The long and glorious era of the gourmet hotel restaurant ended a couple of decades ago. The kind of customer who would stay in a hotel luxurious enough to host such a dining room knows that in a city like New Orleans you'd be nuts to eat in the hotel. Like almost all the other big-deal hotel restaurants of the past, the Sazerac faded away.
But an outfit like the Waldorf Astoria must at least give it a try. And it would be wonderful for a restaurant like the Sazerac to become a go-to place again. The food is already there. All it needs now is a star. A name chef, a name host, maybe even a name entertainer. Or a change in dining preferences. My fingers are crossed.
The Sazerac is the flagship restaurant of the Roosevelt Hotel, a place awash in local history that its return from the dead two years ago triggered a burst of celebration among New Orleanians. That continues in the busy, sexy Sazerac Bar--the ancestral home of not one but two of the iconic cocktails of our city. The adjacent restaurant has been less enthusiastically received, although not because of a lack of trying on the part of the kitchen. The Sazerac's reputation as a very formal, classical dining parlor has not helped, the vogues having turned decidedly to casualness. But the Sazerac's menu and service style show no resemblance to those of the old days. This is a good thing: a lot of that food was tired.
The Roosevelt Hotel--formerly the Grunewald, Roosevelt, and Fairmont--was uncontested as the grandest hostelry in New Orleans for a century. It was in a slow decline when Hurricane Katrina did so much damage that the Fairmont chain walked away, leaving one of the most depressing prospects in the recovering downtown. In 2009, the hotel reopened after a major renovation, under the management of the Waldorf-Astoria arm of the Hilton.
The Sazerac Restaurant opened in 1965, its menu composed by Chef Gunter Preuss, freshly arrived from Europe. (He has had a long career in New Orleans ever since, and now owns Broussard's.) Through the 1980s, it was the swankiest restaurant in town, serving every single dish with tableside ceremony. In the 1970s it pioneered the Christmas season grand dinner, years before the Reveillon did the same thing. Like the rest of the hotel, its grandeur declined in the 1900s and became an ordinary hotel restaurant. The current management is attempting to make it a major restaurant again--although the old grandeur will not likely return.
It's a big, spacious room, two of its walls lined with banquettes made in the perfect size for couples on a date. The lighting is gentle and the ambient sound low, but not so low that whispers can be heard across the room. The front wall wide open to the lobby, an unfortunate change made in the 1990s. The service staff does its work with a bit too much casualness for me, and includes some people who clearly don't understand the concept of fine dining.
The chef's tasting menu here is not only a spectacular dinner, but at under $60 for six courses is a very attractive bargain. Begin any meal here with a Ramos gin fizz, a great old drink made better here than anywhere else.
| Attitude | 1 |
|---|---|
| Environment | 2 |
| Hipness | 1 |
| Local Color | 1 |
| Service | 1 |
| Value | 1 |
| Wine | 0 |
