The Roosevelt New Orleans

The Roosevelt's block-long lobby, all gilded columns and glowing chandeliers, is one of the great interior promenades of the American South. The hotel began life in 1893 as the Grunewald, took the Roosevelt name in the 1920s, and spent the mid-century as the unofficial clubhouse of Louisiana power—Governor Huey Long was so attached to the place that legend insists he built a highway from Baton Rouge to reach it faster. Restored at great expense after Hurricane Katrina and now flying the Waldorf Astoria flag, it sits one block from the French Quarter on the site where, its own history holds, the Sazerac cocktail found its most famous home.

The Sazerac Bar is the essential stop: African walnut, murals by Paul Ninas, and the house rye Sazerac mixed with due ceremony. The Blue Room, once a storied supper club that hosted the likes of Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra, still anchors the hotel's event life, and the annual Christmas transformation of the lobby into a canopy of lights is a New Orleans family tradition in its own right.

Rooms are classically comfortable rather than showy, a rooftop pool overlooks the Central Business District, and Domenica turns out some of the city's best Italian cooking off the lobby. The Quarter's music, restaurants and mayhem are three minutes' walk—close enough for everything, far enough to sleep. As a marriage of grandeur, cocktail history and location, nothing else in New Orleans quite compares.