Cuban Creations Cigar Bar

When New Orleans banned smoking in its bars in 2015, a handful of rooms kept the old privilege. The best of them lives in a marble bath house on Toulouse.

The license is grandfathered to the building itself — 533 Toulouse has hosted a smoking bar for decades, by the house's own telling since 1982 — and Andrew Wilson, a Vegas casino-marketing veteran, took the room over around 2018 and gave it its current polish. Vaulted ceilings, marble columns, and an atrium that remembers being a nineteenth-century bath house.

The License

This is the thing to understand about New Orleans smoke: the 2015 ordinance froze the set of true cigar bars — rooms where the cigar and the cocktail are both legal indoors — and no new ones can join. Cuban Creations holds the Quarter's marquee exemption, which makes an indoor Sazerac with your smoke one of the city's rarer luxuries. Here it's just Tuesday.

The Room

Two speeds under one roof: a sports-bar front with autographed memorabilia, and a back lounge of leather couches, member lockers, and three domino tables that give the room its Caribbean pulse. The canopied sidewalk lounge — a pandemic improvisation that proved too good to remove — adds a front-porch third option.

The Bar

The Sazerac outsells everything, as it should two blocks off Bourbon, and behind it stands a shelf of limited-release Scotch and allocated bourbon that takes the second round seriously. Doors run ten in the morning to two at night, every day — afternoon refuge and last-call room in one.

Why We Picked It

Because the full New Orleans ritual — cigar, Sazerac, marble, late hours — is legal under exactly one kind of roof, and this is the finest one. The Premium Cigar Association made it a partner venue for its 2025 convention; the regulars made it theirs long before.