Commander's Palace

Commander's Palace is the most important restaurant in New Orleans — a Garden District institution that has been defining Creole fine dining since 1880 and has launched more famous chefs than any culinary school in America. Emeril Lagasse, Paul Prudhomme, and Jamie Shannon all ran Commander's kitchen before becoming household names, and the Brennan family, who have owned the restaurant since 1974, treat the chef's position as a residency that eventually produces a star.

The building — a turquoise Victorian mansion on the corner of Washington Avenue and Coliseum Street, directly across from Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — is as much a part of the experience as the food. The dining rooms spread across multiple levels and a garden courtyard, with white tablecloths, ceiling fans, and live jazz during the weekday lunch service. The dress code (jackets preferred for men at dinner) is enforced with the kind of polite Southern insistence that makes refusal feel like a personal insult to your grandmother.

The menu is a greatest hits of Creole cuisine: turtle soup, shrimp and tasso Henican, pecan-crusted Gulf fish, and the bread pudding soufflé that has been on the menu for decades and will never come off. The 25-cent martini lunch (one per person, weekdays only) is one of the great deals in American dining — an extremely dry martini in a proper glass, served alongside some of the finest cooking in the South, for a quarter. The restaurant sustained major damage during Hurricane Katrina and reopened within a year, because New Orleans without Commander's Palace would be New Orleans without itself.