Henry’s Bar was the premiere American bar in Paris from the 1890s until the 1920s and still retained a fashionable clientele until it closed in 1938. It was opened by Henry Tépé (ca. 1856–1918), a German whose sole experience with the United States was as a ship’s boy, when he spent an afternoon walking around Hoboken, New Jersey, between sailings. After that he spent some time in England and then at the Hotel Chatham in Paris, popular with Americans, where he ended up in charge of the new American bar. In 1889, he opened his own bar at 11 Rue Volney, around the corner from the Chatham. Almost immediately, it became the refuge for the homesick American of sporting inclinations. Dark and intimate, the bar was a place, as an 1893 article described it, where “15 or 20 well-dressed and well-to-do Americans and Englishmen … sit or stand talking in the cozy room. Whiskey Sours, Gin Fizzes, … [and] a real free lunch mingle with a real barkeeper and a real bar and the good old American language.” Over the whole thing presided the trim, elegant figure of Tépé, at least when he wasn’t at the races (he was a pillar of the Paris turf).
Tépé’s head barkeeper at the turn of the century, Otto, had a reputation as a mixologist, and indeed Henry’s seems to have been the vector for the new, vermouth-heavy school of American mixology to colonize Paris. It certainly retained a reputation as having the best cocktails in town well into the 1920s, when it was eclipsed by Harry’s New York Bar, around the corner on Rue Daunou. See Harry’s New York Bar. Tépé, perhaps suffering from dementia, committed suicide in 1918. The bar continued, but more as an exclusive old-timers’ club than the lively place it had been. It closed just short of its fiftieth anniversary.
“Paris the Disappointing.” New York Sun. July 30, 1893, 5.
“What Three Members of the Brooklyn Club Saw Abroad.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1909, 3.
Woon, Basil. The Paris That’s Not in the Guide Books. New York: R. M. McBride, 1931.
By: David Wondrich
Henry’s Bar in 1907, with Henry Tepé, center.
Wondrich Collection.
Henry’s Bar in 1907, with Henry Tepé, center. Source: Wondrich Collection.