The Saint

The Saint is a different kind of New Orleans dive bar, perhaps a function of late opening hours by city standards running from 8 PM to 6 AM most days. Stories recounted about a visit to The Saint routinely land on adjectives like dark, sweaty, hot, small. Rather than the kind of open-air, weathered paint dive bar found throughout the city, The Saint is more a destination New Orleans dive, often hard to find for first-timers and about as nondescript as a bar gets here.

The Saint is not a dive bar that a tourist is going to stumble into on accident like so many of the city’s French Quarter, Marigny and even Bywater dives. And that means you’re going to get a local crowd with every intention of living life to the fullest here, the late closing hour friendly for those in the service industry as they get off of shifts elsewhere in the city. Accordingly, the vibe tends to shift later in the night as crowds seem to swell the later it gets.

When the bar is open, a small crowd sometimes clustered around the front door will give it away, but otherwise the only indication that a business exists here is the small neon sign reading “The Saint” just above the front door. The space inside is just as small and snug as reviews make it out to be, though paradoxically live events here are a regular occurrence, many of them related to DJs either local or traveling through the area.

Perhaps the signature weekly event at The Saint is Tikioki Tuesday, which is exactly what it sounds like, a dive bar blend of tiki drinks and karaoke. Festivities start at 10 PM each Tuesday and run until everyone decides that it’s probably time to be done. Wednesday’s recurring event is Rock & Roll High School, another pretty self-explanatory session, this time a DJ set filled with classic rock. Additional sets and happy hour specials fill the rest of the week, meaning there is always something going on at The Saint, providing it the unique energy that it carries.

Details about the space are uncharacteristically hard to come by for a city that typically documents its love of local dive bars extensively. The Saint opened in 2001 in the Lower Garden District with some online sources suggesting that The Triangle was the name (or close to it) of the space’s previous tenant. The decor here, if you can make it out in the pervasive darkness that envelopes the bar, is intense, all manner of poster, photo and graffiti blasted across every available surface.

Even more eclectic than the decorations is the community gathered here, The Saint’s location requiring a very intentional decision to visit. As mentioned, the service industry crowd is strong here, particularly as the night progresses, but because The Saint is so embraced by locals, every walk of life will be well-represented. If you can see them. Have we mentioned it’s dark in there?