The Grill Room at Windsor Court

The Restaurant

The Grill Room opened in 1984 at the Windsor Court Hotel — the twenty-three-story, twenty-three-hundred-piece-art-collection property in the New Orleans Central Business District that has held both AAA Five Diamond and Forbes Five Star ratings continuously since the late 1980s. The dining room itself is a study in formal British-Continental design: an oil-painting-hung lobby gallery leads to a chandeliered, wood-paneled main floor with widely spaced tables, ivory linens, hand-blown glassware, and a sommelier station that anchors the south wall. The room seats about ninety in conditions of operatic discretion — no two tables within easy earshot of each other.

The kitchen, led by executive chef Drew Dzejak, runs a Modern Continental programme that takes the classical fine-dining template — the dover sole, the prime steak tartare, the chateaubriand carved tableside — and refreshes it with Louisiana ingredient sourcing and contemporary technique. Signature plates include a Gulf-tuna tartare with Louisiana caviar and dashi gelée; the dry-aged sixty-day prime ribeye with bone-marrow custard; an Atlantic dover sole prepared tableside on a guéridon cart; a sweetbread course with morel cream and brioche; and a roasted Louisiana-Heritage Farms duck with cherry-bourbon glaze. The pastry team runs a soufflé programme that has been Windsor Court's signature for thirty years — six flavours rotated through the calendar, prepared from order, twenty minutes from oven to table.

The wine cellar holds more than three thousand bottles across nine hundred labels — one of the deepest in the South, with serious vertical depth in Bordeaux first growths, Burgundy grand crus, and California cult Cabernet. The sommelier programme is captained by Joe Briand, formerly of Restaurant August, and the wine pairing flight is the room's most-requested format. Service is the upper international tier: a maître d'hôtel who reads the room before any captain reaches it, a captain-led service round per course, and the kind of operatic-yet-discreet pacing that the Windsor Court's New Orleans business clientele has come to assume. For a deal-closing dinner in the Mississippi Delta, this is the address that everyone serious knows.