The 38 Best Cocktail Bars in France

It's an English pub in the Marais that decided the pint wasn't enough, so the cocktails arrive in small etched glasses while meat pies and wood paneling keep everything honest. A stuffed animal head presides over the tables. The after-work crowd and casual gossip groups ordering half-sized drinks keep things cheerful, and it sits at #7 on Europe's 50 Best Bars, which no one seems to be discussing loudly.

Bar Nouveau is a two-level Art Nouveau cocktail bar in the Marais, tucked away from the shopping and the crowds. It's an unusually good place to be overstimulated by museums and have nobody ask you to decide anything, since the menu is short and the classics are the point. Upstairs is intimate, downstairs is a moody den, and it sits at #17 on the World's 50 Best Bars list. Go early or late if you'd like a table.

Danico is a cocktail bar tucked inside the Italian restaurant Daroco, reached through the covered Galerie Vivienne, a former Jean Paul Gaultier shop whose staff still wear the striped shirts. The menu rotates every few months and picks one country, so you might get Japan's sake and whisky. It's on the World's 50 Best Bars list, with couples, pre-opera drinkers, and out-of-towners at the bar.

Comptoir De Vie is a cocktail bar in Montorgueil built around a twelve-seat blue-green enamel counter, where even the washable wool coasters are French and artisanal. The drinks come paired with small plates, so dinner and a nightcap quietly merge into one long, pleasantly expensive sitting. It landed at #34 on Europe's 50 Best Bars, and the people perched at the counter tend to be asking about the grass spirit.

The Art Nouveau bones of this cocktail bar in the 16th have been hosting drinkers since forever, and the room earns that history. Named for Arthur Cravan, poet, boxer, and Oscar Wilde's nephew, it pours coffee by day and precise, classically rooted cocktails by night. The Tunnel riffs on a Negroni with a splash of dry vermouth; oysters and grilled cheese are there if you need something to slow things down.

The bar inside Hotel Monte Cristo is named for the year Alexandre Dumas was born, and the obsession runs deep: Dumas descended from Haitian rum producers, so the cocktail bar stocks somewhere around 1,600 rums, from molasses-based blends to rhums agricoles to house-spiced bottles. The Latin Quarter setting, the literary conceit, the frankly absurd rum cellar: it all holds together better than it has any right to.

The bar itself was shipped plank by plank from Manhattan in 1911, which is either romantic or completely deranged depending on your mood. Hemingway, Bogart, and Coco Chanel all drank here, and the cocktail menu has been refined across rather a lot of decades since. It holds a spot on Europe's 50 Best Bars, though the crowd seems unbothered by the credentials and mostly just wants a Sidecar.

A second room hides behind an antique grandfather clock, which is either whimsical or the most Bordeaux thing imaginable, probably both. Symbiose is a cocktail bar on the Chartrons quay with its own garden supplying both ingredients and themes, and a rotating list currently running through Myths and Legends. The drinks lean boozy and the bartenders take technique seriously, with at least one Negroni finished sous-vide.

A cocktail bar sitting on the banks of the Charente river, in the middle of Cognac country, that has committed fully to the local spirit, which is either very obvious or very smart. Over 200 bottles line the shelves, and the staff treat recommendations as a calling. The cocktail list runs from classics to odder pairings, with cognac at the center of all of it, as you'd expect given the address.

The bartenders here wear crisp shirts and bow ties, which is where the formality ends, as everything below the waist is boxer shorts. Le Calbar is a cocktail bar in the 12th that has carved out a niche by refusing to be precious about itself, a posture Paris does not always come naturally to. The drinks, though, are careful and creative, built around a menu of country-themed cocktails that take the concept more seriously than the dress code.

No sign marks the entrance, just the red door that gives this Marais cocktail bar its name. Inside, brick walls, candles, and chairs shipped from London make the room feel assembled by someone with strong opinions and good taste. The bartenders here treat hospitality as a technical discipline, which means the drinks are precisely built and the conversation is free. Come ready to stay longer than planned.

On a street better known for beer and mojitos, Café Moderne looks like an old Parisian café that briefly eloped with an American diner. The cocktail bar is a family operation, and the siblings who came up through New York bring something different from the Bastille norm. Order carefully and let them do their thing.

The ceiling ripples overhead like a frozen wooden wave, the bar curves like a boulder, and the whole room reads as a design project by someone who spent years as an artistic director before pivoting to cocktails and extreme sports. Near Canal Saint-Martin, Gravity Bar is a cocktail bar where the concept lands before you've even ordered, which is either reassuring or a challenge, depending on your mood.

Panther-print sofas, a working fireplace, and chandeliers stacked like they're competing with each other set the tone in this hotel cocktail bar inside one of Paris's grand old palace hotels. The room runs unabashedly old-school, and the bartenders lean into it with serious mixing rather than nostalgia. It costs what it costs, and nobody at the deep leather sofas seems troubled by that.

A grilled cheese counter in the 2nd arrondissement hides one of Paris's more quietly confident cocktail bars behind it. At Mabel, you sit before you order, full stop, which sounds like a minor house rule until you realize it shapes the whole evening. The long bar anchors the room, the stools are comfortable, and the bartenders work like they have somewhere to be, which is here.

Tucked into a back corner of the Ritz near the Rue Cambon entrance, Bar Hemingway is a famously tiny cocktail bar, one room and a half, with photographs of its most celebrated regular covering the walls. The crowd runs international and polished, which gives the place the feel of a very expensive waiting room. The cocktails are priced accordingly, though nobody here seems to be doing the math.

Bluebird is a cocktail bar in the 11th that looks like the deck of a '60s cruise ship, with wood paneling, multicolored lights, and an aquarium in the back, minus the shuffleboard. The menu changes monthly and sorts drinks by savory, salty, bitter, and so on, which helps if you've forgotten what you like. There's one table and a lot of stools, so it suits a quick one after work or a nightcap after dinner.

A rough-hewn wooden façade drops into the sixth arrondissement like a Canadian trapper's hut that took a wrong turn at the Seine. Inside, this cocktail bar goes cozy and narrow, all dark wood and deep green velvet, with vintage American music doing the heavy lifting on weekdays. Come the weekend, a DJ takes over downstairs, and the mood shifts accordingly. Cocktail bars on the Left Bank are scarce enough that this one doesn't need to try very hard to stand out, yet it does anyway.

Foliage hangs from the ceiling, a window opens to the street so bartenders can serve passersby, and the bathroom glows neon: Combat is a cocktail bar in Belleville that borrows its relaxed bones from the classic Parisian bistro. The team, who cut their teeth at Experimental Cocktail Club, keeps the room light and the approach unaffected. A Discovery pick from The 50 and a Difford's Guide name.

Big front windows and light wood panelling set CopperBay apart from the usual Paris cocktail bar, which tends to treat darkness as a personality. This cocktail bar in the 10th keeps pastis and classics on the menu alongside original creations that earn some genuine attention. The 50 gave it a Discovery nod, which tracks for a place that reads as both grown-up and quietly confident without making a production of either.

Fitzgerald is a restaurant by day, serving entrecote and risotto to the Tour Maubourg lunch crowd, and a speakeasy by night, reached through padded doors at the back and down into an Art Deco room of velvet chairs and leather booths. Expect classic cocktails, a weekend DJ, and servers with sparklers, for people who've retired from clubbing in theory only. The Infatuation put it on its list of Paris bars.

The cocktail bar that launched what is now an empire of hotels, bars, and beach clubs across eleven cities started here, in a narrow room on Rue Saint-Sauveur. That origin story gives the place a certain founding-energy that never quite left. ECC Paris is glamorous without being stiff, and the drinks lean creative, riffing on unexpected pairings. Regulars treat it like a neighbourhood bar; first-timers tend to photograph everything.

Hip-hop on the speakers and a strict French-spirits-only policy behind the bar: Le Syndicat runs on a kind of proud, earnest nationalism that somehow never feels corny. The cocktail bar calls itself an organisation for the defense of French spirits, and the rotating menus take that brief seriously, finding unexpected angles on cognac, calvados, and Marc de Bourgogne. The industrial room on the Faubourg Saint-Denis fills with a crowd that dresses like it lives there.

A jazz kissa is a Japanese listening bar where the whole premise is sitting down, shutting up, and actually hearing the record. Mesures transplants that tradition to the Haut Marais, with a minimalist, vintage room that quietly discourages multitasking. Cocktails run three ways: year-round signatures mixing Japanese and French ingredients, rotating seasonal drinks built around Asian flavors, and a solid set of classics for anyone who just wants a Negroni.

Moonshiner is a whisky-leaning cocktail bar tucked behind the walk-in fridge of a pizzeria, so getting in means pushing a door that every instinct says leads to the mozzarella. Inside, there's 1920s jazz, Belle Epoque wallpaper, leather booths, and a cigar room, which feels very Prohibition for a country that never had one. Weekend evenings get standing-room-only, so arrive early or befriend a bartender.

No Entry is a cocktail bar in Pigalle, reached by walking through a refrigerator in the basement of Pink Mamma, which is the sort of entrance that makes you feel briefly like a spy and then like a person holding a drink. The room looks like a chemistry lab with a good lighting budget, demijohns of infusions lining the walls. There are no reservations, so you wander in, order the coffee-scented Boulevardier, and keep your shoes unstuck.

Voodoo trinkets and Louisiana kitsch line the walls of this New Orleans-themed cocktail bar tucked into Pigalle, a neighborhood that has quietly traded its hostess-club past for a serious drinking scene. The Sazerac and Vieux Carré are the obvious orders, and the room commits to the theme hard enough that it wraps back around to charming. Worth finding on a side street you might otherwise walk straight past.

Oscar Wilde died upstairs in Room 16, and the cocktail bar below commemorates him in a drink, which feels about right. This is a hotel bar in Saint-Germain, tucked into the kind of street where antiques dealers and rare book merchants share the pavement, and signed photos of De Niro, Depp, and Jagger line the walls. The crowd has always skewed toward the notable; the room just makes it easy to feel that way yourself.

Named for a New Orleans brothel madam whose Storyville establishment was the talk of the early 1900s, this cocktail bar on Rue Frochot leans into the reference without apology. The Belle Époque interior runs to dark wood, deep greens, and bare bulbs looping around the bar canopy like a fairground ride. A neon sign outside gives away the speakeasy posture before you even push the door.

Bottles stacked in wooden crates by spirit type line the back bar, which is a useful organizational system and also a pleasant thing to look at. Maria Loca is a cocktail bar near the Bastille that leans into a hacienda aesthetic, plants everywhere, paintings from young artists on the walls, the whole Latin American detour intact. It runs quiet on purpose, the kind of room built for two or three friends and an unhurried drink, not a scene.

The marble bar seats six if everyone breathes in, and the furniture throughout is so small it feels like a cocktail bar designed for an upscale dollhouse. This is a dimly lit, two-floor spot off rue Mazarine from the team behind the Experimental Cocktail Club, with a faux-vintage aesthetic that stops just short of parody and drinks that stop it entirely. The kind of place where the mise en place alone makes you want something complicated.

Tequila ambassador Tomas Estes planted this corner bar at the edge of the Marais with the same DNA as his London outposts: fading photographs, wooden furniture, bric-a-brac on the walls, and a mirrored back-bar doing most of the decorating. The agave list is the reason you're here, and Notre Dame is close enough that you can pretend you're being cultural about it.