Hemingway Bar

For a first-timer in Paris, the Sister had not done badly.

Sure, we hadn’t managed to get into L’Ami Jean or Hidden Kitchen, but the basics had been covered: Berthillon ice-cream, Laduree macarons, cervelas at Brasserie Lipp, a cocktail at the Hemingway Bar.

What was left on the list? Much too much.

Nonetheless, we decided, end with a bang we must. And so we found ourselves packing into a tiny elevator and rocketing into the gray Parisian sky.

The lunch to end our lunches (for now) in Paris would be at a classic — Le Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, which, at more than 400 feet above ground level, offered a sweet spot to sip some bubbly and look out onto the city beneath.

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We’re sitting at the Hemingway Bar at the Hôtel Ritz Paris, my friend Greg and I.

He leans over and says, soft and deep, “That face, it’s beyond the dreams of pornography.”

The face would be that of Roman the bartender, the friendliest man behind a bar that we’d met in our Paris jaunts thus far.

Greg and I, we’re bar people — we adore eating at bars, perhaps even more than eating at actual tables.

At bars, you tend to get to know your neighbors well — even if conversation only starts up because a fork is in your elbow. You have a front-row seat to behind-the-counter action, all the little dramas that aren’t meant to permeate through the welcoming smiles of waitresses.

You also get to know some pretty gifted entertainers pouring drinks — and Roman happened to be one of them.

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Paris: A Lunch With A View

Paris: A Roman Behind The Bar