I never in a million years thought I’d be giving Antoine’s one star.
That’s how the Yelp review I wrote in early 2020 opens, and I’m starting this post the same way because I want to be honest about how reluctantly I got here. Antoine’s is one of the iconic restaurants in New Orleans. It opened in 1840. It’s been in the same family for six generations. Oysters Rockefeller was invented there. It is, in every meaningful way, a piece of American food history.
The last time I’d eaten there was 2001. I was younger, I was on a trip with friends, and I remember a classy throwback to old school New Orleans dining; gracious service, rich classical French Creole food, a room that felt like time had stopped and that was the point. It stayed in my memory as one of those meals that made me love New Orleans the way I love it.
So when I planned the trip to take Zach there for the first time, Antoine’s was the centerpiece. New Year’s Eve, 2019. His first New Orleans, my favorite city, and I was going to give him the iconic version of it. We’d start the trip the right way.
You can see where this is going.
What we ate
We started with cocktails. I ordered a Champagne cocktail, which arrived tasting like Peychaud’s-flavored Kool-Aid; way too much bitters, way too much sugar, no balance, no restraint. Zach’s Pimm’s Cup was okay, if a little sweet. Neither of us would have ordered a second one if we’d been offered, but we weren’t offered, so the question didn’t come up.
Then the Oysters Rockefeller. I had been telling Zach about Antoine’s Oysters Rockefeller since we’d booked the table. The dish was invented in that kitchen. What arrived was, and I want to be precise about this, gritty and bitter. The oysters themselves were small and disappeared under the topping. The topping was rubbery on top and the consistency of stringy baby food underneath; the kind of texture that happens when something has been pre-made and left sitting under a heat lamp until the order came in. I ate one. I tried to eat a second. I gave up.
The Salade Antoine was an average green salad with a light oil dressing. Fine. Forgettable.
For the main course, Zach and I both ordered the Filet de Gulf Poisson aux Écrevisses Cardinal, which we didn’t realize until it arrived, because the dining room was so loud he couldn’t hear me order and I couldn’t hear him. The fish was good. Good is table stakes in New Orleans. It was no better and no worse than any number of restaurants in the city, for considerably less money.
We somehow received two orders of sautéed mushrooms, which were also good and also not memorable.
At no point during the meal were we offered another round of drinks. At no point were we offered wine. The waitstaff wasn’t rude; they were just clearly in a hurry, turning the table as fast as possible to get the next reservation in. When we finished the entrées and the dessert menu came, we looked at each other and shook our heads. We paid. We left.
What was actually wrong
The food was mediocre. That alone wouldn’t have made it a one-star review; mediocre food in an old-school setting can still be a worthwhile evening if the service is right and the room feels right. The food plus the rushed service plus the loud crowded dining room plus the prices added up to something else.
Antoine’s is coasting on past glory. The reputation is doing all the work and the restaurant is doing almost none of it. They are turning tables because tourists keep showing up and ordering Oysters Rockefeller and crossing it off the list, and the kitchen has no incentive to make those oysters the way they used to be made because the next reservation is already at the door.
That’s the part that broke my heart, honestly. It’s not that one meal was bad. Restaurants have bad nights. It’s that the whole structure of the experience felt like a tourist trap built inside a historic dining room, and the people running it had clearly accepted that’s what it is now.
The Zach problem
Here’s the part of this review I couldn’t write on Yelp because Yelp doesn’t have room for it.
I wanted Zach to fall in love with New Orleans the way I love it. I’d been talking up the city for months. Antoine’s was supposed to be the opening statement. What it actually did was set him up to walk into every other restaurant that week wondering whether I was romanticizing everything; whether the city I’d been hyping was real or just my own nostalgia talking.
We ate well the rest of the trip. We ate beautifully in some places. But the skepticism never fully lifted, and I didn’t blame him for it; he’d just spent a lot of money on a meal I’d promised him would be magical, and it wasn’t. I had to earn back credibility I’d accidentally spent at Antoine’s, and I’m honestly still earning it back. The next NOLA trip we plan, when we plan it, is going to be ours from the ground up. No nostalgia. No “you have to eat here because I ate here in 2001.” Just us, finding the city together.
That’s the thing about reviewing iconic restaurants. The damage isn’t just the bad meal. The damage is what the bad meal does to the trust of the person you brought with you. Antoine’s spent some of Zach’s trust in me, and they didn’t even know they were doing it.
So who should still go
Honestly? Nobody, unless you’re a New Orleans history obsessive who wants to see the rooms. They are beautiful rooms. The Mystery Room and the 1840 Room are worth seeing if you can manage to be seated in one. Go for the architecture, get a drink at the bar, take some pictures, leave.
For dinner, go anywhere else. New Orleans has dozens of restaurants where the food is genuinely extraordinary and the staff actually wants you there. Commander’s Palace is still doing it right. Cochon is doing it right. Brigtsen’s is doing it right. Joey K’s, which became the template for how we plan future NOLA meals together, is doing it right at a fraction of the price.
Antoine’s was once one of the great American restaurants. Maybe it will be again someday. I will not be paying to find out.
P.S. The original Yelp review is here, with the dish-by-dish notes in the format Yelp wants. I wrote it in the first week of January 2020, while I was still mad. Six years later, I’m still mad.
P.P.S. If you ate at Antoine’s recently and had a transcendent meal, I genuinely want to hear about it in the comments. I am open to being wrong. I am also open to “they had a great night and we got the bad one,” which happens. I just haven’t seen evidence yet that the bad one is the outlier.
P.P.P.S. Zach has not fallen entirely in love with New Orleans, and Antoine’s is part of why. He’s open to going back; he just wants the next NOLA trip to be ours, not what he calls a “nostalgia trip.” That’s fair. It also still breaks my heart a little. We’ll get there.