A Boarded-Up Door and a Cocktail List with No Foreign Bottles
The shabbiest storefront on rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis houses a bar built entirely from French spirits, No. 24 on the World's 50 Best Bars in 2018. Go early, before the room fills.
The door on rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis looks condemned. Layers of flyposters, tags on tags, a shutter that reads as long-shut — nothing about the frontage says a bar is behind it, and that is the design. Walk in and the room compresses: dim, small, a central bar, a handful of stools, and a menu that has thrown out the entire international spirits cabinet in favour of calvados, armagnac, cognac, pastis and French gin.
Robin Davalo has run the place since late 2022, with Rémy Savage alongside him. The programme has always been the same argument dressed up in different clothes — that a serious cocktail bar can be built without a bottle of rum, tequila or scotch on the back bar — and the menu, developed with input from French chefs including Michel Sarran, Adrien Cachot and Amandine Chaignot, keeps making the case. The 10th is thick with cocktail bars now. This is still the one worth crossing the room for.
A bar that refuses half the world's spirits is doing something the rest of Paris isn't.
Editorial Deep
Watch the Throne is the one to order first — a Versailles conceit that arrives fruitier than the name suggests and does the introductory work of showing you what a French-only bar can pull off. It's built on the domestic spirits shelf the rest of the world tends to treat as a footnote, and it doesn't drink like a footnote.
The bar top is the whole geography. A short run of stools, low lighting that flatters the glassware and forgives everyone's second drink, and posters and ephemera doing the wall work. The space is compact enough that two people arriving together will end up shoulder to shoulder with whoever came in before them.
Early evening skews local — 10th-arrondissement residents, industry finishing shifts, a scatter of Faubourg Saint-Denis regulars who treat this as their pre-dinner stop. By 22:00 the room tilts younger, louder, more international, and the shoulder-to-shoulder becomes literal. The crowd isn't the product here the way it is at Chez Jeannette down the street — it's the cost of arriving late. Come at 18:30 and it's a bar. Come at 23:00 and it's a queue with a bar behind it.
For a bar of this stature, the pricing is unusual — Little Red Door and Danico both run materially higher for a comparable evening, and the palace hotel bars aren't in the same conversation. The bar snacks (Provence sweet-pepper cream, Barbary duck rillettes) are the one thing to add without thinking.
A bar built entirely from French spirits is a thesis, and the night to test it is a Wednesday at 18:30 with someone who wants to learn something from the bartender. Come back for that. Don't come back at midnight on a Saturday expecting the same bar — the room is too small to be two things at once, and the late version belongs to whoever got there first.
Order this
Drink this.
Watch the Throne, then ask the bartender what French spirit you don't know yet
“Go early. Order Watch the Throne. Ask the bartender a question.”
A cocktail bar built entirely from French spirits, hidden behind a deliberately shabby storefront in the 10th. The programme is distinctive and the pricing is fair for the tier, where the modern-cocktail peers run materially higher. Go at 18:30, sit at the bar, and let the bartender walk you through a shelf you don't know. Skip the late Saturday visit unless you enjoy a queue.
The Verdict
