’s has those standard Creole dishes that are riffs on French cuisine, such as shrimp remoulade, with a horseradish-based sauce that has been updated New Orleans-style with mustard, paprika, and hot sauce; and fish amandine, featuring toasted almonds and a brown butter sauce. There are also dishes that were invented by the restaurant and remain its claim to fame, such as the oysters Rockefeller. Invented by the second-generation owner when he had trouble importing escargot from France, the dish consists of oysters baked in a sauce so decadent that the restaurant named it after the then-richest person in America. Pompano pontchartrain, another standout, features a filet of pompano fish alongside juicy crab meat that’s been sauteed in white wine and butter. Blount explained that compared to the simple, rustic food most commonly cooked at home in New Orleans—much of which is Cajun cooking, the city’s other predominant culinary style—Creole cuisine is more complex, requiring more assembly as sauces get prepped in different pans at once.
At Antoine’s, the dishes and the warm hospitality have remained much the same for decades. The restaurant has seen lots of difficult times, Blount said, enough to fill a book: from the Civil War that erupted just two decades after the restaurant opened; to the Prohibition era and World War II; to Hurricane Katrina, which flooded everything in the space; to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that destroyed the Gulf seafood supply chain; to the pandemic shutdown.
But Blount recognizes that hardship is part of the journey. “No one can go through life unscathed. … Heartache is just part of being alive.”
He said he won’t quit. “The king of England can’t sell his castles. … He has a duty to his office.”
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