Delve Into Paris After Dark
When the lampposts ignite and locals flood the cobblestone streets, the City of Light comes alive.
Photographs by Ériver Hijano
MAYBE YOU’RE LIKE ME. Maybe you’ve been to Paris enough times to see the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Musée d’Orsay. Maybe you’ve stood in a long snaking line at the top of Montmartre just to get 10 minutes inside of Sacré-Cœur or waltzed up the Champs-Élysées to the shadow of that famous arch. Maybe you’ve had the bad espresso, smoked the Gitanes, eaten the croissants. How many visits does all that take? Two? One if you’re efficient?
Maybe you’re like me, and you did all that, and then you did it again, and somehow, in the process, it all just deepened the hunger. The lists complete, the monuments seen, but that’s not what you were there for. You wanted to get it. Not just see Paris — understand it. It’s easy to buy a ticket, book a room. But how do you dive deep into a city so perfectly designed to keep visitors in the wading pool?
Paris has layers. The first tier is the one outlined above, the Must-Sees, the monuments. This is the easy stuff, positioned across Paris’s geography like giant boulders in a low field. On the second tier are the Michelined restaurants, the big dogs of the culinary world, notable to a different sort of tourist but famous all the same. On the third tier are the special places — restaurants, bars, smaller museums, cafés — that require a little legwork, and maybe some French, to ferret out. And in the fourth tier are the places where locals actually go, the neighborhood spots with bad signage and tattered menus that just happen to be perfect. The ones without English Web sites. Here’s the thing, though: If you work hard enough at tackling the third tier, you can start to make it overlap with the fourth.
I come with good news: There is an easy way to progress through the tiers, to dive deeper into the Paris experience. It is simple. You will like it. I will get to it in a minute. But first, we need to discuss jet lag.
8 a.m.
IN PARIS: EMBRACE FATIGUE: Information abounds on the Internet on the subject of getting over jet lag. A popular piece of advice is to sleep a night’s rest on an eastbound red-eye — to close your eyes at liftoff and keep them shut until your plane descends over Europe the following morning. When you land, in the bright, confusing light of a new time zone, force yourself to stay awake until 10 p.m. You cannot, under any circumstances, nap. This method, I assure you, works. But for our purposes, I don’t recommend it.
10 a.m.
NAP: If you’ve come from the East Coast of the United States, your internal clock will want you awake from roughly noon until 4 a.m., Paris time. This is good. Paris thrives during these hours. Lean in to the confusion. Little happens before noon anyway. So let’s start around 6 p.m.
6 p.m.
PARTAKE OF COCKTAIL HOUR: Paris is experiencing a cocktail renaissance. If this is not yet common knowledge among visitors, it’s because so many of the city’s best bars are of the “speakeasy” variety, hidden behind unmarked doors or taco joints or pizza restaurants or grilled-cheese shops. Look beyond the gimmick; the Parisians have. The drinking scene here is so revved up, it’s begun to specialize. Take Mabel, for example — that’s the speakeasy behind the grilled-cheese shop. The proprietor of Mabel has dubbed his bar a “rum empire” and stocked it with the city’s best selection of that liquor. Bartender-owner Joseph Akhavan can be found behind the stick most nights, mixing and stirring and eagerly recommending both spirits and concoctions, so if you don’t know your way around a rum shelf, you’re in good hands. When I tell him I tend to prefer whiskey, he pulls a small chilled bottle from beneath the bar and presents it with a single ice cube in a glass, garnished with a dried fig. He sets a little paper crane next to the glass. “It’s like an old-fashioned,” he tells me, “but with rum and barrel-aged for a month.” Its sweetness is a triple punch — the rum, the added sugar, and the barrel — but the flavor lasts and lasts. It takes whole minutes for the first sip to dissolve from my mouth.
Mabel owes at least some debt to Candelaria, the speakeasy behind the taco joint, one of the places that brought the New York school of cocktail snobbery to Paris. Though it was founded by two Americans and a Colombian, the bar (and its sister bars, Le Mary Celeste and Glass) has become so firmly rooted in the city’s bobo drinking culture that it’s impossible to have a conversation about cocktails that doesn’t at some point mention it. That said, it’s worth the hype, with its Latin American spin on mixed drinks (think: fine mescals; drinks paying homage to Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico; Gabriel García Márquez quotes on the menu). A few blocks away, the bar Andy Wahloo has a fake-out front door — you enter through a sprawling interior courtyard before ducking back into the street-adjacent barroom. A glowing, kitschy ’70s-Moroccan decor sets the mood — the mood being “how far can I unbutton my shirt before I cross the line from rakish to sleazy” — but the focus here is firmly on the drinks. That’s because the bartenders are attention hogs, lighting things on fire, squeezing whole oranges along the overturned blade of a knife, and filling bell jars with infused smoke. It’s a hell of a show, and it makes up for how impossible it is to score a seat in the courtyard during the warmer months.
If it’s still warm out, and outdoor drinking is a must, Hôtel Particulier is the place to find yourself. First, though, you have to find the bar, which is accessible behind a locked gate on a steep drive on a curving hillside road in Montmartre. So cherished is access to Hôtel Particulier’s cascade of terraces that if you hang around its gate during the day, you might hear a tour guide describe it as a kind of holy-grail drinking spot — something to strive for but not rest your hopes on. I hate to ruin the myth, but just press the intercom and wait. The gate will click open. Take a left at the boulder, ring the bell at this gate, and ask the host for a table outside. There aren’t any bad ones.
Perhaps this is all too theatrical for you. That’s fine. Here’s something more straightforward. Enter the Ritz Paris, on the Place Vendôme, and follow the long gallery to the end. Keep going — the hotel, and this corridor, spans the entire block. At the very end, as far as you can get from the main entrance, are a pair of bars: The Ritz Bar to your right and the Hemingway Bar to your left. Take a left. Here, Colin Peter Field, maybe one of the finest barmen in Europe, mixes classics as they’re meant to be mixed, with precision, a kind of Bond-like lack of stress, and gentle helpings of charming anecdotes. I met a couple from Illinois — she is a tax attorney; he works in “organic meat production” — who had visited the bar enough in the late ’90s, while living in Paris, that Field had transcribed the recipe of her then-favorite Champagne cocktail into a notebook he kept behind the bar.
Across the river, Castor Club, a favorite of the cool-kid set, is hidden, in a very chic way, behind a wood-paneled facade with a single slat window. Depending when you arrive, you may need to wait a bit — the narrow space inside can hold only a couple dozen people, and the doorman doesn’t let it overfill. This can have its perks. As I waited for a barstool to open up, a taxi sped by and clipped its side-view mirror on a metal post at the edge of the sidewalk. The mirror bounced across the pavement, narrowly missing a group of women in line. A man from another group went over to the taxi driver as he picked up the shattered mirror. “You almost hurt those girls!” he yelled in French. “You should be more careful.” He asked the women if they were okay, and the two parties merged. Say what you want, but it’s better than “Come here often?”
10 p.m.
BE LATE FOR DINNER: Even on an off-kilter schedule, you must be hungry by now. The simplest, and maybe most delicious option, is to swing by Hero, a beloved Korean-inspired place on Rue Saint Denis, for a hefty pile of spicy fried chicken and some kimchi. Restaurants like this, the ones that skew away from things we might identify as traditionally French, are part of the local culture too. In fact, if you want to know how people actually eat day-to-day, go online and see what’s popular for takeout. Over the course of one meal, I watched four delivery guys pick up orders.
If you’re not in the mood for Korean, keep going north a few blocks and you’ll hit Marrow, a brand-new hot spot helmed by young chef Hugo Blanchet, a vet of Joël Robuchon’s lauded kitchen. The namesake specialty here is baked in pita dough, so the bone itself arrives in a peelable crust. Sinking your teeth into that crust, and chewing it from the bone, may be one of Paris’s most viscerally pleasurable sensations. And that’s saying something.
Most high-end restaurants take a pass on the cocktail list, opting instead for a Michelin-friendly focus on wine. Not Marrow. Bartender — and partner — Arthur Combe is one of the city’s best mixologists, capable of both improvisation and invention, and his list here shows it off. Combe’s Vieux Rectangle, a signature from his days at Experimental Cocktail Club, deserves a place in the pantheon of new classics. I ask him where I ought to head next and he rattles off a list that would take a strong drinker a week to accomplish. “What’s your favorite?” I say, hoping to narrow the options. He replies: “I spend a lot of time at Castor Club, because it’s near where I live and open late.” I mention the line. “The doorman is renting my apartment from me,” he says. “Tell him you know Arthur.” I make a mental note.
No one has ever accused Paris of skimping on decadence, so why stop at pita-encrusted bone marrow? At Ellsworth, just off the Palais Royal, it’s possible to eat a balanced meal that begins with foie gras (paired with a thin granola-like oat layer); progresses to veal sweetbreads; and ends on soft, almost-liquid egg yolk raviolo, topped with truffles. For a less inventive menu — that is, steak — Clover Grill, on the alley-like Rue Bailleul, is the current contender for the city’s best meat. You can see it, actually, dry-aging in a trophy case between the dining room and the kitchen. The play here is to bring a date and order something cut for two.
Look, I know: This is a lot of newness in a city with a very impressive old guard. A favorite from the latter: Le Grand Colbert, a massive, ornate dining room that’s open till 1 a.m., with a menu full of the hits. I’m a sucker for soupe à l’oignon and steak frites, but that’s just me. Finally — and I’m going to make enemies by revealing this — La Poule au Pot, just south of Les Halles, churns out classics in its white-tableclothed dining room until 5 a.m. six nights a week. Tell no one.
12 a.m.
WANDER: It’s safe to say you’re well-fed and a little tipsy by now and probably just hitting your stride. So take a walk. Though the Métro snakes into just about every corner of Paris, you can get surprisingly far by foot. Les Halles is my favorite center point. Beginning here, a 30- to 40-minute walk could bring you as far north as Pigalle or as far south as Le Jardin du Luxembourg; west to the beginning of the Champs-Élysées or east to the Bastille. You’re looking for pockets of noise, for the bubbling up of crowds outside of late-night bars, for the kinds of cafés that act as quick docks for the sidewalk smokers. Novels and memoirs and screenplays have all been written about Paris at night — there’s a reason. The city doesn’t so much sleep as change shifts. The late-night crowd has its own turf, and you can really only find it by looking for it at street level.
Three pieces of advice. One: Don’t be afraid to wander into and through the city’s green spaces. One park in particular rewards a late-night stroll: Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the 19th Arrondissement. It’s home to Le Pavillon Puebla, which is really more like an old caretaker’s house that happens to serve drinks and play music. Revelers gather on a large terrace nestled among the trees, often right up until the moment it closes, at 1:45 a.m.
Two: Don’t write a place off just because it doesn’t look like a bistro from an old Hollywood set of Paris. Some of the best places — the ones most popular with locals — don’t fit the mold you might be expecting. On a barhop in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area, Airbnb experience host Carina Tobagi started the night off at an Irish pub, the kind of Guinness-and-Jamo place you can find in any major city in the Western world. We sat under a wall-mounted TV set playing a football game, near a dartboard, slightly confused. “You’re probably wondering why I brought you to an Irish pub,” she said, laughing. “It’s because Parisians actually go here.” Sure enough, the establishment, Little Temple Bar, quickly filled up around us.
And three: If you happen to walk by the Palais de Tokyo, the contemporary art museum along the Seine, know this — it is open until midnight every night except Tuesday; its newest resident is Les Grandes Verres, a restaurant and bar from the folks behind Candelaria and Hero, and it serves drinks until 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
TURN IT UP: Head to La Mano, on Rue Papillon, and try to make it through the line outside. If you do, you’ll be greeted indoors with one of the city’s best dance parties. The crowd here is the sort that likes to overpay for booze as long as the DJ is good — and he really is, spinning Latin-influenced jams and setting the tone by dancing his heart out at the front of the room. But if that doesn’t do it for you, there are other, less crowded options. I found myself in SoPi (South Pigalle) very early one morning, hopping back and forth across its main drag of bars, Rue Frochot. Dirty Dick — a divey tiki place popular with twentysomethings — closes at 2 a.m., but Glass, across the street, is open till 4 a.m., and it serves honest-to-god American-style hot dogs. L’Entrée des Artistes, around the corner, is also open till 5 a.m. on weekends, but it’s the type of place where half the crowd is outside smoking at any given time. I joined them for a second, pretending to need a lighter, and struck up a conversation with a couple who looked like they do this kind of thing nightly. “Where do you go that’s more fun than this?” I ask, and the girl says Le Truskel.
A 15-minute walk south and I’m pretty sure I can hear the place in question from a block away. At Le Truskel, the crowd is younger and everyone is ordering beer and cheap shots of well liquor. The party here rages until 5 a.m., the DJ playing American hits from the ’80s and ’90s, before most of these folks were born, but somehow they seem to know every word of every chorus. An even mix of locals and studying-abroad expats with pretty good French flirt in the corners. New Order comes on, and I can’t tell if there’s a smoke machine in the room or people just don’t acknowledge the smoking ban here. I’m over 30, so I have a drink and decide it’s time to call it.
12 p.m.
START ALL OVER: I know how this all sounds. Who would waste half the day sleeping in a city like this? But think about the inverse: Who would waste half the night sleeping here? When so many places come alive only after midnight, can you really afford to doze through it? The deep night essentially handicaps the city for you, thinning out the hordes of tourists, closing most of the museums and attractions, and redirecting the energy toward a few scattered beacons of light and noise. You just have to walk around and listen.
But, sure, we’re not vampires. There are things to do during the day as well. Just about any café in the city with rows of street-facing chairs out front can fulfill the requirements for petit déjeuner — coffee, croissants, eggs, etc. — but my favorite is a little spot on the left bank called La Palette, one of a thousand impossibly quaint locations to score a good croque madame. For something slightly more imaginative, head to Madame Pervenche, in the Marais neighborhood, and order Le Kévin croque, a take on the original modified with barbecue sauce and bacon. Remember this place later — it’s open until 2 a.m. and attracts a loud, late crowd for the simple, classic cocktail menu (a spritz, a Moscow mule, a negroni) that has yet to rise into the double-digit prices more typical of the Marais.
At some point, you should end up at vegan spot Café Ineko for a late-afternoon pregame espresso. It’s some of the best-made coffee in the city, and a table out front nabs you a nicely framed view of the narrow alley-sized thoroughfare of Rue Gravilliers. I overhear a group — a couple of American accents, a British one, and two French ones — catching up over glasses of wine. There are worse places to spend an afternoon, letting the blisters on your feet heal and recharging with back-to-back coffees, and maybe the evening’s first glass of rosé. Just don’t stay too long. There’s still a lot left to do when it gets dark.
Before You Go
WATCH Before Sunset
The middle film in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy takes place in Paris and is considered the best by Francophiles.
READ Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker writer’s memoir deconstructs the mythical, romantic vision Americans thrust upon the city, then rebuilds it.
DOWNLOAD Chaleur Humaine by Christine and the Queens
Born in Nantes, singer Héloïse Letissier dived into the club and drag-queen cultures of 2010 London. She built her musical persona out of the sounds — electro, synth, pop — she found there and brought them to Paris, her current home. Letissier’s voice holds all the hope, lust, and heartbreak of a smoky Marais club.
How to Break the Ice
Trump
Avoid local politics. But feel free to share your honest thoughts about the current US president — even over here, he dominates the conversational bandwidth.
Shoptalk
More and more businesses are open on Sunday, which many see as a threat to France’s culture of “work to live” versus “live to work.”
Sex
“Parisians love talking about sex,” advises experience host Tobagi. “It is our favorite subject.”
Experience Paris
Satisfy your cravings for local flavor with hosts who share their passions.
Drink in Saint-Germain
“I like meeting people from all around the world,” says host Carina Tobagi, a born-and-raised Parisian. “It’s a little bit like traveling.” On her bar crawl around Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she shares an insider’s feel for watering holes of all sorts (a street-side café, a chic cocktail bar) and the hard-won respect of bartenders and waiters, who greet her with double kisses.
Taste Wine with Thierry
Thierry Givone was born to spread the gospel of wine. Raised in the Burgundy wine region, Givone worked a stint in marketing before diving into his passion for enology, racking up certifications, and, a couple of years ago, opening a little wineshop on a narrow block-long road just off Rue Monge. His classes involve a half dozen hearty pours of various Givone-approved bottles, but the highlight is his professorial enthusiasm for teachable moments. Givone passes around isolated scents for his guests to “nose” and pours similar wines side by side to show off the differences. He’s a pro right up to the question of his favorite, when he lets a little bias come through: “The Burgundy,” he quips, “is obviously the best.”
Explore African Fashion
Host Chayet Chiénin treats guests to a tour of La Goutte d’Or, known as Little Africa, and the shops of Senegalese tailors, widely considered the most skilled sewers of traditional wax prints. At Maison Château Rouge, the owners offer their locally sourced and made clothing, plus Bana-Bana, a hibiscus drink produced by female cooperatives in Senegal.
Discover Fragrance
Years of working at a fragrance archive of nearly 4,000 bottles and, later, tracking olfactory trends at a perfume house spurred Sophie Irles’s interest in scent history. After delivering a primer on the evolution of scent and technical details — how to select one, where to wear it — Irles introduces guests to notes that comprise creative formulas (from brands such as État Libre d’Orange and Parle Moi de Parfum) found in boutiques in the Marais area. “At the beginning of the tour, some people tell me they have a bad sense of smell,” says Irles. “But at the end, I give a challenge and most of the time they can identify raw materials they didn’t know existed two hours before. They’re so happy and proud!”
Master Personal Style
At That’s Intrinsic, Isaüra Tsama’s agency, the former fashion buyer and current photo-shoot stylist offers sessions to analyze guests’ wardrobes and zero in on the ultimate clothing silhouettes and colors. “The objective is to prove it is possible to flatter all figures,” says Tsama. “I want to help people feel confident in their body and style.” Her aha moment usually comes when determining guests’ ideal bra sizes and heel heights. “Most women don’t know their size,” she explains. “And I often hear, ‘I can’t walk in high heels!’ ”
Eat Endless Brunch
Chef Anne de La Forest’s menu, which is served on her Montmartre rooftop, is always a delicious surprise. One standout spread begins with home-cured pork, bread and seaweed-mixed butter, and a slow-cooked egg served in Parmesan and cream. Terrine-de-croque monsieur, rolled and sliced into spirals, is followed by chicken and roasted potatoes. “A French meal must end with cheese,” says de La Forest, who finishes with a Camembert from Normandy and a Sainte-Maure de Touraine goat cheese with a piece of hay in its center.
Get to Know Historical Women Writers
A former Paris tour guide, native Londoner Heidi Evans points out that male greats such as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Victor Hugo dominate the history of French literature. “I wanted to create an experience that, for once, focuses on the girls,” she says. Her Saint-Germain-des-Prés stroll starts at the Éditions des Femmes, Europe’s first female publishing house, and continues to the former home of novelist Colette and the writing spot of Simone de Beauvoir. Along the way, she makes five stops for sweets, including macarons, chocolates, and caramels.
About the author: Mark Byrne is a writer and consultant to the liquor trade. He writes primarily about drinking and traveling. Between us, he also sometimes does those things for free.
