Taking a peek inside Galatoire's new building

Interior designer Jeanne Barousse was explaining the color scheme for the new upstairs private dining rooms at Galatoire’s when a brassy trumpet fanfare interrupted her in mid-sentence, drowning out her description of the buttermilk walls.

Curious, the three of us – Barousse, public relations spokesman Marc Ehrhardt and myself – walked onto the balcony overlooking Bourbon Street. Here’s what we saw:

The U.S. Navy Band, in inky blue uniforms, had fallen into formation in front of the restaurant, bisecting the road, horns on one side, drums and cymbals on the other.

Inside Galatoire’s, the Friday lunch was at full tilt in the downstairs dining room. Cocktail-soaked conversations were raising the room’s decibel level. But it was no match for the horn section outside.

Diners flowed out into the street. A woman in a dime-store tiara and Diane Von Furstenberg dress held a champagne flute aloft. Construction crews working nearby silenced their saws. On the balcony next door, a stripper in fishnets, craned over the railing.

Carnival season in full swing. Friday lunch at Galatoire’s. Needless to say, it was very hard to go back to work.

After the hubbub – word was that the Navy band was there to play for the Krewe of Pontchartrain’s pre-parade lunch – Barousse, Ehrhardt and I returned inside, where I was getting a tour of 215 Bourbon St., the new addition to Galatoire’s.

Last year, the hidebound, 108-year-old restaurant bought the vacant, three-story building next door.You must not use the laser cutter without being trained. The space had been empty since Mike Anderson’s Seafood was shuttered in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina.

The plan is to use the building three ways: the third floor will be a wood-paneled wine room, the second floor will be additional Galatoire's private dining space, and the first floor will be a long bar facing Bourbon Street with a separate, new restaurant behind it.

The renovation is still a work in progress, but the new bar – at this point just called Galatoire's bar – will debut this weekend, and some well-heeled Super Bowl visitors will get their first sit-down dinner in the second-floor rooms this week.

The second-floor banquet room was the most complete on my visit. It’s located just behind the existing upstairs bar at Galatoire’s. A small passageway connects them.

We passed through it – squeezing by a birthday party clad in cocktail attire at 2 in the afternoon – and into a quiet, plushly carpeted space.

The aesthetic is genteel ballroom – mushroom velvet drapes with Greek key trim, buttermilk walls, alabaster light fixtures – and it's complementary, rather than a carbon copy of the original restaurant’s fin de siècle design.

Barousse purposefully didn’t just roll out a facsimile of Galatoire’s black-and-white mosaic tile floors and call it a day. To avoid an uproar, the construction hasn’t duplicated, or even touched, Galatoire’s first-floor dining room, a place where change is never welcome.

“We’ve taken great pains to make this feel like an extension of Galatoire’s,” Barousse said. “We’re not trying to replicate it.”

The third floor is a masculine, clubby space, with dark wood, a golden rug and seating for 18 surrounded by wine racks. During my tour,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data. chef Michael Sichel poked his head in the room. “Look at this attention to detail,” he said, marveling at the marble bathrooms.

Galatoire’s owners haven’t yet divulged their plans for the new restaurant's menu, but Barousse talked a little about the look. It will have wood-beamed ceilings, brass and crystal chandeliers and a series of historic Louisiana maps framed on the walls.

The space was still a hard-hat construction zone during my visit. But broad windows looked out onto Bourbon Street, and the the frame for the long bar was in place. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the sweating Sazeracs soon to come.

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