The Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone is ready to take on Mardi Gras, the Final Four and the Super Bowl. The historic French Quarter hangout has just received a full makeover, a project that had been in the works and finally came to fruition with its unofficial reopening on New Year’s Eve.
Lena Prima
“It’s something they’ve been wanting to do for a while,” says Emily Schmidt, the PR strategist for the Monteleone. “There are a lot of things going on with the city, and we’re anticipating large crowds so we wanted to get these renovations done.” The hotel recently celebrated its 125th anniversary, and its Carousel Bar has been a place for quality cocktails and sophisticated leisure time for decades. “The management has wanted to preserve it and update it,” Schmidt says. “They wanted to expand it to accommodate the growing number of people that are coming there and preserve it for the next 125 years.”
Today’s official grand opening, in which the bar’s brand new look is finally complete, furniture and all, will coincide with the six-month countdown party to the 10th anniversary of Tales of the Cocktail, an event for cocktail enthusiasts hosted every year at the Monteleone. “Tales of the Cocktail has been hosted at the hotel since it started,” Schmidt says. “It’s grown from a few hundred to several thousand people.”
The countdown party will allow attendees to preview the official 2012 poster by artist Robert Rodriguez, look at the cocktail festival’s upcoming first book, Tales of the Cocktail from A to Z, and be at the launch of Fleurty Girl’s cocktail T-shirt collection. Artwork by Stephan Wanger—a world record mosaic centerpiece made out of recycled Mardi Gras beads—will also be on display. “He’s travelling around the world with these pieces of art to showcase New Orleans,” Schmidt says.
Beyond the unveiling of the bar’s new look, today’s opening draws attention to the bar as a lounge with regular live music. Well-known musicians and newcomers will perform Tuesday through Saturday nights, with Luther Kent playing two nights a week and Lena Prima performing every Friday and Saturday night.
“It’s cool because they’re coming full circle,” Schmidt says. Lena’s father, Louis Prima, performed regularly at the Hotel Monteleone before his death.
“She’s helping to kick off this new series of entertainment and the bar has just undergone this major renovation so it’s like the new generation,” says Schmidt. “There are so many people tied to this bar.”
