Hotel · Place Vendôme · 1er arrondissement

Hôtel Ritz

Name: Hôtel Ritz
Address: 15 Pl. Vendôme, Paris, 75001, FR

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowStill the same

César Ritz's palace on the Place Vendôme — the fixed point of Right Bank luxury, where F. Scott Fitzgerald's bar legend, Tender Is the Night's longest bender, and Ernest Hemingway's two best Ritz stories all check in.

Address: 15 Pl. Vendôme, 75001 Paris
Years: 1898–present

Illustration The Hôtel Ritz façade in color in late golden light, white awnings and topiary along the Place Vendôme arcade

The Vendôme front in the late light — the famous little bar is through on the rue Cambon side.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

César Ritz opened the hotel that carries his name in 1898, with Auguste Escoffier running the kitchens, and between them they more or less invented the modern luxury hotel — electric light, a bathroom to every room, and service calibrated to make royalty feel adequately received. The address did the rest: the Place Vendôme side for the grand entrance, the long corridor of vitrines back to the rue Cambon side, and, tucked there, the small bar that would collect more literary legend per square meter than any room in Paris.

For the expatriate books, the Ritz is the Right Bank's pole star — the money register against which Montparnasse's saucers are counted. Fitzgerald made the bar practically a second byline: it is where Tender Is the Night installs Abe North — the Divers' brilliant, failing composer friend — for his long, ruinous last morning of charm before the boat train, and where A Moveable Feast lands its final Fitzgerald joke — Georges the barman, years later, asking Hemingway who this Monsieur Fitzgerald was that everyone kept asking about.

Hemingway's own Ritz legends bookend the war. In August 1944 he arrived with the liberation, a band of irregulars in tow, and 'liberated' the hotel bar — the martini count has grown with every telling, which is how he would have wanted it. And in 1956, by the story he told, the basement yielded two small trunks he had left in 1928: the notebooks that became A Moveable Feast. The hotel restored itself top to bottom from 2012 to 2016; the little bar on the Cambon side now carries Hemingway's name, which settles the argument about who won it.

Key facts

Opened: 1898 — César Ritz, with Escoffier in the kitchens
The bar: The small bar on the rue Cambon side — Fitzgerald's second office, today the Bar Hemingway
1944: Hemingway arrives with his irregulars and 'liberates' the bar
1956: The basement yields the trunks — by Hemingway's telling — that became A Moveable Feast
Today: Still open — restored 2012–2016, Place Vendôme side unchanged

Documentary photographs

Archival and present-day photographs, reproduced with rights verified.

Printed dinner menu of the Hôtel Ritz, Paris, dated 26 June 1900 — Dinner for 26 June 1900 — the Escoffier kitchen two years into service: Consommé Rossini, caneton de Rouen Vendôme, and an 1893 Pommery on the wine list.1900 · Unattributed menu card, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Queen Marie of Romania with her two eldest daughters in the garden court of the Hôtel Ritz, 1919 — Queen Marie of Romania with her two eldest daughters in the hotel's garden court, 1919, during her visit to the Paris Peace Conference.1919 · Agence Meurisse, Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

The arcaded Place Vendôme entrance of the Hôtel Ritz in 1965, doorman and guests outside — The Place Vendôme arcade and hotel entrance in 1965, photographed by Willem van de Poll.1965 · Willem van de Poll, Nationaal Archief (CC0) · CC0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Hôtel Ritz façade on the Place Vendôme, awnings over the arcade and the column beyond — The Vendôme front — the grand entrance César Ritz opened in 1898.Editorial illustration

The Hôtel Ritz façade in color in late golden light, white awnings and topiary along the Place Vendôme arcade — The Vendôme front in the late light — the famous little bar is through on the rue Cambon side.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1898
César Ritz opens the hotel on the Place Vendôme, Escoffier commanding the kitchens — the template of modern luxury.
1920s
The rich Americans' pole star: Fitzgerald adopts the bar, and the Ritz becomes fiction's shorthand for the Right Bank at full wattage.
1934
Fitzgerald gives the bar its longest scene in Tender Is the Night — Abe North's last morning, charm dissolving by the glass.
1944
August: Hemingway and his irregulars 'liberate' the bar; the martini tally grows with every retelling.
1956
The trunks: two cases left in 1928 surface from the basement, by Hemingway's account — the seed of A Moveable Feast.
Today
Open as ever after the 2012–2016 restoration; the Cambon-side bar carries Hemingway's name.

On the map

Related books

Recalled in the memoir

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

The Fitzgerald chapters close at the Ritz bar — Georges the barman asking, years later, who this Monsieur Fitzgerald was — and by Hemingway's own telling, the memoir began in the hotel's basement, in two trunks left in 1928 and recovered in 1956.

Setting of the story

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1934

The Paris chapters install Abe North at the Ritz bar for his long, ruinous last morning — charm dissolving glass by glass before the boat train, one of the novel's great set pieces of waste.

Writers who knew this place

Ernest Hemingway

American · Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.

Frequented by

From prewar drinks with Fitzgerald to the August 1944 afternoon he arrived with his irregulars to 'liberate' the bar — the hotel repaid the loyalty by putting his name on the room.

— Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American · The Jazz Age's laureate — famous at twenty-three, author of Gatsby at twenty-eight, and owner of the longest posthumous comeback in American letters.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Hôtel Ritz in Tender Is the Night.

Inside Hôtel Ritz

Pen-and-ink illustration of Bar Hemingway at the Ritz Paris — green leather club chairs, the wall of framed memorabilia, and the sailfish over the banquette

Bar HemingwayA 25-seat cocktail bar at the rue Cambon end of the Ritz Paris, opened under Ernest Hemingway's name in 1994 in the former Le Petit Bar.

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