
Christopher Parr, is the Editor and Chief Content Creator for…
After a renovation that took four years and cost $400 million, the Ritz Paris has recently reopened its doors — which also means that the hotel’s famous Bar Hemingway is open for business again as well. In addition to Ernest Hemingway, the bar was a favorite haunt of some of Hemingway’s famous contemporaries: Cole Porter would spend up to 9 hours a day at the bar, sometimes composing a tune while he drank.
The bar retains much of its original aesthetic, even after the major renovations. Still there are leather chairs to lounge in, wood paneled walls, antique typewriters, and Hemingway memorabilia. Some curtains are new, some lights are new, but everything else remains largely the same.
The head bartender is Colin Field whose creations have influenced cocktail lovers around the world. One of the most popular drinks at the Bar Hemingway is still the ‘Serendipity’, a Calvados- and Champagne-based drink that Field created in 1994. Since the bar’s reopening, Field has also introduced a new cocktail which he calls “the world’s first clear dry dirty martini.” As Field told Forbes’s Karla Alindahao, the cocktail has “all the taste of olives—slightly salty, absolutely brilliant, and totally clear. Not as if you just washed your hands in it! A superb work of art and a total secret.” Certainly something to travel to Paris for!

Christopher Parr, is the Editor and Chief Content Creator for Pursuitist, and a contributing writer to USA Today, Business Insider — and the on-air host of Travel Tuesday on Live at 4 CBS. He is an award-winning luxury marketing veteran, writer, a frequent speaker at luxury and interactive marketing conferences and a pioneer in web publishing. USA Today has named him one of the “Top 10 Luxury Travel Bloggers” — and Madison Magazine honored him as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential People in Madison.”