This love letter to the legendary bars of some of Paris’s most luxurious (and expensive) hotels is not to suggest that I prefer to lap my gin from Baccarat crystal. And as compelling as I find the cultural lore of early-20th-century Paris, I don’t go to the bar at the Hôtel de Crillon to try to coax Teddy Roosevelt out of the woodwork. If I were only after luxury and history, I’d go read a book in the Louis Vuitton store. The secret is that this cluster of Right Bank monuments holds, and often hides, lounges that provide singular, decadent, theatrical sets for a magical night out in Paris, where opulence and silly fun can go hand in white-gloved hand.
The French have never had a cocktail culture in the Anglo-American vein. Even today, in a French household your hosts are more likely to offer a Kir or vermouth on ice than a Martini before dinner. So the bars américains of the grand hotels—hotels that mostly opened or relaunched in the 1910s and ’20s—catered specifically to that era’s influx of English and American travelers. Some of the palace bars offer fanciful homages to an older version of what a bar should be, a place where there’s a Corpse Reviver on the cocktail list and the barmen all wear bow ties.
At the Ritz’s dark-wood, dozen-table Bar Hemingway, Papa’s preferred rifle is pegged above the bottles and his books line the walls. British head bartender Colin Field, like his book The Cocktails of the Ritz Paris, is a font of fastidious cocktail history (ask him about the Bloody Mary and clear your schedule) and a reliable source of delicious drinks.
I sat down at the bar and Field, to whom it’s best to give free rein, immediately started to hollow out a fresh passion fruit in preparation for the Nautilus, a cocktail in which the fruit’s hull, opened at the top, emptied and filled with freshly blended strawberries and vodka, rises slowly out of a passion-fruit Martini. Two drinks in one, with moving parts. As the passion fruit rose slowly from its bright orange sea, the bar erupted in applause, and Field beamed with the satisfaction of a magician whose assistant has not been sawed in half. The bar may be dedicated to Hemingway, but it’s Field’s stage.
Getting to Bar Hemingway is in and of itself one of Paris’s singular experiences. The Ritz faces the Place Vendôme, but Bar Hemingway hides just inside the back doors to the hotel, at the Rue Cambon. So you have to traverse the entirety of the hotel to reach it, a distance that César Ritz, according to one account, decided to make less interminable by filling it with “beautiful things.” The result is a 120-yard, brightly lit corridor, embedded right and left with glass cases of such “beautiful things” as splayed scarves, mounted pumps, glistening perfume bottles, and a sequined denim jacket. Walking the hallway prefigures the dream you’d have if you read the Air France duty-free catalog on opium before going to bed.
Safely out of the merchandise mirage and just a few blocks south, the Hôtel Le Meurice suggests a different fantasy of bygone cocktail culture. In a reference to the hotel’s historic British patronage (it is mentioned by Thackeray and Dickens), in 2007 Philippe Starck redecorated its Bar 228 as a tobacco-toned Victorian gentlemen’s club—except that he made it brilliantly, subtly glamorous. In place of a roaring fire, dozens of peach-colored votive candles flicker in a glass case; lamps stand on lavender cut-crystal bases; and white roses tower in the corner of the room. If Bar 228 conjures up Rudyard Kipling, it conjures up Rudyard Kipling in a pair of pearl drop earrings and pink lip gloss. No wonder it attracts the Fashion Week set.
Many palace bars open at six, but the humanitarian Meurice starts serving at noon. I showed up wilted one afternoon after a morning trip to the Louvre, and head bartender William Oliveri restored my will to live with a Bullshot—beef consommé, vodka, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco. It was salty, bracing, and powerful enough to run for mayor.
Down at the end of the arcade on the Rue de Rivoli is the Hôtel de Crillon, a long, 18th-century aristocratic town house on the Place de La Concorde with a colonnaded facade commissioned by Louis XV. The building looks worthy of housing a parliament, so it is all the more shocking when you walk down the marble gallery of the hotel to find a crimson velvet bar the size of a pillbox. It’s like finding the heart of a mouse inside a whale.
Given its size and location, I was almost surprised to find the little chamber hopping on a weekday night around ten, conversation gently blanketed by the languid tinkling of a black baby grand piano. I sat at the mosaic-mirror-encrusted bar (the work of French sculptor César) where, to my left, two male models sniffed at a 100-year-old bottle of Rémy Martin and, to my right, a 75-year-old Chanel-swaddled woman sipped rosé Champagne. Obviously, I ended up in conversation with the lady. She told me I had nice legs and advised me on seasonally appropriate stocking choices. In an increasingly casual world—one where “dressing for dinner” means throwing a kaftan over a swimsuit—the sumptuous fabrics and chandelier lighting of the palace bars encourage a rare bit of dress-up.
The Hôtel Raphael, at the western end of the Champs-Élysées, just south of the Arc de Triomphe, bears the cultured touch of its art-collecting founder (note the Turner in the lobby). The Raphael’s downstairs bar, with its sea of radiant, cherry-colored velour sofas and glistening oil paintings, should go in the Rolodex of anyone planning a Parisian tryst. Especially a really illicit one—the downstairs bar is never packed. A second bar, on the roof, offers 360-degree views of the Paris skyline; in the summer, Right Bank Parisians meet in the private bays separated by topiary hedges and sweet-smelling fruit trees.
Anyone on a dedicated hunt for chic Parisians need look no further than the Hôtel Le Bristol. The Bristol bar breaks from a pattern of intimacy in palace bars and instead offers grandeur—theater in the round. A ring of pink marble columns surrounds a circular marble bar at the heart of a flotilla of brocaded pastel armchairs and love seats. It’s sort of like a Roman bathhouse where you bathe in Cognac and power instead of thermal water. Politics and posh seem to have begotten one another at this most princely of palace bars. French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s camp has made the Bristol its preferred retreat. On a recent Monday night, I had to elbow my way past stacks of paparazzi at the front door. Someone at the bar whispered the name of a certain famous French actress with a Coast Guard dinghy for lips. I never saw her, though the cops-and-robbers act of a French rock star with a sizzling Marlboro on his lip getting politely chased around the bar by a steward with an ashtray was ample entertainment. (The smoking ban, enacted in January 2008, is taken very seriously.)
Head bartender Thierry Hernandez’s “palace of tomorrow” at the Plaza Athénée offers futuristic, multi-textured cocktails—a deconstructed Piña Colada, for example, which entails eating a foamy coconut meringue and then spraying rum with pineapple extract from a tiny vaporiser into your mouth. If the elegant lady at the Crillon scolded my bare legs, she’d surely balk at the alcoholic pineapple Binaca—even Hernandez admitted it targets the younger crowd. The smoky blue glass bar that responds to touch with a glowing internal light (I felt like I was setting my cocktail down on ET’s dying chest), the portable plasma-screen menu, the liquor coaxed into gelatinous slivers and frozen Popsicles—embrace it or pooh-pooh it, you can’t deny Hernandez’s genius for sparking conversation.
The Plaza Athénée was for me, as it is for many, a gateway to the palace bars. Last year, my sister, who works in fashion, dragged me there for her 24th birthday, so I had to swallow my protest that it was going to be expensive and completely ridiculous. It was both, and I’ve never looked back.