The Fascinating History of New Orleans’ Oldest Bar
At the dawn of Prohibition there were three world-famous bars in New Orleans: Henry Ramos’s Stag Café, Chris O’Reilly’s Sazerac House and Pierre Cazebonne’s Old Absinthe House, perhaps the most famous of the three. Two of those bars enjoy truly mythical stature in the modern cocktail revolution. Their signature drinks are among the bedrock classics and their histories are recounted in bars from Sarasota to Singapore, St. Petersburg to Punta Arenas.
Conveniently for their legends, the Sazerac House, opened in 1851, and the Stag, successor to the bar that Ramos opened down the street in 1887, never came back after Prohibition; they never had to scrape by during the dry years, try to rebuild their clientele during the 1930s, pump cheap rum drinks into G.I.s and gyrenes, flyboys and swabbies during World War II, figure out what the visiting merrymakears wanted to drink during the buttoned-down 1950s or compete with hard drugs and hookers in the 1960s and 1970s. They’re not still keeping the lights on by selling Vodka Sodas to sorority girls and Bud Light to guys who look like their dads.
The Old Absinthe House, open pretty much continually since at least 1842 (there were a couple of years during Prohibition when the place was padlocked—but its actual bar was still in use, in a building down the street), has done all those things. It is a true survivor: the oldest bar in New Orleans and one of the oldest in America. In all that time, it has grown its own crust of myth and legend, a rough, patchy thing that is as neglected as it is ancient. The last time the bar’s actual history was investigated in any detail was in the 1930s. I think it’s time for an update, particularly since, as far as can be determined, 2019 is the 150th anniversary of its embrace of the word “absinthe” in its name.