Best Designed Bars in Paris

In Bercy Village in the 12th district, this fun and trendy bar-restaurant dedicated to wine is a large and very lively contemporary brasserie. The menu combines seasonal dishes, Asin references and Chai favourite to suit all tastes and all budgets. Every table features the “wine key”, so that customers can go down to the cellar to choose their bottle of wine from over 300 options. Two beautiful patios overlook the Cour Saint-Emilion and Bercy Park.

Another project from the Costes family, those purveyors of Paris lounge cool, this time calling on the interior decoration services of India Mahdavi, who New Yorkers might know from The Hotel on the Rivington and APT, and Londoners from Suka, so the tone has long been set for this there-level café-brasserie.

The décor is more pop-tastic than you might have expected – pink pool table, black-and-white floor tiles and Xavier Vaihan’s massive Sophie sculpture, whose yellow bosom sinks into the floor of one level with the backside coming down the celling of another – but the real surprise is the pedestrian menu. Fish and chips or spaghetti Bolognese, anyone? Chase with a banana split or, as your fellow eurotrash diners, a more than respectable mojito.

For something more secluded than the sceney bar and dining areas, but definitely not any less fancy, then make a booking for the private Germain Paradisio bar and screening room downstairs.

The 15-room Parisian boutique Hotel Thoumieux in the Left Bank is yet another cool, art-deco-ish creation by Thierry Costes and designer India Mahadavi.

Located above the popular Thoumieux Brasserie, the hotel also offers its own significant culinary input in the form of the 20-seat dining room Jean-Francois Piege, where Chef Jean-Francois Piege is apparently creating gastronomic masterpieces.

The dining room’s tongue-in-check décor, also by India Mahdavi, exudes a somewhat out-dated and perhaps even a bit under worldly glamor of a bygone-era – potted plants on doilies and elaborate wallpapers included. The pastelly furnishings, carpets and wall treatments bring out an aura of an elderly, once-quite-elegant aunt, who would not allow you to enter the room with a drippy chocolate ice cream cone.

L’Arc Paris, Restaurant-Bar & Club, has been open for four months and at least the Club has already become the place where you go if you want to be with the chic, the famous and the beautiful. Mostly, you go there to be seen.

Last month, one of the must-see occasions at the Club was the Chloé Van Paris’s Fashion Burlesque Ball, a masquerade where the dress code, according to the Club’s Facebook page. Party – Club Party was “13 cm heels, nylon, glamorous stockings, retro, pine-up, dandy, sexy, smart and glamorous.”

At the Restaurant, chef Antony Germani (of L’Atelier Joël Robuchon) presides over menus of seasonal everything-made-from-scratch delicacies.

L’Arc occupies the former premises of l’Etoile Nightclub at 12 rue de Presbourg, with views of Arc de Triomphe but it was completely redesigned by Cannes-based Prospect Design.

Prospect was established in 1996 by Samy Chams (and expanded into Dubai in 2005) whose night-club design work includes VIP Room in St Tropez, Baili in Cannes, and Maddox and Movida in London. – Tuija Seipell