The Best Places to Drink and Stay in France

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 bar inside this 18th-century townhouse in the 8th comes with a lawn, stone animals grazing silently outside the windows, and the ambient feeling that you've somehow left Paris entirely. That's before you've ordered anything. It's the kind of cocktail bar that arrives pre-loaded with atmosphere, tucked inside a Michelin-starred restaurant, so the drinks program has something to prove and generally acts like it knows that.

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.

Paint tins and old Coke crates serve as stools, which tells you most of what you need to know about this bar's energy before you've ordered a drink. Tucked into a courtyard off a street full of Chinese restaurants in the Marais, Andy Wahloo mixes graffiti, Pierre et Gilles kitsch, and geometric tiles under a French electro-house soundtrack. The crowd dresses accordingly. It's a bar that commits fully to its own absurd logic, and somehow it works.

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.

Chandeliers and moulded ceilings make Le 47 feel more drawing room than hotel bar, which is more or less the point given the Arc de Triomphe is a short walk away. You enter straight off the street through a corner door, stepping behind the back-bar into a room of fabric armchairs and geometric backlit shelving, with marble and quiet money everywhere. The kind of place where you don't rush your drink because the chair won't let you.

A cocktail bar tucked at the back of the Park Hyatt Vendôme, past a lounge with deep chairs and a working fireplace. Bronze figures appear at the entrance and again throughout the hotel, which turns into a small game if you're paying attention. The bar itself overlooks a courtyard full of sculpture, so the view does some of the heavy lifting. Guests in good suits fill the room by evening, and the whole thing is quieter and less theatrical than you'd expect for the Rue de la Paix.

The bar inside this Philippe Starck-designed hotel in the 20th looks completely unremarkable from the street, then you walk in and find chandeliers made of children's rubber swim rings and curtains printed with naked bodies. Chalk graffiti covers every wall and the ceiling. Staff wear dungarees off one shoulder. It's the kind of maximalist chaos that somehow holds together, and it draws the kind of crowd that enjoys explaining Starck to people who already know.

The terrace hangs over the Mediterranean close enough that you feel slightly implicated in it. This is the bar at the Maybourne Riviera, a minimalist perch where the sea does most of the decorating and the drinks follow suit, leaning into the coastal setting rather than competing with it. Floor-to-ceiling windows mean the inside table isn't much of a consolation prize. The kind of bar where the view sets the pace and nobody seems to mind.