Ritz Paris Review: Is It Still Worth It?

The Ritz Paris sits on the Place Vendôme like a monument to the idea that history is enough. Hemingway drank here. Coco Chanel lived here. Princess Diana left from here. The hotel knows this, and it assumes you do too, and it prices every thread count and crystal chandelier accordingly.

I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. I spent three nights looking for a reason to love it that went beyond the address on the stationery.

I found the bar. That was about it.

The Room

A Prestige Suite, which the Ritz describes as “an ode to French elegance.” It is, in the way that a museum exhibit is an ode to the era it represents — technically faithful, emotionally inert. The Louis XV furniture is immaculate. The silk curtains are the correct shade of gold. The marble bathroom has the right veining and the right fixtures and the right weight of towel. Everything is right. Nothing is alive.

The room feels like it was designed for a guest who arrived in 1937 and has been waiting patiently ever since. The technology has been updated — there’s a tablet that controls the curtains, a speaker system that works after three attempts — but it’s been layered onto the room like a concession rather than an integration. The WiFi password was delivered on a silver tray. This is either charming or absurd depending on how badly you need to check your email.

The bed is good. I’ll give them the bed. Firm, well-dressed, the kind of mattress that luxury hotels used to invest in before they all switched to the same plush-pillow-top that feels like sleeping on a cloud and gives you a backache by night two. The Ritz bed has an opinion about posture, and it’s right.

The Service

This is where the reputation diverges from the reality. The Ritz prides itself on service that “anticipates your needs.” What it actually provides is service that performs anticipation — a distinction that matters more than you’d think.

The staff are polished, professional, and relentlessly present. My coffee arrived before I ordered it on morning two, which sounds impressive until you realize they simply repeated my morning-one order without asking if I wanted something different. I didn’t, but I might have. Anticipation is not repetition.

The concierge booked me a restaurant I didn’t ask for because he “thought I’d enjoy it.” I didn’t. It was the kind of safe, establishment choice that a concierge makes when he’s guessing at your taste rather than asking about it. A conversation would have been more valuable than the assumption.

The Bar

Bar Hemingway is the reason the Ritz still matters. A small, dark, wood-paneled room that seats maybe thirty people and makes cocktails with the seriousness of a research laboratory. The head bartender makes a dry martini that I’d describe as life-altering if I were the kind of person who let cocktails alter my life, which apparently I am.

The Serendipity — their signature, with calvados, mango, and mint — shouldn’t work but does. The Ritz Sidecar is the most expensive cocktail on the menu and the only one I’d order twice. The bar itself smells like leather and history and the specific kind of smoke that expensive places cultivate. It’s the one room in the hotel that feels genuinely alive.

Go to Bar Hemingway. Skip the rest.

The Alternatives

Here’s what I’d book instead, at half the price or less:

Le Pavillon de la Reine, Place des Vosges. A hotel built into a 17th-century courtyard in the Marais. The rooms are smaller than the Ritz’s, the location is better, and the building has the thing the Ritz doesn’t — a sense of being somewhere specific rather than somewhere famous. The courtyard at breakfast, with the fountain and the ivy and the quiet of the Place des Vosges behind you, is worth more than any silk curtain on the Place Vendôme.

Hôtel Grand Mazarin, Marais. New, opinionated, and designed by someone who understands that a hotel room in 2025 should feel like a place you’d actually live. The restaurant is excellent. The rooftop has a view of the Marais rooftops that makes the Place Vendôme look like a parking lot. It costs a third of what the Ritz charges and it’s better at everything except name recognition.

The Verdict

The Ritz Paris is a beautiful building with impeccable maintenance and a profound misunderstanding of what luxury means in the current century. Luxury is not silk curtains. It’s not silver trays. It’s not a famous address. Luxury is the feeling that a place was designed for how you actually live, not how someone imagined you might live in 1898.

The Ritz assumes its history is sufficient. For some guests, it is — and if you want to sleep where Hemingway slept and Chanel lived and the ghosts of a particular kind of Parisian glamour still linger in the hallways, the Ritz delivers that specific experience. It’s expensive. It’s beautiful. It’s a time capsule.

But time capsules, by definition, stopped keeping up.

The room to book: If you must, the Coco Chanel Suite. It’s the only room with genuine personality.
The room to avoid: Anything labeled “Classic.” The Ritz’s classic rooms are small by modern standards and priced by historical ones.
Don’t miss: Bar Hemingway. One drink minimum. Two drinks ideal.
Skip: L’Espadon restaurant. Fine dining that’s more fine than dining.

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