The talk you overhear in New Orleans restaurants is usually about restaurants. It tends to center on the hot new place of the moment, and whether one will be able to try it while it's still hot - or at least before it closes. Less often, you hear New Orleanians conversing about a restaurant that's been around a few years. If the talk is good, pay close attention. Because not many older restaurants manage to hold the interest of the dining public. It has to be not merely delicious and hospitable, but somehow timeless.

What follows are some of the stories that you are likely to hear about a restaurant that has celebrated its 80th birthday. In 1918, a colorful French wine salesman named Arnaud Cazenave opened the grand restaurant that bears his name.

Count Arnaud (as he came to be called, without any bona fide claim to the title) practiced a brilliant new approach to the serving of food and drink. He became so influential in his business that it can be said that the entire New Orleans restaurant community reflects, to one degree or another, his ideas. And the style he set inspires everything we do to this day at Arnaud's.

Arnaud believed, quite simply, that the pursuit of the pleasures of the table is as worthy as anything else one does in life.