A veteran bartender at the Ritz Paris makes a clean and dirty exit

“Pierce Brosnan would come by himself and say, ‘What should I drink?’” Field recalled. “’Maybe a dry martini, sir,’ I’d say, and make you the most perfect dry martini. In my own little head, he had served James Bond.”

Mr. Field decided he wanted to be a bartender during a school trip to Paris as a teenager. He was enchanted by the distinguished cafe waiters of the city; to him, they represented romance and freedom.

When he returned home to Rugby, England, he set up a bar in his bedroom, with stools, glassware, bottles, the works. At 18, she wrote to the Ritz for a job. “They sent me a lovely letter that said, ‘Once you’ve finished hospitality school, feel free to contact us,’” she said. He saved his money to attend the Ferrandi hotel school on the Left Bank of Paris.

Upon completion, he reapplied to the Ritz, only to be told it still wasn’t up to their standards. He then worked for fancy restaurants and bars throughout the city, including L’Hôtel, the 18th-century establishment in the Latin Quarter where Oscar Wilde died in 1900. It was there, in the “dungeon-like basement bar,” Field said. , who met Mrs. Moss, with Johnny Depp, her boyfriend at the time. Although Mr. Field was happy with his work, the Ritz still appealed to him.

It’s understandable: from the moment Swiss hotelier César Ritz opened the Ritz on Place Vendôme in 1898, it has been regarded as the ne plus ultra of hospitality. “At the Ritz, nobody pushes you,” wrote Marcel Proust, who made it his second home while working on his masterpiece, “In Search of Lost Time.” In 1921, the hotel added the Ritz Bar in the Cambon Wing, across the street from Chanel. For men only, the Ritz Bar was where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank during the Roaring Twenties.

A small lounge across the hall from the Ritz Bar opened in 1926, for women to wait while their husbands drank. It was known as the steam room, “because the ladies were steaming,” Field said. In the 1930s, the Ritz Bar began hosting women, and the Steam Room was outfitted with a bar and renamed Le Petit Bar.