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.
Those murals are the first thing that stops you when you walk in. They wrap the room in a continuous Gauguin-influenced panorama of New Orleans at Mardi Gras, populated with real figures from the 1930s: Jean Harlow poses in one corner, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor appear nearby, and Groucho Marx occupies a spot that has been the subject of ongoing debate about whether it might actually be James Joyce. The bar was men-only until 1949, when Weiss staged a publicity event inviting women inside, an act the city now commemorates annually as the Storming of the Sazerac.
The Sazerac Bar serves the cocktail it’s named for with the 19th-century original recipe, rye whiskey rinsed in Herbsaint with Peychaud’s Bitters and a lemon peel, along with the Ramos Gin Fizz that Long favored. White-jacketed bartenders, curved Art Deco walls, and leather seating complete a room that reads less like a hotel bar and more like a museum that serves very good drinks. The Roosevelt is at 130 Roosevelt Way in the CBD.
Chandelier Bar, Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans
The Four Seasons occupies the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street, a 34-story modernist structure designed by architect Edward Durell Stone in the 1960s and converted into a hotel and private residences after a $360 million renovation completed in 2021. The Chandelier Bar sits at the lobby level, its centerpiece a custom installation of 15,000 hand-strung Bohemian crystals from the Czech Republic, designed by the Preciosa glassworks and measuring 20 feet long by 14 feet wide by 13 and a half feet high.
The light that moves through the installation changes character from morning to evening, which means the room you’re sitting in at noon is a different room at 10 p.m. Eighty-five seats are divided between the bar, the lounge, and a garden terrace outside, with the interior subdivided by shutter screens of oak, iron, and commissioned art that create pockets of privacy within the larger space. Louisiana artist George Dunbar’s clay and gold leaf panels face New York artist Leonardo Drew’s relief works on paper across the room.
The cocktail program is led by beverage director Hadi Ktiri, who helped Arnaud’s French 75 Bar earn its 2017 James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program. The Chandelier Martini won Esquire’s Martini of the Year in 2023.
The bar also serves Preservation Hall Jazz musicians on a regular rotation, which means some evenings you’re sitting under 15,000 crystals listening to live jazz with a glass of something excellent in your hand. Food is by Alon Shaya. The Four Seasons is at 2 Canal Street.
The Parlor, Henry Howard Hotel
Everything about the Henry Howard Hotel is the result of a single architect’s outsized ambition, and the building makes that clear from the street. Irish-born Henry Howard designed the double-gallery Greek Revival mansion at 2041 Prytania Street in 1867 for the daughters of a Mississippi River steamboat magnate, and he applied to it the same vocabulary he used across half of the Garden District: Corinthian columns, dramatic Roman arches, full-height windows that flood the interior with light, and 12-foot ceilings throughout.
The hotel is 18 rooms, which means the parlor at its center operates less like a hotel bar and more like the living room of a very well-appointed private home. Red pine floors, original crown molding, antique jazz instruments mounted on the walls, custom New Orleans-themed toile wallpaper, and a marble-topped bar station in the corner set the room. Velvet chairs and a green sofa face floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Prytania Street.
The bar cart offers cocktails to guests and the occasional walk-in who knows the place exists. There is no restaurant on site, and the Parlor is not trying to be anything other than what it is: a quiet, architecturally remarkable room where you can have a Sazerac before walking down to Magazine Street or catching the St. Charles streetcar two blocks away. Henry Howard Hotel is at 2041 Prytania Street in the Lower Garden District.
