Buzzed, full, happy: At restaurants, bars these faces on the wall have stories to tell

I was sitting at the bar at the Steak Knife, soaking up the scene at a steakhouse that doubles as a martini-kissed clubhouse for the New Orleans Lakeview neighborhood, as people hobnobbed and sliced through buttery rib-eyes.

Just over my shoulder, though, there was a captivating scene in its own right, and another testament of what our favorite restaurants can mean to us beyond the meal.

A few years back, Steak Knife proprietor Bobby Roth turned a snug space that had been a video poker corral into a grotto of gratitude and remembrance to his late friend Joe Segreto, the onetime Louis Prima manager, long-time restaurateur and irreplaceable New Orleans character.

It’s dubbed the Eleven 79 Room, after Segreto’s last restaurant, a modern Italian classic on Magazine Street that he shuttered a few months before he died in 2015. The small space has an old sign from Eleven 79, and replicates the restaurant’s twilight ambiance with its own old wall sconces. Through the dim lighting, faces smile or mug back at you from photos of the dapper Segreto and company, hinting at epic meals and adventures and friendships from the past.

“It was a labor of love building that,” Roth told me as his bar filled up early that evening. “It’s my shrine to give some memory to a great friend and a great restaurant.”

Faces on the wall effect

That hits squarely with the feelings I get about dining and about our hospitality culture, a feeling that warms this time of year as we head out for holiday get-togethers and year-end celebrations.

One of the ways this is expressed is what I’ve come to call the faces-on-the-wall effect.

You know it when you see it. These are the displays of photos that cover walls at restaurants and a great many bars, sometimes carefully framed, sometimes slapdash collages.

It’s a way of sharing history and personality by celebrating the people who have been part of their extended stories, the ephemeral experience of good feelings from hospitality immortalized. I love peering into theses photos, because of what I see looking back.

Antoine’s has the Rex Room, lined by formal portraits of past Carnival royalty. Many places have tapestries of celebrities and sports heroes of generations ago, snapshots at the table or the 8-by-10 glossies they handed out, autographed in thick black marker. “Great meal, good luck,” they might read.

But what really gets me are the regular New Orleans people, the people who are important to the place. They’re the ones who kept coming back and keep places relevant by their patronage.

Their smiles are familiar. It’s the full-belly happiness and third-drink buzz resonating in black and white or faded Kodachrome from long ago. There are wine bottles like trophies on the tables signifying a special event, or maybe they’re triumphantly holding up dessert plates with happy anniversary messages rendered in chocolate sauce around the rim.

The modern marketing scheme is all about instantaneous impressions. Cue the social media influencers with flashy reels, often of themselves against the backdrop of a restaurant with dishes as props.

But these old analog era photos give a different message and influence a different feeling. It’s not about marketing, but marking relationships and entwined stories of places that host and people who partake, adding heart to a hospitality culture along the way.

A grin generations wide

The emblem of Pat O’Brien’s bar in the French Quarter is its famous hurricane cocktail in its wasp-waisted glass.

But when I think of the place, I also think about the faces on the wall, wearing grins surely abetted by said hurricanes, but seeming genuine nonetheless. It's a tale of generations of New Orleans people coming through here, alongside the many tourists it attracts, and to me, it makes Pat O'Brien's the Library of Alexandria of the faces on the wall effect.

Walk the carriageway entrance and you see poster-size blowups of black-and-white photos representing different decades of people here to party. Inside the main bar, an underappreciated den of old-school New Orleans style, the walls are a tapestry of photos, frame to frame as if the subjects are all still standing elbow to elbow.

It turns out Pat O’Brien’s came to this décor decision by popular demand. The bar often has a photographer roaming around. Eventually, enough people asked to have these displayed on the walls that the bar leaned into it, explained company president Shelly Waguespack. The attachment that people feel to them can run deep.

“Sometimes the photos go missing, the truth is sometimes people steal them,” she told me. “Well, this happened to a photo of a man proposing to his wife by our fountain. A friend told him it was gone and he was upset, because every year they visit from Florida to see it again. We asked him to send us a copy, and we printed it out and put it back up.

“That’s how much these things mean to people. It’s touching,” Waguespack said. “I think it shows you how much our New Orleans places matter to folks.”

Even if you’re dining solo in New Orleans, or having a drink by yourself, are you really alone? At the right place, just look around for faces on the wall and you’ll find your answer.

Love New Orleans food? Pull up a seat at the table. Join Where NOLA Eats, the hub for food and dining coverage in New Orleans.

Follow Where NOLA Eats on Instagram at @wherenolaeats, join the Where NOLA Eats Facebook group and subscribe to the free Where NOLA Eats biweekly newsletter here.