The 3 Cocktails You Must Try at the New Ritz Paris

The Ritz Paris hotel reopens this June after a three-and-a-half-year renovation. Colin Peter Field, head barman of the hotel’s Bar Hemingway, raises a toast.

The 3 Cocktails You Must Try at the New Ritz Paris

Colin Peter Field

Photo courtesy the Ritz Paris Hotel

“From the moment you step into Paris’s Bar Hemingway, which dates to 1921, you’re steeped in history. It’s where Hemingway spent many evenings, and he was followed by other notable writers and photographers. The bar is still a key part of the city’s nightlife. When I was hired in 1994, I got carte blanche to create the space, and I introduced a new cocktail menu. I built relationships with our loyal clients, and during the Ritz’s recent closure, I hosted dinner parties at my home with these ‘Hemingway Orphans’ as we called them. They wanted reassurance that the Ritz wouldn’t change. Obviously many things have—the bedrooms are larger, the bathroom floors are heated, the garden is more epic than ever. The Ritz’s soul though? Completely intact.”

The Most Famous Cocktail: The Serendipity

“This drink is to the Ritz what the Bellini is to Harry’s Bar in Venice. I invented it in 1994, and we’ve been serving about five dozen a night ever since. It’s France in a glass: Calvados with fresh mint, white sugar, crystal clear apple juice, and Brut champagne on top.”

The Most Expensive Cocktail: The Ritz Sidecar

“In 1923, Frank Meier, the hotel’s first head bartender, created a Sidecar for his wealthy American clients using Cointreau, lemon juice, and extremely rare cognac from 1831. When I updated it in 2001, I dreamt of getting it in the Guinness Book
of World Records, which requires proof that someone ordered it. Someone did, and it was named the most expensive cocktail in the world. The price today: $1,500.”

The Showstopper Cocktail: The Nautilus

“This beautiful creation is like two drinks in one: First the emptied hull of a passion fruit is filled with house-made strawberry vodka, which has a bright red color, then the whole thing is floated on top of a vibrant yellow passion fruit martini.”

Or, bring Paris to your front porch and make these tasty cocktails for your own summer soirées.

The Serendipity

Ingredients:
2 branches of fresh mint
3cl of Calvados Pays d’Auge
1 spoon of sugar
5cl of clear apple juice
Champagne (as needed)

Put mint, Calvados, and sugar in a tumbler. Stir, then add the clear apple juice and ice. Fill with champagne and stir gently (you don’t want to release too much carbon dioxide).

Ritz Side Car

Ingredients:
6cl Cognac 1854 or any cognac Ritz before 1872
1/2cl Cointreau
1/2cl lemon juice

In a shaker, mix cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice. Shake and pour into a Hemingway cocktail glass frozen at -18.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nautilus

Ingredients:
3 passionfruit
5cl vodka
Strawberry vodka (as needed)

Shake passionfruit with vodka. Pour into cocktail glass, then take the half husk of one of the passion fruits and place it floating into the cocktail. Pour strawberry vodka into the shell and serve.

>>Next: 3 Amazing Food Festivals in Paris in 2016

Lindsey Tramuta is a Paris-based culture and travel journalist and the author of The New Paris and The New Parisienne: The Women & Ideas Shaping Paris.
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