The Room Colin Field Spent Nearly Thirty Years Building
A 25-seat oak-panelled room on the Rue Cambon side of the Ritz, built for classical cocktails and quiet conversation. No bookings: arrive before opening, around 5:30pm, and the room is yours.
The ice is what you hear first. There is no music at Bar Hemingway — never has been, that's the policy — so what fills the room is glass on glass, a stirring spoon against a mixing tin, and the low register of people talking to each other rather than at each other. Twenty-five seats. Oak panels. Hemingway on every wall, in silver frames, looking at you looking at the drinks.
The bar sits inside the Ritz Paris but you don't enter through Place Vendôme. You come in from 38 Rue Cambon, the back side of the hotel, through a corridor that empties into a room the size of a large living room. Colin Field ran the cocktail programme here for nearly three decades before stepping away in 2023, and everything about how the bar moves — the pacing, the rose on a lady's glass, the disciplined classicism of the menu — is his shape still holding.
The best small cocktail room in Paris, run on a policy of no music and no shortcuts, and priced accordingly.
Editorial Deep
The menu runs the classical spine — martinis stirred cold and clean, a French 75 that arrives without decoration, the Serendipity that Field built out of cognac, mint, apple juice and Champagne and has been on the card long enough that regulars order it by name. The Clean Dirty Martini is the signature and the drink to lead with: it is the house showing you the discipline before it shows you anything else. The Picasso and the Raspberry Martini round out the short list of drinks the room is known for.
Twenty-five seats in a room panelled in oak, walls hung floor-to-ceiling with silver-framed Hemingway photographs, upholstered leather armchairs pulled up to small tables. Lighting stays low — sconces, no overheads doing any real work. The no-music policy is the defining acoustic decision: what you hear is conversation and glassware, and the volume in the room is set by whoever happens to be in it rather than by a playlist.
Hotel guests in jackets, older regulars from the 1st and the 8th who have been coming for years, a steady rotation of Americans and Brits who have read about the place and are here to sit inside the mythology for an hour. The mix skews forty-and-up on weeknights, younger and better dressed on Fridays. Because there are twenty-five seats and no music, one loud table changes the whole room — and on the wrong night, that table exists. Most nights it does not.
Do not turn up at nine on a Friday, get turned away, and console yourself with a second round somewhere down the street to make the trip feel worth it — the value here collapses the moment you start paying twice without getting the seat. This is Ritz pricing for Ritz cocktails in a Ritz room, and it is defensible against Bar 228 at the Meurice and Les Ambassadeurs at the Crillon — none of which are cheap, all of which charge for the address as much as the drink.
Come back in November, at 5pm on a Tuesday, when the room opens and you can walk in and take a bar stool without a conversation. That is the version of Bar Hemingway that earns the price and the reputation — two drinks, ninety minutes, one of the great small cocktail rooms in Europe working at its own pace. Do not come back at 10pm on a Saturday with four people expecting to be seated. The room does not do that night, and trying to make it will produce the worst evening the bar is capable of.
Order this
Drink this.
The Clean Dirty Martini, then the Serendipity
“The best small cocktail room in Paris, at Ritz prices, if you can get a seat.”
Go early on a weeknight, enter from 38 Rue Cambon rather than Place Vendôme, and sit at the bar. Order the Clean Dirty Martini first. Skip Friday and Saturday nights unless you can be there before opening — the 25-seat room fills fast and most people who arrive after 8pm on a weekend leave without a drink. The cocktail prices are defensible for this room, this technique, and this address; it stops being defensible if you drink two rounds standing in the corridor waiting for a seat.
The Verdict
