The réveillon is a continuing New Orleans holiday season custom, rooted in the nineteenth century, during which local restaurants serve a special prix-fixe menu, a multicourse meal offered for a fixed price.

An old French custom meaning “awakening,” réveillon dinners were originally celebrated by Catholic families, who, famished from the Church-prescribed Christmas Eve fast, returned home from Midnight Mass to a feast of seafood gumbo, roast meats, dressings, desserts, wine, and eggnog. In nineteenth-century-Creole New Orleans, families continued the tradition, though often celebrating a réveillon in conjunction with the New Year.

“Tonight in Frenchtown there will be many a joyous ‘reveillon,’ for it is an olden Creole custom to keep the merry hours flying on New Year’s eve,” the Daily Picayune wrote on December 31, 1897. “Among the Creoles the custom is one which age does not wither, and tomorrow, as in the years gone by, the Creole dames will keep their festal day, and friends far and near will call to give greetings and a ‘Happy New Year.’”

The réveillon tradition, however, gradually faded in the succeeding decades. By the 1920s most New Orleans home kitchens had fallen in line with American conventions. However, réveillon dinners continued to be served at local private clubs and the occasional hotel and restaurant.

In the early 1980s, members of French Quarter Festivals, Inc. (FQFI), a nonprofit organized to promote and showcase the culture and heritage of the Vieux Carré neighborhood, brainstormed ways to fill French Quarter dining rooms and hotel rooms during the holiday season. The neighborhood was no longer the holiday shopping destination it had been in decades past. A group of local historians suggested a reawakening of the réveillon tradition and revived it for the 1986 holidays.

For three weeks that December, fifteen restaurants offered a “Creole Christmas” prix-fixe menu at prices ranging from $5 to $35. The first restauranteur to sign up, Ralph Brennan of Mr. B’s Bistro, told the Times-Picayune that initial results were mixed. Nevertheless, the réveillon renaissance continued in the following years.

In 2003 the number of réveillon-celebrating restaurants in New Orleans expanded after FQFI dropped a requirement for businesses to submit their menus for approval. The réveillon list now mixes classic New Orleans establishments with more contemporary ones.

Today, in the weeks preceding the opening of réveillon season, participating restaurants post their menus on the official Holiday New Orleans website. In 2023 nearly fifty restaurants rang in the New Year with a réveillon dinner.