Antoine Alciatore arrived in New Orleans from France in 1840, opening his restaurant at the age of 27. He ran it until his death at 55 in 1875, when his wife Julie Freyss Alciatore took the helm while their son Jules trained in the kitchens of France. Jules returned in 1887 and spent the next four decades expanding the restaurant into surrounding properties -- a former slave quarters, a carriage house -- until Antoine's could seat 800 diners across 15 themed rooms. Each room was decorated to honor a different Mardi Gras krewe: Rex, Proteus, Twelfth Night, Maison Verte. The menu, originally written entirely in French, introduced dishes that became New Orleans canon: Oysters Rockefeller, pompano en papillote, Eggs Sardou, and the flaming Cafe Brulot, a tableside spectacle of coffee, orange liqueur, cinnamon, cloves, and fire. Today's owner, Rick Blount, calls the style "Haute Creole" -- sophisticated French technique applied to local ingredients like turtle, pompano, redfish, and crawfish, with virtually no Cajun or Italian influence.

Because the water table in New Orleans sits dangerously high, a conventional wine cellar is impossible. Antoine's solution is a "wine alley" -- an air-conditioned corridor lined floor to ceiling with racks holding up to 25,000 bottles. Guests who linger past closing time are sometimes offered a private tour through all 15 dining rooms and the display cases packed with nearly two centuries of memorabilia. The rooms themselves are a journey through the restaurant's history: gilded mirrors in the Main Dining Room, the imposing Large Annex, and the most storied of all, the Mystery Room. During Prohibition, Antoine's served alcohol in coffee cups that were shuttled through the ladies' restroom into the Mystery Room, where patrons drank in secret. The subterfuge was an open secret in the French Quarter, and the room's name stuck long after repeal.

When Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005, the French Quarter's elevation spared it from the catastrophic flooding that devastated most of New Orleans. Antoine's was not so lucky with wind. The hurricane tore part of the roof off and collapsed a section of exterior wall. Worse, the climate-control system failed, and the entire contents of the wine alley were lost. The restaurant reopened on December 29, 2005, devoting $10,000 per week to rebuilding the wine collection bottle by bottle. Two years after Katrina, with the city's population still a fraction of its pre-storm numbers, Antoine's came within inches of bankruptcy. Zero customer base, the owners later admitted. But the restaurant held on, eventually reclaiming its position as one of the city's top earners. In the wake of the storm, Antoine's added something it had never offered in 165 years: a Sunday Jazz Brunch.

Antoine's has fed multiple U.S. presidents and once hosted Pope John Paul II. Oliver Stone filmed two scenes from his 1991 movie JFK in the restaurant, with Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison eating lunch in the Large Annex Room while the real maitre d'hotel, Henri Alciatore -- a direct descendant of the founder -- greeted him on camera. The restaurant also inspired Frances Parkinson Keyes' 1948 novel Dinner at Antoine's, her best-selling book, which used the restaurant as atmospheric backdrop for a Creole murder mystery. In the novel, Keyes portrayed New Orleans as an exotic, half-foreign city whose customs baffled Northerners -- a description that remains surprisingly accurate. Antoine's endures not because it rests on tradition alone, but because it embodies a city that refuses to eat anything boring.