Arnaud's Restaurant

The largest restaurant in New Orleans with 14 private dining rooms, a massive bar, and a Mardi Gras Museum housing elaborate costumes. Founded in 1918 by "Count" Arnaud Cazenave, this Creole cuisine institution has retained its elegant atmosphere - and its original owner.

Arnaud's Restaurant sprawls across a full city block in the French Quarter, one of the four Grand Dames of New Orleans cuisine alongside Antoine's, Galatoire's, and Broussard's. With 14 private dining rooms, a massive bar, and a Mardi Gras museum upstairs, it is the largest restaurant in the city. It is also one of the most haunted, watched over by spirits who seem determined to ensure that the standards they established in life are maintained in their absence.

Arnaud Cazenave, a French wine salesman who styled himself "Count Arnaud" (a purely honorary local title), launched the restaurant in 1918. He built it into a Creole institution that catered to New Orleans' socialites, expanding by purchasing adjacent buildings to accommodate his growing empire. The Count was a perfectionist who demanded excellence in every detail, and his death in 1948 did nothing to diminish his attention to the restaurant's operations.

Staff throughout the decades have reported seeing a dapper gentleman in a tuxedo standing in the corner of the dining room, supervising the comings and goings of the restaurant. The apparition bears an unmistakable resemblance to Count Arnaud himself. His ghost has been known to rearrange silverware or adjust the bar setup to his liking—apparently, the afterlife has not dulled his exacting standards. The Count's Room is reportedly the most active space in the restaurant, where the late founder's presence is most strongly felt.

Germaine Cazenave Wells, the Count's daughter, was a larger-than-life figure who reigned as queen of over 22 Mardi Gras balls between 1937 and 1968—more than any other woman in Carnival history. The Mardi Gras Museum on the second floor bears her name and displays more than two dozen lavish costumes, including 13 of her own queen's gowns. A workman in the museum reported seeing an apparition bearing a striking resemblance to Germaine herself, a misty form watching over the festive gowns she once wore.

Even without ghosts, the museum has an unsettling quality: each costume is displayed on a mannequin bearing a wax-museum likeness to Germaine Wells, creating an army of identical faces frozen in perpetual celebration.

Other guests have reported seeing a woman wearing a hat exit the ladies' room and cross the hall, only to walk directly into a wall and disappear. Investigations revealed that a staircase once stood where the wall now blocks passage—the ghost follows a path that no longer exists in the physical world.

The Richelieu Bar, one of the oldest structures in the restaurant complex dating to the late 1700s, was an opium den when Count Arnaud purchased it. Staff report that temperatures in the bar drop dramatically at random, as if something from the building's darker days still lingers in the air.

Arnaud's offers not just exceptional Creole cuisine, but a dining experience watched over by generations of spirits who helped build it into a New Orleans institution.