The grand old restaurant Commander's Palace, in New Orleans, is hidden among multicolored mansions in the city's smartest neighborhood, not far from where Sandra Bullock owned a house.
To get in, you have to pass muster: no jeans, no shorts, nothing that would detract from the genteel luxury where the city's old guard drink scandalously cheap 25-cent martinis along with their turtle soup, gumbo and bread pudding. It's a place that, implicitly at least, is dedicated to one of the city's oldest society rituals: keeping up the illusion of wealth from the city's distant past as a fast-growing center of commerce.
