Now The Westin Palace, the hotel opened in 1912 on once-palatial grounds at the behest of King Alfonso XIII, who craved a splashy modern property for the city. Its compelling history – during the Spanish Civil War, for example, it doubled as a makeshift hospital – can best be appreciated from the 1912 Museo Bar (as the Palace Bar was renamed), sipping on an effervescent ‘Ginger Collins’. Wood-panelled and dotted with sage-green armchairs, it is akin to a library, with numerous artefacts to peruse. Silver glasses used by the king to toast the hotel’s opening and a letter adorned with Salvador Dalí’s scribbles all help piece together the hotel’s rich cultural heritage.
No. 18
Calorosa
LE BAR AMÉRICAIN AT HÔTEL DE PARIS MONTE-CARLO, MONACO
Created by Ghisolfi Lorenzo
INGREDIENTS
1 chilli seed
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) Aperol
25 ml (¾ fl oz) Bombay gin
25 ml (¾ fl oz) limoncello
25 ml (¾ fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) passion fruit juice
15 ml (½ fl oz) egg white
candied pepper strip (or regular red [bell] pepper strip), to garnish
METHOD
Crush the chilli seed in the bottom of the cocktail shaker, then pour in the other ingredients and dry shake. Strain into a coupette, then garnish the top of the drink with a strip of pepper.
To many, Monaco is a sheer fantasy populated by royalty – a sunny enclave fuelled by grandiose wealth. A visit to this tiny French Riviera principality is therefore surprising, because, despite the onslaught of gold-encrusted surfaces and hefty bank accounts, it is more chill than haughty. Le Bar Américain, located inside the Belle Époque Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, is one place that triumphantly straddles opulent and down-to-earth. The hotel, opened in 1864, underwent a massive renovation, which was completed in 2018, making way for two rambling suites that were co-designed by Prince Albert II in honour of his parents, Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace Kelly. Le Bar Américain sports a terrace that opens onto the Mediterranean Sea, but the softly lit interior is just as hypnotic, with mirrored panels, sweeping curtains and booze bottles tucked into arches all eliciting a hard-to-find retro-glam ambience. Steps away from Place du Casino, the bar is sure to have more than a few high-rollers leaning back in leather armchairs at any given time. They too will be revelling in their ‘Duhamel’ cocktails (Goslings rum, cider, ginger, cardamom, lime, green apple) and the sounds of live jazz.
No. 19
Meurice Millennium
BAR 228 AT LE MEURICE, PARIS, FRANCE
Created by William Oliveri
INGREDIENTS
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) Cointreau
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) crème de rose liqueur
130 ml (4⅓ fl oz) rosé Champagne
pared strip of orange zest, to garnish
METHOD
Pour the Cointreau and crème de rose into a Champagne flute. Top off with the Champagne and garnish with orange zest.
After a spell on Rue Saint-Honoré, Le Meurice moved over to Rue de Rivoli in 1835, wooing well-to-do British tourists with a premier location across from the Tuileries Garden and underneath a tasteful row of arcades. With sizable apartments, smoking and reading rooms, and private dinners then on offer, it’s no wonder Le Meurice became a favourite among royalty – beginning with Queen Victoria’s visit in 1855. The first hotel in Paris to flaunt telephones and baths in every guest room, Le Meurice retains a ritzy, 19th-century tone, starting in the gilded lobby. Contemporised with a frosted mirror and updated Louis XVI-style chairs inspired by hotel regular Salvador Dalí, it leads to the low-lit Bar 228.
It’s not the original 1936 lair, and eccentric designer Philippe Starck has spruced up the joint with pink copper, brass and stainless steel, but the dreamy painted ceiling and early 20th-century fresco panels by Alexandre Claude Louis Lavalley plunge you back to a time when guests such as Rudyard Kipling and Ginger Rogers might have sipped nightcaps at the hotel.
William Oliveri manned the bar at Le Meurice for decades, plying guests with bubbly cocktails and dry Martinis until he retired. The next generation of bartenders, thankfully, continue to intensify the impression that you are indeed somewhere special. When the hotel reopened in 2000 after a lustrous renovation, Oliveri’s celebratory cocktail went on the menu. It’s been clamoured for ever since.
No. 20
The Serendipity
BAR HEMINGWAY AT RITZ PARIS, FRANCE
Created by Colin Field
INGREDIENTS
1 fresh mint sprig
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) Calvados
30 ml (1 fl oz) apple juice
Champagne (the bar uses its own Ritz Réserve Brut Barons de Rothschild), to top up
METHOD
Add the mint sprig to a highball glass filled with ice, then pour in the Calvados and apple juice. Top up with Champagne.
There are only 35 seats at Bar Hemingway and night after night there are eager imbibers who contentedly wait to settle into one of them. Named for the peripatetic author who was so enamoured with the Ritz bar that he supposedly tried to rescue it from the Germans in 1944, then knocked back a staggering 51 dry Martinis in celebration of Paris’s liberation, Bar Hemingway might just be the globe’s most well-known hotel bar. The Ritz opened on Place Vendôme in 1898, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cole Porter drank here well before Bar Hemingway’s modern unveiling in 1994. History, magnified by old photographs and antiques such as a typewriter, gramophone and boxing gloves strewn about, certainly appeals to the curious queues, but the lure of the intimate room extends to the clubby blend of oak and pine-green carpeting, as well as the white-jacketed barmen. Colin Field – the most revered of them – has made the bar his home since it
