Old Absinthe House, French Quarter.

A 218-year-old French Quarter dive that has not lost its grip.

The Old Absinthe House occupies the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. The building is a Spanish colonial structure, built in 1806, opened as a bar in 1807. It has poured continuously for two hundred and eighteen years, with the exception of three Prohibition years when it operated as a coffee house with a back room you could enter through a side door if you knew the right staff. The right staff have always been there.

The bar is on the ground floor of a two storey building. The room is small, dim, and smells faintly of louche absinthe and cigar smoke worked into the wood since the Pierce administration. The long mahogany bar runs along the right wall. Three brass absinthe fountains, each from the 1870s, sit on the bar. They drip ice water through sugar cubes onto the spoons over your glass.

This is the rare dive bar with a verifiable place in American history. Andrew Jackson met with the pirate Jean Lafitte upstairs in December 1814 to plan the Battle of New Orleans. The room they met in is unchanged and still bookable for groups.

The dripping absinthe fountain.

You order an Absinthe Frappe. The bartender pours one and a half ounces of Pernod-style absinthe into a small glass. They place a slotted silver spoon across the rim. They balance a brown sugar cube on the spoon. They turn one of the brass fountains so its tap aligns over the cube. They release a slow, fat drop of ice water. The drop hits the cube. The cube drips sweet water through the slots into the absinthe. The drink turns from emerald green to pale, milky white. The louche.

The whole drip takes roughly four minutes. You watch it happen. You do not stir. You do not interrupt. You do not photograph the drip on your phone, although you will want to. The drink is twelve dollars. The performance is free.

The Absinthe Frappe and the house Sazerac.

• Absinthe Frappe: twelve dollars. The reason the bar is named what it is. Order it first.
• Sazerac: twelve dollars. The Old Absinthe House Sazerac is one of the finest in the city, made with Sazerac rye, Peychaud's, and an absinthe rinse. The bartender stirs.
• Pimm's Cup: ten dollars. A house pour, with a cucumber spear from a jar that has been on the bar since the 1990s.
• The pony beer: Abita Amber on draft, six dollars. The local New Orleans choice for the regulars who do not drink absinthe at noon.
• The bar food: there is a small kitchen serving a po' boy and a gumbo. Both are good but not why you came. Eat after.

Tuesday at 2pm. The empty fountain hour.

The Old Absinthe House opens at 9am every day. It closes at 4am. The Bourbon Street crowd starts at 9pm and runs until close. The honest hour is 2pm Tuesday: the bar is half empty, the bartender has time to do the Absinthe Frappe slowly, the only other customers are the regulars who drink absinthe in the afternoon as a religion.

The mid-afternoon hour also exposes a small detail you cannot see at night: the back wall is covered with thousands of business cards stapled directly to the wood, accumulated over a hundred years. Every card someone left behind. Every business card represents one specific drinker on one specific afternoon. The wall is the most quietly moving artefact on Bourbon Street.

What to do upstairs.

The second floor of the Old Absinthe House is a private room called the Jackson Room. It is the room where Andrew Jackson met Jean Lafitte. The room has a small fireplace, a long table, and twelve high-backed chairs. The table is original to the meeting. The chairs are 1820s reproductions of the originals.

The Jackson Room is bookable for groups of six to twelve. The reservation is by phone, not online. The minimum is two hundred dollars in food and drink. The room comes with a dedicated bartender who pours from the brass fountain you find on the side cabinet.

If you can plan a New Orleans group dinner around this room, do it. It is the best private dining experience in the French Quarter under five hundred dollars. Bring a Lafitte's bourbon for the table and toast Jean Lafitte before the food arrives.

For two people, an eighty dollar afternoon.

Two Absinthe Frappes at twelve dollars each. One Sazerac to compare. One Pimm's Cup. A small bowl of gumbo at twelve. Tip at twenty percent. Total for two: about eighty-five dollars. Stretch it across three hours. The drinks are slow by design. The fountain takes its time. The afternoon goes with it.

For a Jackson Room group of eight, plan for fifty to seventy dollars per person, with the kitchen pacing food courses around drink rounds. The room is two hours minimum, three hours typical.

The afternoon regulars and the Bourbon Street tide.

The Old Absinthe House has a clear day-night personality split. From 9am until 7pm, the bar is occupied by a small set of regulars: French Quarter residents, retired city employees, a writer or two, a few tourists who have figured out the right time to come. After 7pm the bar pivots to the Bourbon Street crowd: bachelorettes, conventioneers, college students.

The afternoon clientele is the bar at its best. Sit at the bar at 3pm. Order a Frappe. The regular two stools down will, eventually, tell you about the time he met Tennessee Williams here, and you will believe him because the chronology works and because the building has been standing for two hundred and eighteen years, which makes most claims about it true.

How to be welcome at the Absinthe House.

• Do not stir the Absinthe Frappe before it louches. The bartender will roll their eyes but pour you a fresh one for free.
• Do not photograph the business card wall. The bar prefers not. Look at the wall instead.
• Do not arrive after 8pm on a Saturday and expect the daytime experience. The bar pivots hard.
• Do not bring a stag party between 9am and 7pm. The afternoon crowd will move to a different bar within an hour.
• Do not ask the bartender to pour you a Lafitte's house cocktail off the menu. They will, slowly, but the menu drinks are why you are there.
• Do not, ever, claim the Hand Grenade frozen drink on Bourbon is "the same kind of bar." The bartenders will silently mark you down.
• Do not skip the upstairs Jackson Room visit if a group offers to take you up. It is the room. Go up.

Lunch at Galatoire's, drinks at Old Absinthe House, walk to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop.

The classic French Quarter day: lunch at Galatoire's on Bourbon at noon, the Friday Lunch institution. Walk one block north to the Old Absinthe House at 2pm for an Absinthe Frappe. End at Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon at 5pm for a Voodoo Daiquiri in the candlelit front room.

For more bars in the area, see our New Orleans city guide, the cocktail bars guide, and the companion Lafitte's entry on this list.

Yes. The most historic dive in America.