New Orleans Historic Hotels by Paul Oswell

Author:Paul Oswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

The famous Omni Royal Rib Room.

The hotel was constructed to exacting specifications set forth by the Vieux Carré Commission which oversee all historic preservation efforts in the French Quarter. It was to be built upon exact drawing of the St. Louis Hotel with its famed arches, Spanish wrought iron railings down to the precise height and dimensions which outlined the Paris look Mansard Roof.

One of the most difficult decisions, along with all the interior and exterior design plans, was the nature of the flagship restaurant. It had long been intended that the hotel should trumpet a Creole restaurant of the highest caliber, but when research showed that several high-class Creole restaurants were in fact within a stone’s throw of the hotel, it was time for a rethink.

The Rib Room would be a restaurant specializing in prime beef, a very British addition to the French Quarter dining scene, but one that proved so successful that it not only eventually cemented the hotel’s culinary reputation in town but also provided a model for many of the hotel company’s other openings.

A hotel worthy of DePoilly’s vision was built up from the rubble, even including his precious cypress wood as a major constituent of the interior. The Royal Orleans Hotel, after the usual forays into the bureaucratic battleground that surrounds construction in the French Quarter, had its gala opening on October 8, 1960.

Battling for business and going up against the fame of the Roosevelt and the Monteleone, the hotel had to employ innovative tactics—it was the first hotel to advertise on billboards on the road from the airport, for example. But this steeliness, perhaps borne from the adversarial spirit of the original City Exchange, has seen it flourish and become a French Quarter institution in its own right, through its acquisition and rebranding by Omni and up to modern times.

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