“Pierce Brosnan would come alone and say, ‘What should I drink?'” recalled Mr. Field himself. “Maybe a dry martini, sir,” I’d say, and I’d make it the most perfect dry martini. In my own little head I had served James Bond.
Mr. Field decided as a teenager that he wanted to be a bartender during a school trip to Paris. He was enchanted by the city’s leading bar waiters; to him they represented romance and freedom.
When he returned to Rugby, England, he set up a bar in his bedroom, with stools, glassware, bottles, the work. At age 18, he wrote to the Ritz for a job. “They sent back a nice letter saying, ‘Once you’ve done hotel school, don’t hesitate to contact us,'” he said. He saved his money to attend the Ferrandi hotel school on the left bank of Paris.
Upon completion, he reapplied to the Ritz but was told he did not yet meet the standards. He then worked for posh restaurants and bars in 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 cellar bar,” Mr. Field said, that he first met Mrs. Moss, with Johnny Depp, her boyfriend at the time. Although Mr. Field was satisfied with his work, the Ritz continued to pull him.
Understandably: from the moment that the Swiss hotelier César Ritz opened the Ritz on the Place Vendôme in 1898, it has been regarded as the cream of the crop in the field of hospitality. “At the Ritz, no one displaces 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 Ritz Bar in the Cambon wing, opposite Chanel. For men only, the Ritz Bar was where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald famously drank their way through the Roaring Twenties.
A small parlor across the street from the Ritz Bar opened in 1926, where women could wait while their husbands drank. It was known as the steam room, “because the ladies were steamed,” said Mr. Field. In the 1930s, the Ritz Bar began to welcome women, and the Steam Room was equipped with a bar and renamed Le Petit Bar.
