Book Ahead or Show Up at Five
A Marais pub with Guinness on tap and a cocktail programme ranked twentieth in the world. The Panais Colada is the reason to make the trip.
The Panais Colada arrives cold, off-white, and smelling of root vegetable. Parsnip, cream, Plantation dark rum, velvet falernum — a Piña Colada rewired for people who thought they were done with the Piña Colada. It is the single drink that explains what Hyacinthe Lescoët and Hugo Gallou are doing on Rue de Poitou.
They opened in 2019 after working in London, which is where the concept comes from: an English pub with Guinness on tap, Welsh rarebit on the menu, and a cocktail list serious enough to have landed at No. 20 on the World's 50 Best Bars in 2025 (No. 19 the year before). The pub half is not a costume. The cocktail half is not a compromise. The trouble is that the world has now noticed both.
A pub that pours world-ranked cocktails, and the price of that reputation is a room too crowded to enjoy them in.
Editorial Deep
The Panais Colada is the house move — parsnip run through a Piña Colada, and the vegetal weight is what makes it work. Order it first. Then the Cigarette After Sex, which stacks Agua de Jamaica against Elephant Sloe Gin and Del Maguey Vida mezcal into something darker than the name suggests. The Akira Kira sends grapefruit through sencha and galanga into Lillet Blanc — a lower-proof drink that reads more Tokyo than Marais.
From the street it reads as a pub. Green frontage, doors folded open onto Rue de Poitou in the 3rd, the kind of façade you walk past on the way to somewhere in the Haut Marais. What's behind the door is closer to a small London corner pub that happens to have a serious back bar: wood, warm light, a counter you can lean on, and Guinness pouring next to the shakers.
Its No. 20 place on the World's 50 Best Bars in 2025 has done what a listing always does. The room is fuller than it was, earlier than it was, and a meaningful share of the counter on any given night is people who have flown in for the ranking. Locals are still there — Marais regulars, industry, the Parisian bartending set who know Lescoët — but they come earlier or later than the peak, and the peak is loud. Not unpleasant, not touristy in the bad sense, just busier than the room is built for. If crowd is the reason you drink out, this is the cost of the reputation.
The Panais Colada is the defence. That's what a serious cocktail costs at a serious bar in Paris — Little Red Door and Danico land in the same money for less inventive drinks — and the parsnip build is doing work that would run higher at the palace bars. Guinness on tap is the sleeper value on the menu. The one thing that gets stretched is service — the bartenders are skilled and friendly, but the volume of guests means attention thins at peak, and that shows up as a wait rather than a surcharge.
This is the best version of a specific idea — the English pub with a world-class cocktail programme — and there isn't a better one in Paris. The night to come back for is a 5 PM arrival, a seat at the counter, a Panais Colada, a Welsh rarebit with a pint of Guinness, and out by 7:30 before the room turns. Do not come back at 10 PM on a Saturday expecting a conversation. Do not come back if what you want is Little Red Door's hush. Come back for the counter, early, with someone who will order the second drink off a bartender's suggestion.
Order this
Drink this.
Panais Colada; ask about the rotating menu
“Go for the Panais Colada at the counter at 5 PM. Skip Saturday at 10.”
A genuinely inventive cocktail programme built inside a working English pub, and the best version of that idea in Paris. Its No. 20 place on the World's 50 Best Bars in 2025 has crowded the room, so timing matters more than it used to — arrive at 5, sit at the bar, order the Panais Colada, and leave before the peak turns the acoustics against you. If you want quiet Paris cocktail hush, go to Little Red Door instead.
The Verdict
