Four Nights a Week in a Guimard Building
Franck Audoux's cocktail bar occupies a 1911 Hector Guimard landmark in the 16th, opens Wednesday to Saturday, and rewards the person who stays downstairs.
The Bloody Mary arrives at a mirrored wooden bar inside a building the French state has designated a national historic monument. Hector Guimard designed 17 rue Jean de la Fontaine in 1911, and the Art Nouveau ironwork outside is the reason anyone photographs the address before walking in. The reason to walk in is Franck Audoux, who opened Cravan here in 2018 and named it for Arthur Cravan — dadaist, boxer, Oscar Wilde's nephew.
This is a small cocktail bar in the 16th arrondissement, in Auteuil, several Métro stops from where most visitors drink in Paris. It serves no wine and no beer. It opens four evenings a week. The bar sits inside the top tier of Paris cocktail rooms by reputation, and the scale of the operation doesn't match the scale of the reputation — which is most of what makes the room work.
A Guimard monument, a four-night week, and a Bloody Mary that earns the trip west — provided you sit downstairs.
Editorial Deep
Order the Bloody Mary. It is the drink that shows what Audoux is doing — balanced, seasoned properly, not the tomato-and-vodka afterthought it usually is elsewhere. The house also sells its cocktails bottled, under the Cocktails en bouteille CRAVAN label, both here and through the e-shop. That should tell you how confident the programme is about its own consistency.
A jazz record is playing at a volume that lets two people at the bar talk without leaning in. The floor is tile, the stools are wood, the walls are mirrored, the bar is wood-panelled, and there is an Art Deco ceiling overhead — the interior is small enough that you take all of this in from your seat without turning your head. The Guimard building it sits inside dates to 1911 and is protected as a national monument, which is the kind of address most cocktail bars would lean on harder than this one does.
Auteuil is not where visitors drink in Paris, and the room reflects that: this is a neighbourhood cocktail bar for the 16th, quieter than anything in Pigalle or the Marais, populated by people who live within walking distance and by the small number of drinkers who've decided the Métro ride west is worth making. The jazz stays on, conversations stay at conversation volume, and nobody is waiting three-deep behind your stool. If you want a scene, this is the wrong bar. If you want to hear the person you came with, this is the right one.
The Gilda at €7 is the clearest value on the menu; the cocktails are where the tab climbs, and they are what the room is selling. There is no wine or beer to duck into if the bill starts to worry you.
Come back on a Wednesday at 6pm, when the bar has just opened and the seats are still available, sit downstairs, drink the Bloody Mary and eat the crab tarama. That is the evening the room was built for. The reasons not to return are structural: it opens four nights a week, the interior is tiny enough that a walk-in on Saturday at 9pm is a gamble, and if you need wine or beer with dinner this isn't the room. Book through the site or by phone, or take your chances on the terrace when the weather cooperates.
Order this
Drink this.
Bloody Mary, Gilda (€7), crab tarama with origan crackers
“Go for the Bloody Mary at the downstairs bar on a Wednesday. Skip if you need wine, beer, or a Saturday-night scene.”
Cravan's original 16e room is a small, four-nights-a-week cocktail bar inside a 1911 Guimard building, run by Franck Audoux with the seriousness a room this size can sustain. The Bloody Mary is the tell — properly built, properly seasoned — and the downstairs bar is where the drinks are made to order. The upstairs floor pours premixed and should be skipped. There is no wine, no beer, and no walk-in guarantee on a weekend night, which is the trade the format asks of you. For a considered aperitif with someone you want to hear talk, this is one of the correct calls in Paris. For a group, a late night, or anyone who wants a glass of Sancerre with their oysters, Cravan's larger 6e location on boulevard Saint-Germain is the version to book instead.
The Verdict
