Arnaud's Restaurant

Arnaud Cazenave, the Count who opened Arnaud's in 1918, has been seen standing in the far-left corner of the main dining room during busy service in full tuxedo, mustache and all. His daughter Germaine, Mardi Gras queen of more than twenty balls, drifts through the upstairs Mardi Gras Museum where her gowns are displayed. The Count died in 1948 but doesn't seem to have checked out.

Arnaud Cazenave died in 1948. Staff and guests at Arnaud's still describe seeing him in the dining room: a tall man with a mustache in a tuxedo, standing in the far left corner on busy nights, watching service the way he did when he owned the place.

He's known as the Count, which was his nickname, not a title. Cazenave was a French wine salesman who arrived in New Orleans in the 1890s and opened Arnaud's in 1918, in the middle of a building boom and a few months before Prohibition would have sunk a lesser operator. He ran the restaurant for thirty years and was famously particular about everything: table settings, pressed linens, the angle of the silverware. By most accounts, he still is.

The Count usually appears in a corner, usually during dinner service, usually to someone who has no idea who he is. Diners describe him looking like a well-dressed guest who wandered over from another table. He smiles. He doesn't speak. He watches the room for a beat and then he isn't there. Staff rarely spot him in the kitchen. He's a front-of-house ghost, keeping an eye on the floor.

His daughter Germaine haunts a different part of the building. After Cazenave's death, Germaine Cazenave Wells took over the restaurant and became famous in her own right, reigning as queen of more than twenty Mardi Gras balls between 1937 and 1968, a New Orleans record that still stands. Her gowns are on display upstairs in the Germaine Cazenave Wells Mardi Gras Museum, and that's where people see her. She floats through the gallery as a misty form, sometimes pausing by a particular dress. Guests have described the temperature dropping around specific mannequins, and a handful of staff have reported display cases rattling for no reason during quiet hours.

The museum is free and open to anyone who has a meal downstairs. It's worth wandering up after dessert even if you don't believe in any of this, because the dresses themselves are unreal: sequined, twenty pounds of beadwork, gowns that required their own staff to carry the trains.

Arnaud's is big. 12,000 square feet, multiple dining rooms, a bar that looks like nothing has changed since 1918. On a busy night, the staff count tops fifty. The Count has a lot of room to patrol. If you're seated on the far left side of the main dining room and you notice a man in a tuxedo watching the floor from behind a column, resist the urge to wave him over. He's just checking in.