Few know more about the art of the hotel bar than Colin Field, the British bartender who presided over the Paris Ritz’s Hemingway Bar for 30 years. During his tenure, the 25-seat lounge became a hotspot for guests including Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan and Kate Moss, the last of whom was so smitten with Field that she wrote the foreword for one of his books.
Field “divorced” the Ritz – his words – in 2023, but he has been very busy since, with regular guest slots at Paris’s Maison Proust – “a five-star boutique hotel with a beautiful bar” – and the Grand Palais’s “buzzing” new Grand Café. He’s also the brains behind the menu as the new Le 7 Cocktail Bar at Paris’s Mondovi Luxury Suites, an exclusive lieu de vie in the 1st arrondissement with only 11 suites. Created by boutique specialists Iena Hospitality (Le 5 Particulier, Padam Hôtel), the hotel is meant to feel like a home from home. And the bar, which just opened, is correspondingly bijou with just a handful of tables, a small terrasse and seven seats surrounding the black marble-topped bar, where Field will pop up from time to time.
‘‘I rather liked the idea that, instead of receiving people in your apartment, you could receive them downstairs in the bar,” says Field, gesturing to the velvet-clad surrounds. Today he’s sporting his signature look: a navy
