In Paris, craft concoctions sidle up to the bar
On the menu at Mabel, a rum-focused bar in Paris’ Second Arrondissement, is a section titled “Mabel’s Recommendations”. It lists the names and addresses of nearly 30 other cocktail bars in Paris.
Not too long ago, Mabel would have had a tough time filling that page. But in the past year, the city’s craft-cocktail scene, which has lagged well behind those of London and New York, has bloomed.
Mabel itself is a recent addition, opening in November. In April, the partners Josh Fontaine, Adam Tsou and Carina Soto Velasquez Tsou — who already had three other cocktail bars, including the trailblazing taqueria La Candelaria — opened their fourth, Hero, with Korean fried chicken as its culinary lure.
Lulu White, a small, well-hidden Art Nouveau bar, arrived last year on a block in the popular South Pigalle district that is also home to the casual party bar Glass and the tiki temple Dirty Dick. Nearby is a new New Orleans-inspired lounge called Baton Rouge. Anyone on a bar crawl in that area can sleep it off at the Grand Pigalle hotel, a novel residence for the cocktail minded. It was opened in April by the people behind the sprawling Experimental Cocktail Club empire. There is a bar in the lobby and bottled cocktails in every room, not to mention carpeting with a Martini-glass pattern. In 2014 “came the tsunami”, said the bartender Sullivan Doh, who has worked at Experimental Cocktail Club and at Sherry Butt, another influential bar. “So many good bars opened through this year I didn’t have time to check half of them.”
Paris was slow to join the modern cocktail revival as it circled the globe from Sydney to San Francisco, and when it finally did, many of the new bars followed an American template.
The founders of Experimental Cocktail Club, widely credited with starting the movement in 2007, had been inspired by visits to New York bars like Milk & Honey and Flatiron Lounge. And because most subsequent Paris bars were opened by Cocktail Club alumni, the scene developed without a real personality of its own. That has changed in recent months. “They look to really be coming into their own,” said Forest Collins, an American-born cocktail blogger (52martinis.com) in Paris who has been covering the city’s cocktails since 2007. “There is a renewed inward focus, with bartenders and bars looking to French ingredients.”
No bar is looking to them more than Le Syndicat, in the Faubourg St.-Denis neighbourhood, which Doh started last year with Romain Le Mouellic. Every drink at Le Syndicat is made with French spirits — not just national legacy liquors like Cognac, Calvados, Armagnac and absinthe, but also French vodka, gin, whiskey and rum. There’s even a cocktail that uses marc, the little-loved French answer to grappa. The menu includes original creations and classics like the Old Fashioned and Bloody Mary reimagined in Gallic terms.
“In France, nobody drinks Cognac in the younger generation; we drink it with our grandfather at Christmas,” Le Mouellic said. “We want to fight for French alcohol.”
Beyond Le Syndicat, French products are finding their way onto many cocktail menus.
“We’re hearing a lot about ‘the French touch’ when it comes to drinks here,” Collins said.
The invigorated cocktail culture is evident even to French expatriates like Nico de Soto, who cut his teeth at Experimental Cocktail Club and recently opened the bar Mace in the East Village.
“I haven’t been back to Paris since September, and in nine months 10 super cool bars opened at least,” de Soto said. “I’m very proud of the scene in my city right now.”
How proud? He plans to open his own Paris bar next year.