A bar, at its finest, is a form of theatre. The stage is the zinc counter, the footlights are the bottles ranged behind it in their amber and gold and deep cordovan gradations, and the drama — the conversation, the argument, the seduction, the grief quietly nursed over a single glass that is never quite empty — unfolds nightly without script or direction. Paris understands this instinctively. The great bars of the city are not merely places to drink; they are places where life, in its most concentrated form, has always conducted itself.
Harry’s New York Bar: The American Quarter
There is an argument to be made — not uncontested, but compelling — that Harry’s New York Bar on the Rue Daunou, established in 1911 when Tod Sloan, a retired American jockey, acquired an entire mahogany bar and its fittings from a closed New York establishment and had them shipped to Paris, is the single most historically consequential bar on earth. The Bloody Mary was allegedly invented here in the 1920s. The French 75 is claimed here. Hemingway drank here, as did Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and — in the period between the wars when Americans of a particular literary or artistic temperament converged on Paris with the focused purposefulness of migratory birds — most of the other writers and artists who gave that era its mythology.
The bar has changed little since those years. The dark wood panelling, the pennants of American universities nailed to every available surface, the downstairs piano bar that still operates as a neighbourhood secret — Harry’s exists in a state of deliberate continuity with its own legend, and the legend, on examination, turns out to be largely accurate.
La Closerie des Lilas: Memory in Brass
At the bottom of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, where the café broadens into a full restaurant and where the terrasse that Hemingway occupied during the writing of The Sun Also Rises still faces onto a chestnut grove, the Closerie des Lilas holds its ground against time with the composure of an establishment that knows it has already outlasted most of what surrounded it. Each table at the bar bears a small brass plaque commemorating a distinguished habitué: Apollinaire, Picasso, Verlaine, Trotsky. This is not decoration; it is geological record.
The bar section — distinct from the restaurant and operating with a slightly different tempo — is where the serious drinker will choose to be positioned. The cocktails are classical and prepared with a precision that honours the tradition of the place. The clientele tends toward the literary and the unhurried, and the bar staff possess the particular quality, common to the finest Parisian bartenders, of knowing when conversation is desired and when it is not.
The Ritz Bar: Golden Geometry
The bar of the Hotel Ritz — inaugurated by César Ritz in 1898 and bearing, since a substantial renovation completed in 2016, an interior of gilded and lacquered elegance designed to echo the geometry of the Vendôme column that stands outside its windows — is not a place to go for historical roughness. It is a place to go for the experience of luxury bar culture at its most accomplished and most considered.
F. Scott Fitzgerald drank here, famously enough that his name is attached to an area of the bar. Coco Chanel maintained an apartment in the hotel for decades and could be encountered in the vicinity with some regularity. The martini served here is, by universal assent of those who take such things seriously, one of the finest available anywhere in the world: properly cold, properly stirred, properly silent in the glass.
Le Fumoir: The Library Bar
Opened in 1999 and situated across the street from the Louvre, Le Fumoir occupies a double space — café in the front, bar and library in the back — that has established itself, in a relatively short time by Parisian standards, as one of the city’s genuinely indispensable drinking establishments. The library section, with its shelves of books available for reading during one’s visit, creates an atmosphere of civilised leisure that feels authentically Parisian in a way that many of the city’s more ostentatiously historical bars do not. The gin selection is exceptional. The clientele is a mixture of arts professionals, museum workers, and the occasional novelist who has discovered that a corner table here, in the late afternoon before the evening crowd arrives, is as conducive to thought as any space the city offers.
Experimental Cocktail Club: The New Tradition
In the Marais, the Experimental Cocktail Club represents the finest flowering of the Paris cocktail renaissance — a movement that has, in the past fifteen years, elevated the city’s drinking culture from a wine-and-pastis monoculture to something genuinely pluralist and inventive. The cocktails here reference classical form while departing from it with the confidence of practitioners who understand the tradition they are departing from. The space itself is intimate, correctly dim, and populated by a clientele whose attention is divided, in roughly equal measure, between their companions and their glasses.
To drink one’s way through the history of Parisian bar culture is to drink through the history of the twentieth century itself — its artistic movements, its wars, its loves, its long conversations about what it means to be alive and free and in possession of enough time and money for a properly made martini. The bars of Paris have witnessed all of it, and they remain, as ever, entirely ready to witness whatever comes next.