You enter all three spaces of De Vie through a single door in the Montorgueil district, a host confirming which of them you’re heading to before directing you onward. Bar De Vie is downstairs, in a cave that dates back to at least the nineteenth century – low-ceilinged and unhurried, with the kind of quiet that makes the street feel further away than it is. There are twelve seats, all of them at the counter.

The bar itself is worth examining. There is no back bar in any conventional sense: instead, a raised worktop and a pair of drawer cooling units sit between the bartender and the guest, one operating as a fridge, the other as a freezer. All cocktails are pre-batched and pre-diluted, decanted before service into 250ml glass bottles and chilled, which means the bartender spends the majority of their time at the counter rather than on drinks preparation. The design was deliberate – proximity and hosting over production.

No ice is used at any point, which opens up the technical brief considerably. Stemmed glassware is chilled to -20°C, either drawn from freezer drawers built into the station or frozen à la minute with liquid nitrogen. Drinks are served from frozen bottles, blended with frozen dairy cubes, heated in bain-maries, or turned into sorbets to order. The glassware itself is largely handmade in Europe, with a proportion produced in Paris from recycled glass. A number of cocktails arrive in custom ceramic vessels made with ceramicists across the city – including the bar’s own range, which incorporates built-in ceramic elements that function in the same way as whisky stones. Coasters and placemats are handmade from Pyrenées wool and recycled deadstock waxed canvas.

The menu at any given moment contains ten cocktails, each built around a single piece of French produce sourced directly from a grower and converted entirely into products made at the Atelier. The naming convention reflects this: CARROT_v3 denotes the third carrot cocktail the bar has made; PEPPER_v1 the first using pepper. The versioning is a running record as much as a label. Drinks change when the homemade products run out – sometimes once a week, sometimes daily – and the team works several cocktails ahead, developing replacements before the current product is depleted. The menu itself is printed on 200gsm textured pastel card, hand-bound in recycled deadstock waxed canvas, and designed so that reading it one way gives English and flipping it gives French. A parallel non-alcoholic version is available for at least half the drinks at any point, and the full tasting menu in the dining counter above is available without alcohol throughout.

The Atelier operates ten minutes from De Vie inside a local distillery, and the scope of what’s produced there is considerable. Spirits are made in a 400-litre alambic still and via cold vacuum distillation on the rotavaps; no neutral grain alcohols are used, with fruit and vegetable spirits preferred both for character and for the reduced ecological footprint of the raw materials. Unrefined sugars from metropolitan France replace refined alternatives throughout. Byproducts move between the Atelier, the kitchen and the bar in a closed loop – wines bottled in recycled magnums from the dining room, filtered water left at the end of service kegged for batching or used to water the plants. All food waste that leaves the building goes to composting.

The display of this process is built into the room. A Liquid Library of fermentations and experiments is visible from the bar; dry store goods are arranged in an open pantry alongside it. The logic of the bar is made legible to anyone sitting at the counter – and there is a lot to read. Alongside the in-house pantry, De Vie holds what it describes as Paris’s largest collection of Eaux de Vie from producers across France and neighbouring countries, housed in the cave.

Pre-shift, the full team sits down together for a family meal that extends to the team of the neighbouring bar, before a briefing covering menu changes and the evening’s reservations. Each guest arrives with a pre-prepared docket noting their language preference, allergies, any special occasion and which seat they’ve been assigned. The music in each room runs on its own playlist – a blend shaped by the founders’ British and Irish heritage, grime and garage threaded through calmer contemporary tracks, shifting register as you move between the spaces. In the bathrooms, hidden behind a mirrored wall, the soundtrack changes entirely: Action Bronson’s podcast series visiting Parisian bars and restaurants plays over the speakers. The closing shift ends with the team writing a haiku to summarise the evening.

Guests leaving Bar De Vie are given a drinks card listing everything they had that evening – producer location, ABV, volume, allergens, and a hand-drawn pastel illustration – alongside the bill, which arrives inside a booklet of the team’s Paris recommendations, organised by neighbourhood, with separate maps for cafés, bakeries and restaurants.