Antoine Alciatore arrived in New Orleans in 1840 and opened a boarding house with a kitchen attached, and his family has been running the place ever since.
He came by way of New York, spent a short stretch cooking at the grand St. Charles Hotel, then struck out on his own with a pension that fed lodgers and walk-ins alike. His fiancée traveled down from New York with her sister to join him, and the couple married and built the business together. Years later, dying and unwilling to let his wife watch him decline, Antoine sailed for Marseilles. He told her they would not meet again on earth. He was right.
His son Jules took over and converted the boarding house into a full restaurant in 1898. Jules had trained in Paris, and the following year he ran into a problem that turned into the dish everyone knows. French snails had become hard to get, and escargots à la Bourguignonne was coming off the menu. Jules took that recipe’s logic, all butter and herbs, and applied it to Gulf oysters, which were local and abundant. He named the result after John D. Rockefeller, then the richest man in America, because the sauce was that rich and that green. Rockefeller himself apparently never tasted it.
The recipe has stayed inside the family for more than 125 years. Jules extracted a deathbed promise that the exact proportions would never leave the house. An editor’s note published alongside a 1948 magazine feature said only that the sauce contains 18 ingredients. Roy Alciatore, who ran the restaurant for nearly forty years, released ten Antoine’s recipes that same year and slipped a decoy version of Oysters Rockefeller among them. Plenty of people still believe that decoy is the real thing. The house maintains the sauce contains no spinach, which has pushed researchers toward watercress and other pureed greens. Antoine’s had served an estimated 3.5 million orders by 1980.
The building holds fourteen dining rooms, each decorated on its own theme, and they are worth asking about. The Mystery Room got its name honestly. During Prohibition, patrons slipped through a closet door in the ladies’ restroom and came back out with coffee cups full of liquor. Second-floor rooms include several with balconies over St. Louis Street, and an elevator reaches all of them.
The rest of the menu carries as much history as the oysters. Eggs Sardou and Pommes de Terre Soufflés both originated here, the puffed potatoes at least in the version Antoine’s made famous. Baked Alaska closes most celebration meals. Café Brûlot Diabolique gets set on fire at the table, another Jules invention.
A few house rules catch people off guard. Dress code runs smart casual and gets enforced at the manager’s discretion, with collared shirts strongly suggested for men and no flip flops, tank tops, baseball caps, or athleisure. The restaurant issues one check per table regardless of party size and will not split or itemize it, though it accepts up to five forms of payment against that single check.
Service times need a phone call. The restaurant’s own pages list conflicting dinner windows, and third-party listings disagree further on which days lunch runs. Dinner generally starts around 5 or 5:30 p.m. and ends at 9. Sunday brunch runs 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. with a live jazz band.
Antoine’s sits at 713 St. Louis Street and takes reservations at (504) 581-4422. Book ahead, order the Rockefellers, and accept that you will never know what is in them.
