“We wanted the hotel to feel like it has always been a part of the Marais landscape,” Swedish, London-based interior designer Martin Brudnizki is quoted on the website of the new Paris 5-star hotel Le Grand Mazarin as saying. “… We were therefore inspired by the great Houses of the aristocratic era.”

He is referring there to the mansions and townhouses built in the 17th century when the Marais became trendy territory for the construction of noble residences and their continued use and decorative evolution by the titled and entitled through most of the 18th century. The Revolution then sent the aristocratic owners and renters either into exile or to the guillotine, after which “always been a part of the Marais landscape” came to mean something vastly different.

No longer marked by great wealth and privilege, the Marais was increasingly defined by labor, light industry, immigration and poverty. There were still dozens of grand old mansions around, but by 1900, the Marais swelled with a poor and working-class population, including many immigrants, among them thousands of Jews from Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, with many more arriving through the 1930s. The Holocaust then sent the Jewish population either fleeing or to the death camps, leaving behind a decrepit cityscape that the rare visitor in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, even 1970s may well have thought had “always been a part of the Marais.”

The 311-acre heart of the Marais was saved from further ruin and the specter of concrete-and-glass renewal by a national law of 1962 calling for district-wide historic preservation and restoration. The law, along with the subsidies, public works and business opportunities that would eventually follow, accompanied the continuing evolution of the Marais, with: the arrival of Sephardic Jews to Paris in the 1950s and 1960s; the opening of the Picasso Museum in 1985; the opening of gay bars and clubs in the latter half of that decade; the steep rise in real estate prices in the 1990s; the development through the 2000s of rue des Rosiers, formerly part of the Pletzl at the epicenter of pre-war Yiddish-speaking immigration in the Marais, into a street that’s part Jewish food court part internationally-branded boutiques, and, in the 2010s, the listing of a considerable number of properties on Airbnb, each promising “charm” and “exposed wooden beams” (read: old buildings now gentrified).

Slowly at first, then much quicker since the mid-1980s, the Marais evolved into such a well-maintained on-the-radar quarter for strolling, shopping, museum-going, art-gallery-contemplating, café-sitting, with a few gay bars here, and a few Jewish restaurants there, that today’s visitor might think that its trendy bourgeois-casual lifestyle and the ease of communicating in English “have always been a part of the Marais landscape.”

Le Grand Mazarin

Where, then, do Le Grand Mazarin and its restaurant Boubalé fit into today’s Marais?

On the edge, or in many ways as its main entrance, catercorner to City Hall, in a 19th-century building across the street from the BHV Marais department store, at one corner of Place Harvey Milk, named for assassinated American defender of gay rights. A doorman in pride purple livery stands by the hotel entrance.

Past the small reception area, the drawing-room lobby presents a muted flamboyance, introducing visitors to the muted greens, reds and blues that dominate throughout the building and to the cozy, quirky, sophisticated nostalgia that impregnates the place.

The 50 rooms and 11 suites present a potpourri of furnishings, each outlined with a prominent curve or bevel, with enough reminders of 18th-century styles that the pre-Revolutionary petite noblesse would feel very much at ease here. It’s design without being high design, welcoming without being precious, indulgent without being lavish. Above all, it’s stylishly comfortable. The rooms are of modest size, as one would expect in the Marais. Rates start at 590€ and will rise beginning spring 2024.

The hotel’s restaurant Boubalé, described below, serves traditional Askenazic/Israeli fare. There’s also has a little, kitsch-chic, ground-floor bar. In the basement there’s an attractive pool with a fresco reminiscent of Cocteau’s work along its arched ceiling. A VIP basement lounge-bar will also soon open in another portion of the basement.

All told, the upmarket hotel, restaurant, bar and VIP room that form Le Grand Mazarin don’t seem to have “always been a part of the Marais landscape” so much as they present a cheery, nostalgic pastiche of major markers of the Marais of the past five centuries.

Boubalé

This restaurant and its adjacent bar are very much part and parcel of Le Grand Mazarin but with separate entrances from the hotel. So they can certainly be considered for anyone not lodging upstairs.

While the hotel’s rooms and suites call to mind the well-being of the petite noblesse, Boubalé—the restaurant’s name is a Yiddish term of endearment—and the bar appear to have been inspired by a vigorous and stylish older actress in Yiddish theater who enjoys hanging out with the younger crowd.

As noted above, the restaurant serves traditional Ashkenazic/Israeli cuisine. Jerusalem-born chef Assaf Granit has become a prime purveyor of Israeli cuisine in France. He’s the first Israeli chef to have a Michelin star in France (at Shabour in the Paris’s 2nd arrondissement). As executive chef with the JLM Group, he has been overseeing Boubalé in its opening period before the restaurant’s executive chef Itmar Gargei takes full command of the kitchen.

“Tradition, tradition!… Tradition!”—you know the song. This is the menu version of that: challah, pastrami plate, gravlax, roast beets with feta and horseradish, chopped chicken liver… seafood knaidlach, “ashkenazi mesachen,” “goulash+gnochhis”… strudel, babka… More polished than revisited, it’s all tasty—“entertaining” is perhaps a more accurate word—in a traditional smorgasbord kind of way. If not made with Bubbie love, then at least made with open-kitchen care. Ordering several appetizers (we ordered nearly all of them) to share is the way to go, both to get a taste of the various dishes and to get into the upbeat spirit of the place. The aforementioned Yiddish actress may well have had the tableware custom-made in the old country; her children will let it gather dust in the closet when they inherit it, but the grandkids and their kids will find it delightful. Anyway, Boubalé isn’t meant for her own children, now too old for this. On the two evening that I dined here (once as a guest*, once as a host), the majority of the crowd appeared to be under 35. There’s a good, upbeat vibe if you don’t mind the rising music and voice level as the evening progresses.

A 3-course meal, with challah (10€), will run about 75€, without drinks. I leave it to you to decide if that’s “oy vey” pricing.

The Bar

As someone who enjoys the atmosphere of hotel bars, I found the playful kitsch-chic décor of the little ground-floor bar quite to my liking as a place to wind down the evening. Here, I had my first taste of the Tunisian fig brandy Boukha, a drink with an Ashkenazic-Sephardic history of its own. The basement club/bar, is intended as a no-cell phone space to wind up the night, wasn’t yet open when I visited.

Le Grand Mazarin and the restaurant Boubalé, 17 rue de la Verrerie, Paris 4th arrondissement.

Le Grand Mazarin is the latest of the Pariente family’s slowly growing collection of distinctive 5-star hotels under the umbrella name Maisons Pariente, including Crillon Le Brave in Provence, Le Coucou in Méribel and Lou Pinet in Saint Tropez.

* Disclaimer: As many readers know, I wear various professional hats: travel writer and editor of this publication, travel and tour advisor for agencies and individuals, and organizer/guide in Paris and throughout France. I have worn all three with respect to Le Grand Mazarin: 1. In writing this article. 2. In first dining here as a guest on a site visit with a luxury travel agency, then second dining here on a tasting tour that I organized and hosted for visitors to Paris. 3. Subsequent to that first visit I was hired by the hotel to give a tour of the Marais to visiting journalists.

© 2023, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Paris Hotel & Restaurant Report: Le Grand Mazarin and Boubalé appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

(Updated April 2016)

1. Hotel Saint-James

Two metro stops west of Etoile, the site of the glamorous 4-star Saint James was once far enough away from the central Paris to serve as a launch pad for hot air balloons. While tall buildings have sprouted in the area, the lush private garden of this luxuriant refuge, accented with fanciful balloon canopies (photo above), remains intact and serves as an open-air bar during the fine-weather months. Like its classy library bar and Michelin-starred restaurant, the open-air bar is reserved for hotel guests and club members during the day, but all of them are accessible to visitors after 7pm.

Hotel Saint James, 43 avenue Bugeaud. 16th arr. Tel: 01 44 05 81 81. Metro: Porte Dauphine.

2. Regent’s Garden Hotel

Napoleon III liked his private physician so much that he built him a delightful townhouse with an enclosed garden on the western edge of Paris just beyond the Arc de Triomphe. This year the 4-star hotel has made its private garden an even greater draw with an outdoor exhibition of bronze and ceramic sculptures by Mickie Doussy on view through September 30. Beyond breakfast, when open only to guests, the garden bar/tea salon is open to visitors on reservation.

Regent’s Garden Hotel, 6 rue Pierre Demours. 17th arr. Tel: 01 45 74 07 30. Metro: Ternes.

3. Villa du Square

Tucked between Le Corbusier townhouses in the residential 16th, the Villa du Square (open since September 2015) is a B&B offering five luxurious bedrooms in a 1920s mansion lovingly decorated by art collector hosts Marie-Victoire and François-Christophe Gicqueau. The garden—200 square meters of urban Eden shaded by centenary pines—has enough secluded ‘corners’ that guests won’t trip over each other while they smell the roses.

Villa du Square, 26 rue Raffet, 16th arr. Tel: 01 71 72 91 33 Metro: Jasmin. The garden is only open to overnight guests.

4. Hotel des Marronniers

The secluded garden behind this 3-star Left Bank hotel is open to the public from 2pm until 11pm for tea or drinks.

Hotel des Marronniers, 21 rue Jacob. 6th arr. Tel: 01 43 25 30 60. Metro: Mabillon.

5. Villa Montabord

The Cité des Fleurs, a one-block pedestrian street in the Epinettes district on the northwest edge of the capital, is one of Paris’s original gated communities. The guidelines laid down by the developers in 1847 mandating at least three flowering and/or fruit trees for every garden are still observed. Thus, the four-room bed-and-breakfast that Isabelle and Jérôme Sciard opened in their 19th-century home has a pocket-sized private garden within a garden community. Expect fluent English (Jérôme is a former submarine commander who was stationed in Newport, RI for a year) plus large, luxurious bathrooms, WiFi and television.

Villa Montabord, 3 Cité des Fleurs, 17th arr. Tel: 06 14 88 74 06. Metro: Brochant. The garden is only open to overnight guests.

6. Hotel Eldorado

This hipster enclave in rapidly gentrifying Batignolles is one of the last places in Paris where budget-minded visitors can get a double-digit priced room with facilities “down the hall,” in a decor that mixes fake leopard skin throws and real cat-hair from resident felines. The hotel may have two stars but its popular Bistrot des Dames restaurant/wine bar, nestled in a pleasant but not-overly-groomed garden, goes by its own standards and is open to the public.

Hotel Eldorado, 18 rue des Dames, 17th arr. Tel: 01 45 22 35 21. Metro: Place de Clichy.

7. Novotel Paris Les Halles

With a giant, custard-colored canopy hovering over the Châtelet shopping center, catching ”a patch of blue” in Les Halles is as rare as it was for Oscar Wilde at Redding Gaol. Given the forbidding façade  of the Novotel Les Halles, it’s a triple-fine surprise to find a delightful, tree-shaded garden terrace-bar nestled within its walls. An oasis of calm in a chaotic neighborhood.

Novotel Paris Les Halles, 8 Place Marguérite de Navarre, 1st arr. Tel: 01 42 21 31 31 Metro: Châtelet.

© 2015-2016, Corinne LaBalme

Updated April 2016

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* * *

It’s a smooth evening in the lounge-bar at the Hotel Lutetia. Daniel Roca, in-house pianist and musical programmer, wends his way through jazz standards at the center of a well-oiled trio. Head bartender Gilles Guyomarch supplies a harmony of cocktails, swaying lyrical conversation from the crowd.

I’ve given Mr. Guyomarch carte blanche to prepare me something not too sweet. He keeps the first one classic Lutetia with a cocktail called Le Lutèce: Grand Marnier, Havana rum, raspberry juice and lime juice.

I clink glasses with Christine and Paul Wegmann who are visiting from New Orleans. Christine is a writer who’s also a lawyer; Paul is a lawyer who’s also a writer. When not litigating, she writes about celebrities, he writes about sports.

At 7:30 pm, the lounge at the Lutetia can feel a bit too much like the first-class lounge at a sleek airport. Most large hotel bars give that impression at this time of day. The music helps sooth that. The cocktail helps us sink into the furniture and become a part of the atmosphere. It’s a long, classy, stylish room. Before long we aren’t in a waiting room but exactly where we should be. Dinner can wait. More olives, please.

Peggy Newland, another visiting American, joins us. She’s in town to do research for an article about jazz in the Saint Germain Quarter, a welcome break from her work as an adolescent psychologist. Her daughter is upstairs in the room.

The Wegmanns soon leave for dinner. Peggy and I, satisfied with an appetizer of olives and nuts, stay for a second cocktail. Again, I give Mr. Guyomarch carte blanche and this time his envoy returned with a Hemingway Special: dark Caribbean rum, tonic, lemon juice and sugar.

Peggy and I discuss journalism and writing, pretending that we’re here for work. When the jazz trio takes a break and leaves the room silent we realize that indeed we are. We finish our second drink and separate for our respective interviews: I go to interview the bartender, she goes to interview the pianist.

Gilles Guyomarch, originally from the distant island of Ouessenant off the coast of Brittany, is one of the most faithful bartenders in Paris to judge by his longevity at the Lutetia. With 25 years of experience here, Mr. Guyomarch has seen two generations of patrons and assorted fads and trends come and go.

In recent years, he says, the tendency has been to more champagne, to wine by the glass rather than the bottle, to lighter drinks and, more regrettably, to a clientele that doesn’t bother to dress up to swirl a drink in the lounge. Such changes are part of the natural evolution of drinking since the 1980s. It’s the bartender’s job to adapt.

What’s disheartening, he continues, is that clients sitting alone at his bar are no longer interested in conversing with the bartender or even with each other. He indicates with his chin a man having a heart-to-heart with his handheld. “People want to live to the rhythm of Google… they have no patience for conversation.”

Mr. Guyomarch does have such patience. Between cocktail preparations he speaks with the calm, discreet confidence of the best hotel bartenders.

Peggy joins me back at the bar. The pianist, the double bassist and the drummer have settled back into position for another set.

Peggy and I give Mr. Guyomarch our own confidence: we’ll stay for a third cocktail.

I watch as Mr. Guyomarch improvises: vodka, Blue Cuacao, orange juice and apple liqueur for Peggy; gin, strawberry liqueur and peach liqueur for me.

I ask what these drinks are called. “It’s more difficult to find names than recipes,” he says. “We’re like musicians. I found the recipe, you’ll find the name.”

So Peggy and I take up the challenge. We allow our drinks be transported on a silver tray into the lounge.

The bar, crowded when I arrived at 7:30, had emptied out by 8:45 as dinner reservations beckoned, and now, already 10 o’clock, people are trickling back in.

Peggy’s daughter comes to sit with us for a while. We tell her that we’re trying to find a name for our drinks. While unknotting her shoelaces the color of Curacao blue, she nonchalantly suggests Buster Blue as the name of Peggy’s drink. We unanimously agree.

But we’re stuck on the name of my drink.

Peggy’s daughter has again been invited to disappear. Peggy and I head back to the bar. Daniel Roca, the pianist, having finished another set is now hanging out near the end of the counter. We ask for his help and he gives a stab at naming my drink “Apollonia.” Mr. Guyomarch rejects that off-hand as though for personal reasons. We don’t ask why.

Finally Mr. Guyomarch resolves the issue by declaring that mine would henceforth and forever be called “Gary’s Cocktail.”

I’m flattered. I now have a drink named after me at the bar of the historic Lutetia.

I’ve no illusions, of course; at other times, no doubt, the same drink has been or will be called Fred’s Cocktail or Janet’s Cocktail or Helmut’s or Achmed’s. But for an evening it’s mine. Here I am with a bright and beautiful woman whose daughter with Curacao blue shoelaces doesn’t mind being sent to her room; live jazz standards have been gliding in and out of the conversation; the bartender has named a drink after me; the pianist gives me a nod to let me know that I’ve come to the right place. The bar is mine. The music is mine. Paris is mine.

Three cocktails at Le Bar of the Lutetia will do that to you.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

Hotel Lutetia. 45 boulevard Raspail, 6th arrondissement. Tel. 01 49 54 46 46. Metro Sèvres-Babylone. Cigarette and cigar room by the bar.

A review of the Hotel Lutetia on France Revisited can be found here.

The post “Gary’s Cocktail” at the Bar of the Hotel Lutetia, Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

By the time the Hotel Lutetia opened its doors in 1910, well-to-do visitors to Paris were familiar with the extravagance of hotel luxury in the City of Light but they hadn’t yet experienced it on the Left Bank. Palatial lodging had until then been a Right Bank affair: Hotel du Louvre, the Meurice, the Ritz, Hotel Normandy and others flourished in the triangle between Place de la Concorde, the Opera and the Louvre, Paris’s primary luxury zone of the Belle Epoque.

Wealthy visitors, including British aristocrats and the like, flocked to that Right Bank zone where, without traveling far, they could call on fellow French aristocrats (who’d had the good sense to marry the wealthy heirs of banking and industry), visit the Louvre by day, attend the Garnier Opera by night, luxuriate in tea rooms, hotel bars, high-class prostitution, see the sights, check out the latest art, fashion and jewelry and shop. There was little reason to stay elsewhere.

The Left Bank also had its shopping attraction in the name of Au Bon Marché, a temple of modern commerce created by Aristide Boucicaut. In the 1860s Boucicaut had launched the concept of the department store—all you could want in a single place—in France and well beyond. The square between Le Bon Marché and the Lutetia would eventually be renamed Square Boucicaut.

The owners of Au Bon Marché (its name was eventually changed to Le Bon Marché by the LVMH group, which has owned the stores since 1984) therefore devised a plan to further cater to the needs and whims of the crème de la crème of shoppers while also attracting members of government (the houses of parliament and most government ministries are nearby) and notables associated with the universities in the Latin Quarter: they would built a hotel unrivaled on the Left Bank.

The hotel was given the grand name Lutetia, after the town developed along the Seine by the Romans after their conquest of the local tribe of Celtic Gauls known as the Parissi. The Lutetia’s architects were Louis Hippolyte Boileau and Henri Tauzin, who designed a building that was a precursor to the Art Deco style. Boileau’s grandfather was the initial architect of Au Bon Marché beginning in 1867, a project to build Paris’s first specifically designed department store that was taken over by Boileau’s father. Boileau himself worked on an expansion of the store in the 1920s.

Though the initial exuberance at the new hotel was stopped in its tracks by the First World War, the Lutetia took off with a bang during the Roaring ‘20s and assumed its role as a purveyor of the spirit of luxury on the Left Bank.

Lutetia’s construction, however, didn’t create a major wave of top-tier hotel construction on the dense central Left Bank. Instead, luxury pursued its evolution on the Right Bank as it extended its reach to the area surrounding the Champs-Elysées. The Hotel Plaza-Athenée which opened on avenue Montaigne in 1913, served as a cornerstone for the development of high-pampering hotels to either side of the Champs-Elysées, then well on its way to becoming a new sector for Paris extravagance.

One hundred years on, the Right Bank, specifically the first, eighth and sixteenth arrondissements, remains the natural herding ground for high luxury lodging and shopping and the preferred bank for department store shopping in Paris.

With 231 rooms, including 60 suites and junior suites, plus a large plush lounge-bar, a magnificent banquet room, meeting rooms, a brasserie and a gastronomic restaurant, the Lutetia’s size makes it an oddity on the central Left Bank. Perhaps because of that the Lutetia seemed to lose its way in the 1990s and early 2000s as boutique 4-stars claimed control of the hotelscape of the 6th arrondissement and edging into the 7th (Relais Christine, Aubusson, Pont Royal, Montalembert, Bel Ami, Villa d’Estrée, Relais Saint Germain, etc.), even if some of those boutiques are quite the store.

I remember going to the Lutetia to meet friends who were staying there in the late ’90s and finding its atmosphere slightly reminiscent of 1945, when the hotel served as a repatriation center for displaced persons and concentration camp survivors. Its dark days from 1940 to 1944 when the occupying German took it over as headquarters for their military intelligence services (Abwehr), however, were long gone. It was a decent place to stay, alright, but I had come to see the Lutetia as yet another Concorde hotel: fine but soulless, on the Left Bank but no longer imbued with the exuberant intellectual spirit of the Left Bank of the 20th century, a 4-star chain mentality in a pretty body. Le Bon Marché still offered fine department store shopping but entering the Lutetia was like going to the mall.

It’s time now to reconsider that point of view.

Since 2010 the Lutetia has been the property of the Israeli Alrov Group. Though still under Concorde management, the Lutetia is in the process of reclaiming its discreet yet showy side, a duality that a hotel must master in order to garner attention in the absence of a glowing article in The New York Times, a few glossy magazine spreads, a juicy sex scandal or Starwood points.

The Lutetia has a ways to go if its owners fantasize about joining the ranks of the “palaces,” as they top-tier hotels are known in France, yet the building was designed with as much luxury in mind as the famous names of the Right Bank, so the physical potential remains. Meanwhile, 5-star status mostly requires the will do so at this point. In any case, this is a property worth keeping an eye on.

As a business destination this been a sure bet all along at the right price. It has now been successful of late in enhancing its design, art, and literary cred, which has helped shake off its chain reputation, making it more appealing for free-spirited leisure travelers.

The Lutetia is a 4-star hotel, among the city’s finest in that category, especially for such a large hotel by Paris standards. But stars alone do not make a hotel; travelers should be wary of the star inflation over the past two years as France has harmonized its categories in line with other European countries. Five-stars are not always more prestigious than four.

The Lutetia has more upgrading to do in terms of service and in some of the rooms in order to restore its wow power through and through. Nevertheless, many of the rooms are on fine footing and nearly all have have size in their favor, even the 7th floor rooms, originally reserved for chauffeurs and other personnel accompanying the fortuned clientele. And certain aspects of the Lutetia are clearly intended for a 5-star or even palace clientele. In particular, there are several drole or chic and in some cases spectacular designer suites that, along with works of art in the public spaces and the Art Deco spirit of the building, earns the Lutetia its designer cred.

The more eye-popping of those designer suites—signature suites, they’re called—are clearly intended for high-end travelers, e.g. the 1300-square-foot fifth-floor suite decorated by the sculptor Arman on the themes of music and African art; the Littéraire Suite with its own library; the shoe-themed suite with works by the artist Thierry Bisch; the filmmaker David Lynch has decorated a suite that is an ode to his adoration of Paris. The 7th-floor Hiquily Suite can only be thought of as the female nude suite since they appear everywhere: lamps, table bases, mirrors, etc.

Museum-quality photography adorns the walls of several suites that have been decorated in collaboration with Paris’s Maison Européene de la Photographie. Some of the signature suites have stunning views out to the Eiffel Tower or over the center of the capital. These suites are generally beyond the budget of 4-star travelers and even many 5-star travelers. Yet the more self-assured 5-star travelers who generally look toward the Right Bank for luxury hotel options will not feel like their slumming by considering this Left Bank 4-star option.

Space limitations on the central Left Bank ensure that smaller 3- to 5-star hotels are bound to dominate the hotelscape in the area. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see that the Lutetia is fighting for its reputation and doing a good job of ensuring a place where visitors can live large on the Left Bank.

For those staying in a 4- or 5-star hotel where boutique may be a code word for a lobby you don’t want to sit in and a receptionist who serves as bartender, it’s worth keeping the Lutetia in mind when in search for a somewhat sophisticated place for:

– a meal: Paris, a gastronomic restaurant (one Michelin star) cheffed by Philippe Renard and decorated by Sonia Rykiel, open Mon.-Fri.; Le Lutetia, a brasserie, open daily; a “jazzy brunch” served Sundays noon-2:30pm Sept-May;

– a literary event: among them, events held by the association Les Mots Parleurs, which organizes readings and literary encounters at the hotel one Saturday evening per month;

– a musical evening: in particular jazz in the lounge-bar Wednesday to Saturday evenings, 10pm to 1am, under the programming of in-house pianist Daniel Roca, and

– a drink at Le Bar du Lutetia. Did I mention that I have a cocktail named after me here? No? Well, continue to “Gary’s Cocktail at the Bar of the Hotel Lutetia” for a singular account of how that came about.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

Hotel Lutetia. 45 boulevard Raspail, 6th arrondissement. Tel. 01 49 54 46 46. Metro Sèvres-Babylone. Small spa area. Stylish cigarette and cigar room by the bar. A monthly schedule of literary and jazz events and exhibitions at the Lutetia can be found here.

The post The Reawakening of the Hotel Lutetia: Living Large on the Left Bank appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

The discreet entrance to the Hotel Fouquet’s Barriere on avenue George V, just off the Champs-Elysées, is a cross between that of an Italian pensione where you don’t know how to find the reception and an illustration by Dr. Seuss with its long couches and playful curves and colors.

The bar, Le Lucien, which is what I’d especially come to visit, was one twisting flight up.

The lounging area of Le Lucien is given rhythm by gold columns that play against violet and green velvet chairs and couches. One wall is occupied by brightly backlit empty shelves as though the background for a Kindle commercial. Warm weather opens the inner courtyard, where the busyness of the Champs-Elysées is but a silent memory.

That’s where I met head bartender Stéphane Ginouves, who in 2011 won the first Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF, Best Craftsman in France) competition for bartenders.

One reason I wanted to meet Mr. Ginouves was that I’d read in the press release that he was once in charge of the bar at the non-commissioned officers’ mess and that among his achievements prior to the MOF title was winning the “Shaker Challenge” at Disneyland Paris, where he worked at the Steak House. The resumes of most bartenders in luxury bars tend to emphasize that they’ve been mixing for the rich and powerful or the young and chic rather than for non-coms and people willing to get their picture taken with Goofy.

Having myself attended the New Jersey School of Bartending before a brief career behind a bar for wannabe mafiosi in Milwaukee, I appreciated the lack of glitter of his early career. Mr. Ginouves, born in 1974, nevertheless went on to earn himself in 2003 the title of Champion of France for Cocktail Creation and Technical Champion at the World Cocktail Competition . I went onto a career in mixing words with a few if less prestigious titles of my own. He has worked at Fouquet’s Barriere since 2008.

The other reason that I wanted to meet Mr. Ginouves was that with any luck I would get a free drink out of the interview. But what to choose?

As far as cocktails go, Mr. Ginouves professes a preference for classic rum-based cocktails while also having several non-rum creations to his name, including one consisting of vodka, guava juice, candy strawberry syrup and poppy flavoring. That’s certainly not something I would order, so after a bit of discussion I settled on another his creations called Single S, a kind of champagne julep meets whiskey sour.

I chose it because several months earlier I had been introduced to Single de Samalens, an armagnac-cum-whiskey of sorts (tasting notes further down this page) and because they primarily taught us Madmen drinks at the New Jersey School of Bartending while the wannabe wise guys in Milwaukee only ordered drinks that evoked people they dreamt of doing business with (white and black Russians, Irish coffee, Scotch and soda, Manhattans).

Stéphane Ginouves’ Single S
3 cl of strawberry puree in which fresh mint has been crushed (strained)
3 cl of Single de Samalens (8 years)
2 cl of amaretto
7 cl of champagne
Decoration: mint and a strawberry

Rooms at Fouquet’s Barriere

Unlike most other five-star hotels in Paris, Fouquet’s Barriere is part of a French group, which partially explains why it rings few bells for American travelers. Furthermore, despite the prestige of their Paris address, Groupe Barriere is better known for its hotels (and spas and casinos) in Deauville and La Baule, where its brand of luxury dominates, or for its properties in Cannes. (France Revisited review of Deauville properties are found here.)

Though its entrance doesn’t signal this hotel to be as high fashion and crème de la crème as some of the other hotels in its category, it is indeed in the same league as the others. In the 81 rooms and 31 suites, decorator Jacques Garcia has reigned in his Seussian tendencies in favor of a hearty luxury in tones of chocolate, gold and leather in the suites, creating plush 1950s revisited. The wifi is free, as it always should be these days, and, pleasant surprise, so is the mini-bar.

Hotel Fouquet’s Barrière and Bar Le Lucien. 46 avenue George V, 8th arrondissement. Tel. 01 40 69 60 00. Metro George V. Room rack rates begin at about 640€ for a standard room. Member of the association The Leading Hotels of the World.

Single de Samalens, my cocktail back-story

I first encountered Single de Samalens in 2011 at a well-oiled wine and spirits trade fair in Paris. It’s produced in the Bas-Armagnac zone of the Gascony region of southwest France. It’s not Armagnac brandy but rather an attempt by a large Armagnac producer to find additional use for its grapes and its stills.

Single was launched in 2010 and is marketed as a would-be whiskey-like spirit though made from grapes. The brand name points to the use of a single grape varietal, the ugni blanc (white), which is one of four main varietals that can go into Armagnac, and underscores the attempt to position this as an alternative to single malt whiskeys.

I brought home some of their test-tube tasters and invited a whiskey-drinking buddy over to try them. We tried the three available Singles, aged 8, 12 and 15 years:

Aged 8 years: 80% double distillation*, 20% continuous distillation. While I wouldn’t otherwise associate this with whiskey because it’s clearly grape-based, lightly floral and fruity, it can evoke certain adolescent whiskeys. It’s no competition for an average single malt, especially by itself, but it’s affable enough with ice or better yet in a cocktail, such as Stéphane Ginouves’s above. Of the three tried here, this was my co-testers preferred because he enjoyed its comparison with whiskey.

Aged 12 years: 50% double distillation, 50% continuous distillation. Clearly more of a brandy (i.e. Armagnac) than the 8-year Single and even edging toward a port with tastes of fig and plum, I found it pleasantly complex and with adequately long finish and so preferred this over the others.

Aged 15 years: 50% double distillation, 50% continuous distillation. The additional three years hasn’t added anything other than wood, while taking away some of the dried fruit. We both found it a bit leathery.

I suspect that these were early batches, which would explain the lack of appeal of the oldest product, so it might be worthwhile to revisit the subject in a few years.  For the time being it’s an entertaining concept spirit that I wouldn’t run out to buy but that I enjoyed discovering.

* Note: By contrast with the process used for this product, Armagnac is produced though a single continuous distillation process of any of four main grape varietals including the ugni blanc grape used here. Cognac is produced through a double distillation process of any of three main grape varietals, also including ugni blanc. Armagnac and cognac are both brandies but result from other differences including soil, weather, grapes, and types of oak in which they are aged.

** Samalens is a producer of Armagnac (specifically, Bas-Armagnac) that has belonged to the Samalens family since 1882. It is based in Laujuzan, 100 miles south of Bordeaux in the department of Gers.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

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Location
The choice of a long-ignored block of Paris’s 16th arrondissement for the Shangri-La Hotel was considered questionable well before the 5-star establishment opened in December 2010. Respectably askew from the glitter of the city’s Golden Triangle, this part of Avenue Iéna is considered by some to be a kind of no-man’s land bordered by lesser known museums. But it is indeed a worthy location.

True, there are no LVMH storefronts across the street— instead, there’s the breathtaking permanent collection of Asian art at the Guimet Museum nearby. And there are no colorful Paris macaroons in bakery shop windows in the neighborhood—instead, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings one of the capital’s most appealing outdoor produce and flower market unfurls around the corner on Avenue du Président Wilson.

I would understand better if people argued that it was difficult to get a taxi in the immediate area on a rainy day. I imagine it is. Then again, taxis are hard to come by in any neighborhood in Paris on a rainy day.

The Shangri-La may not be central to the Golden Triangle, but a great hotel is capable of being the center of its own universe. This hotel is still developing and at this writing has yet to prove such greatness, at least not to me, but it does have a quiet grandness. Besides, the location of choice in the City of Light isn’t a street or an arrondissement but Paris itself.

Anyway, the location is Paris enough that I heard a generous amount of well-spoken French in the tea room/lounge while having a cup of Pu’er chrysanthemum tea. I’ve no special affection for flowery teas, but while waiting for an appointment in the hotel lounge with a cup and a pot of it in front of me, I realized that it didn’t matter how central the hotel was because I was the one who was centered.

Décor
The building at the heart of the Shangri-La, the former Palais Iéna, was built 1892-1896 as the home of Roland Bonaparte (1858-1924), Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandnephew.

Shangri-La is an Asian chain (this is their first European venture) yet it has largely maintained the original patrician Parisian spirit of the ground-floor public rooms. They were and remain an ode to the marriage of aristocracy and industrial achievement. The hotel’s public spaces successfully play the Parisian parlor game of showing class through restraint.

Shangri-La has not set out here to offer Parisians an Asian touch but to offer a Parisian home to travelers who may well have already been to Asia. Nevertheless, the welcome tea in the rooms, the Ming-inspired vases by the entrance, the veneers, the occasional silk vest (an awkward touch, sorry to say, on otherwise Paris service folk) and some coy feminine nods let us know that the Shangri-La chain is indeed based in Hong Kong.

There’s a stolid luxury here of revisited early 19th-century themes of straight lines, dark wood, marble, bronze, gilt. The beautiful wallpaper and wall fabrics made me want to caress the walls in the corridors and in the bedrooms. The high-class amenities and gadgetry (e.g. TV integrated into the mirror) are all present as in any recent hotel of this standing.

The décor edges towards clarity and minimalism rather than showiness. I can understand why some say that Pierre-Yves Rochon’s contemporary Empire décor lacks fantasy, though what appeals to me here is precisely that discretion. Several more ornate reception rooms exist at the Shangri-La for private events, otherwise the décor, like the location, doesn’t scream “Destination for stars, sheiks and fashion victims.”

In avoiding the touches of frou-frou that are sometimes merely intended to show that a hotel is as cool and contemporary as its would-be clients, Shangri-La may have erred on the side of caution. However, I do think of the decor as generally graceful. And in three visits to (not nights in) the Shangri-La I’ve yet to see much in the way of the zoo of fashionistas and vulgarity that can inhabit some of Paris’s finest hotels. That’s a good sign.

Eiffel Tower Views
More than half of the 81 rooms and suites have a direct view of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine, including magnificent terraces with several of the untouchable suites and some balconies with more standard rooms. The Eiffel Tower view from two of the most precious suites has already made the rounds of the magazines favored by those who can almost afford to stay there.

Interestingly, the hotel’s most expensive suite, the nearly 3000-sq.-ft. Imperial Suite, whose posted rate is 18000€ per night, does not have an Eiffel Tower view. That’s because that suite is a part of Roland Bonaparte’s original private mansion, and Eiffel’s Tower, completed several years before the mansion was built, held little favor with the upper class at the turn of the century.

Bar and Restaurants
The Shangri-La Hotel has three restaurants: the intimate and formal L’Abeille (The Bee), named for a symbol of the Bonaparte family, the polished La Bauhinia, named for the flower on the flag of Hong Kong, serving French cuisine along with select Asian dishes, and Shang Palace, serving gourmet Cantonese cuisine. A “well-being space,” including a swimming pool, is due to open later this year for the exclusive use of hotel guests.

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For more on Shangri-La’s public areas, in particular its bar and the restaurant La Bauhinia, read the continuation of this review: La Bauhinia at Shangri-La: Seductively Polished Cuisine and a Little Cleavage.

For the prequel to this article see: In Transit: The Route to Shangri-La Is Paved with Good Intentions.

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Shangri-La Hotel, 10 avenue d’Iéna, 16th arrondissement. Tel. 01 53 67 19 91. Room rates begin at 750€ (over $1000) per night.

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