#2 | Jacque’s Bar, The Hoxton, Paris, France
Visit: Fall 2019
First of all, I would like to talk a little about the bar reviews in general. I have thought about this for quite some time, how far into the past I should go, for a review to be posted. Because at least on some level the reviews should still give a rough estimate for a current quality standard and for that 5-6 years old reviews would not help too much. Even if it would be nice for me personally to find a complete private bar history here, a real bar diary, I want to select this rather for the benefit of potential readers. 2019, just under 3 years, seemed to me a good choice here. Especially through Corona, I was this spring / summer (2022) in many, even internationally known bars, which still used their 2020 summer menu right now because of the exhausting last years. Thus, with starting at the earliest in 2019, there should still be some proximity to the status quo right now.
But now let’s talk about our bar of the week, the most positive surprise of my visit to Paris at the time, Jacques' Bar at The Hoxton, Paris.
I, as well as several Parisian bartenders at the time, had not heard of the bar before (it opened around a year before that visit). I came across it in preparation for the bar tour only because, after frantically searching for new bars to discover, I came across a list from VOGUE of all places, about the 15 "most beautiful" Parisian cocktail bars (better list than you might expect).
First of all, the hotel itself is really charming, Paris has shown twice on this trip (another bar was in one too) how boutique / design hotels should be done, without too much cliché and intentional coolness. Tasteful, understated, timelessly elegant. The photos don't even do the hotel justice. It's completely hidden down a narrow side street in a still fairly central, bourgeois neighborhood (which would surely still be unaffordable for 80-90% of Parisians). A chic and unexpectedly small building like you often see in Paris, an old, quite small city palais that has been converted. Maybe on the outside facade to the street as wide as 3 small German one-family homes next to each other. You walk in through the archway and everything is just open, bright and does not look like a hotel, but maybe a designers private villa that has open house.
To the bar you go through a courtyard and a outdoor spiral staircase up to the 1st floor, through a door and you get surprised again -after the hotel itself-, by really cool vintage wallpapers and a small, maybe for a maximum of 20 people designed room with great modern-retro seating and a respectable, half round bar, beautiful marble on old wood, on the opposite side.
The menu is small but nice, a double pager with roundabout 12-14 drinks, behind it a longer spirit list and wine/champagne, all typical and more than solid for such a hotel. Whereby this card size is also absolute standard in Paris, similar to daily/weekly menus in restaurants, it is rather difficult to find a good bar that has more than 14 drinks. But this lasts always just half a year, some bars even change it 3-4 times a year. A great advantage, instead of (as previously preferred by me) more drinks -or even just the Parisian amount- and then to only change it every 1-2 years, while even still leaving some drinks in, etc. as I see it more often in Germany.
But back to the bar itself, it looks like a mixture of an old British living room (50s to 60s) with some colonial style cues through the counter and cabinets and then the again obviously very modern interpretations of retro designs in some furniture, but somehow it all fits together and looks directly cozy, as if you have visited this place already a few times.
The theme of the menu was at that time a world trip and was meant to be developed around that even more in the following months, with exact stations in the form of a travel map with the route, etc. Under the review itself you can still see the menu from back then.
I had the "Mahatma Chai" first, a clarified milk punch with rhum agricole, sake, chai tea syrup, lime, etc. and was almost a little overwhelmed by the presentation. On the bowl in the picture, already huge, you had a ceramic lid formed like a trumpet that gets removed before you. Now I am a friend of special presentations, but I must admit, as almost the only criticism of the evening, that it was a bit annoying to drink from the very curved glass with the giant ice cube, because the giant cold cube always touched you above the upper lip after drinking half the drink. The drink itself was sublime, it uses the intended silky feel of the technique perfectly and plays in the mouth with coconut, rice, chai and light vanilla and banana notes without becoming very fruity, he sends you on a cure in a luxury spa in Southeast Asia.
Second I had the "Lounge Lover", a nice refreshing gin sour with light raisin notes, which becomes exciting mostly through the perfectly made champagne foam, that is how I would like to have gin drinks more often.
After over 30 minutes of a very nice conversation with the obviously delighted bartender, happy about the quite interested guests, he wrote down 5 tips for the next days on a note for me. Even that was not enough, he then wanted my email address, to which he sent a list with a whopping almost 30 recommendations, from cafes, to bars, restaurants and small museums. Still not at the end, he made me as a crowning glory on the house a smaller version of the "Cool Rasta" (because I before openly decided between that and the gin drink) in a nosing glass. A just perfectly balanced mixture of rather dry Jamaica rum, homemade elderflower liqueur, homemade coconut liqueur and bitters, one of the most "elegant" rum drinks I've had the last years.
So we end with the conclusion: The bar as well as the hotel are absolute insider tips for all Paris visitors, visit fast, before they might (deservedly so) appear in many more lists.
The menu (2019):
