another
good French wife and mother--a tiny little old lady more than
ninety-five years old, who came to New Orleans in 1840 as the bride of
the then young Antoine Alciatore.

So we put on our hats and coats when evening came, and went back to
Antoine's for dinner, and as long as we were in New Orleans we kept on
going back.

That is not to say, of course, that we did not go also to the Louisiane
and Galatoire's, or that we did not drop in for luncheon, sometimes, at
Brasco's, in Gravier Street, or at Kolb's, a more or less conventional
German restaurant in St. Charles Street; or that we failed to go out to
Tranchina's at Spanish Fort, on Lake Pontchartrain, or to the quainter
little place called Noy's where, we learned, Ernest Peixotto had been
but a short time before, gathering material for indigestion and an
article in "Scribner's Magazine." But when all is said and done there
remain the three restaurants of the old quarter.

I should like to give some history of Galatoire's as well as of the
other two, but when I asked the _patron_ for the story of his
restaurant, he smiled, and with a shrug replied: "But Monsieur, the
story is in the food!"

Do not expect any of these places to present the brilliant appearance of
distinguished New York restaurants. They are comparatively simple, all
of them, and are engaged not with soft carpets and gilt ceilings, but
with the art of cookery.

I have been told that some of them have what may be termed "tourist
cooking," which is not their best, but if you know good food, and let
them know you know it, and if you visit them at any time except during
the carnival, then you have a right to expect in any one of these
establishments, a superb dinner. For as I once heard my friend Col.
Beverly Myles, one of the city's most distinguished _gourmets_, remark:
"To talk of 'tolerably good food' in a French restaurant is like
talking of 'a tolerably honest man.'"

The carnival of Mardi Gras and the several days preceding, is one of
those things about which I feel as I do concerning Niagara Falls, and
gambling houses, and the red light district of Butte, Montana, and the
underground levels of a mine, and the world as seen from an aeroplane,
and the Quatres Arts ball, and a bull fight--I am glad to have seen it
once, but I have no desire to see it again. During the carnival my
companion and I enjoyed a period of sleepless gaiety. To be sure, we
went to bed every morning, but what is the