Home / Paris / Cocktail Bars / Bar Hemingway, heritage hotel bar, Place Vendôme · $$$$ · No. 4 on our 50 best cocktail bars in the world
There are grander bars in the world and more inventive ones, but few carry as much romance as Bar Hemingway. Tucked down a corridor of the Ritz Paris, off Place Vendôme, it is a small, wood-panelled room, around twenty-five seats, hung with photographs and handwritten letters, warmed by leather and sepia light, and haunted, in the best sense, by the writer whose name it bears. It is the definitive argument for the hotel bar as an art form: intimate, personal and utterly timeless. We rank it fourth in the world as the finest expression of European bar hospitality anywhere.
Hemingway and the Ritz
Ernest Hemingway made the Ritz bar his Paris headquarters from the 1920s, drinking here with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and famously declaring that when he dreamed of the afterlife, it took place at the Ritz. The bar's founding legend belongs to August 1944: arriving in newly liberated Paris as a war correspondent, Hemingway is said to have "liberated" the Ritz bar himself, running up a tab for fifty-one dry martinis. The story is told as lore rather than documented fact, but it is exactly the kind of lore a great bar is built on, and the room named in his honour leans happily into it.
Colin Field's long reign
For nearly three decades, Bar Hemingway was inseparable from Colin Peter Field, the English-born, Paris-trained bartender who took charge when the room opened under its current name in 1994 and was repeatedly called the best bartender in the world by the likes of Forbes and Travel + Leisure. Field turned the bar into a stage for a deeply personal style of hospitality, remembering guests, tailoring drinks to their mood, sending ladies' cocktails out with a fresh rose. When the Ritz closed for its long renovation, he safeguarded much of the bar's memorabilia in his own home so it could return unchanged. He retired from the Ritz in 2023 after almost thirty years; the bar today is in the hands of his successor, Anne-Sophie Prestail.
The room, reborn
The Ritz Paris closed in 2012 for the first time in its history, undergoing a sweeping renovation, reported to have cost somewhere in the region of €140 million, that was interrupted by a fire in the roof in early 2016. The hotel reopened in June 2016, and Bar Hemingway reopened with it, kept reassuringly identical to the room regulars remembered. That continuity is central to its charm: in a city and an industry obsessed with the new, here is a bar that treats being exactly the same as an achievement.
The drinks
The signature is the Serendipity, invented by Colin Field and first served on New Year's Eve 1994, Calvados (apple brandy), fresh mint and cloudy apple juice lengthened with Champagne, a drink Field described as "France in a glass." The martini is the other pillar, and Field's inventions around it became famous in their own right: the Clean Dirty Martini, built with three different treatments of olive, and the Picasso Martini, chilled with an ice cube of frozen dry vermouth. For those with very deep pockets, Field also created the Ritz Sidecar, made with exceedingly rare pre-phylloxera Ritz Fine Champagne 1865 Cognac, once recognised as the world's most expensive cocktail. Everyday prices are among the highest in Paris, this is the Ritz, but the drinks justify them, and the room throws in a piece of living history for free.
A room with a history of its own
The Hemingway Bar's story predates the name. Its space traces back to Le Petit Bar, which the Ritz itself describes as the first upscale bar in the French capital open to women, who could arrive unaccompanied at a time when that was still remarkable, a small but genuine piece of social history folded into the hotel's walls. Over the decades the room passed through several identities before being dedicated, in 1994, to the writer who had loved the hotel so completely. That anniversary was chosen deliberately: the bar opened in August 1994, fifty years after the liberation of Paris that Hemingway had woven himself into. To sit here, then, is to sit inside layers of story, literary, wartime, social, that few bars anywhere can claim, and the room wears them lightly, in its photographs and letters rather than any plaque or fuss.
The Serendipity and the art of the personal cocktail
The bar's most famous creation has an origin story as charming as the drink. Colin Field invented the Serendipity and first served it on New Year's Eve 1994; the guest who tasted it, a Monsieur Jean-Louis Constanza, is said to have exclaimed "Serendipity!", and the name stuck. Its build is deceptively simple: Calvados, the apple brandy of Normandy, muddled with fresh mint and cloudy apple juice, sweetened lightly and lengthened with Champagne. Field called it "France in a glass," and it captures exactly the bar's philosophy, that a great cocktail is not about complexity but about balance, seasonality and a sense of place.
That philosophy extended to how drinks were served. Field made the personal touch the bar's signature: he studied his guests, tailored drinks to their mood, and famously sent cocktails ordered by women out with a single fresh rose. The martini became his particular canvas. Beyond the classic, he devised the Clean Dirty Martini, built with three separate treatments of olive to give brininess without cloudiness, and the Picasso Martini, chilled not with ordinary ice but with a cube of frozen dry vermouth so the drink never dilutes off its mark. These are the flourishes of a bartender who thought about every guest as an individual, the reason so many regarded him as the finest in the world.
The most expensive cocktail in Paris
For a certain kind of visitor, the Hemingway Bar is also home to one of the most extravagant drinks ever poured. Field created the Ritz Sidecar using exceedingly rare pre-phylloxera Cognac, a Ritz Fine Champagne 1865, combined with Cointreau and lemon juice. Its cost, running to well over a thousand euros a serving, derives almost entirely from the near-irreplaceable spirit at its base, and at one point Guinness World Records recognised a version of it as the most expensive cocktail in the world. That record has since been surpassed elsewhere, but the drink endures as a symbol of the bar's particular register: a place where the ev