When Alex Francis and Barney O’Kane left Paris’ Little Red Door in 2024, there was never any question what their next step would be. They would, of course, continue serving cocktails, and it was a given that their new bar program would be a sustainable one.
Earlier this year, the duo launched the first part of their De Vie concept, Comptoir De Vie, a Paris restaurant with a fine dining menu and cocktail pairings to match. Bar De Vie, centered around drinks, will open later in the year with a short and sweet menu of recognizable classic cocktails with seasonal De Vie twists. There are no agave spirits or American whiskeys; the majority of ingredients are local. Every drink in the program is served up—and that’s not a stylistic choice. Francis and O’Kane have designed the menu to operate without ice entirely.
For the co-owners, De Vie is simply an extension of how they already live their lives. “The greatest impact any of us have is through the work we do, and we want to support the world we want to see,” says Francis. “We couldn’t imagine working any other way.”
Here, Francis shares how he and O’Kane have not just prioritized sustainability at De Vie, but also, how they’ve built it into the bar’s whole foundation.
[Though we work without] ice, only use French spirits and work seasonally, none of that should be relevant to the guest; they shouldn’t have to know that to understand what’s going on [in our bar] or have a good time. I see the way we work as an extreme; it’s a way of looking at how to do things differently, but I don’t think that [everyone needs to] completely remove clear ice or ice in general from bars.
We did it for a lot of different reasons. The main one is just that ice is such a waste. It’s literally just stuff that goes in the sink, and then you’re turning on hot water to melt it. If we put too much food in the bin, we’d freak out that we’d be wasting too much.
No bar in Paris is making their own ice because of the size of venues, so here, a company makes them and delivers them, and ice is heavier than concrete, so you’re basically transporting cinder blocks from one part of Paris to another. Even if you have regular ice, like from a good ice machine, it takes over 10 liters of water to make one kilo of ice. So it’s a waste of water, a waste of energy, a waste of money. Guests don’t value it as much as you think they do. It’s more of the industry inflating [its importance]. I’ve even had people say to me that we’ll never be on the 50 Best list because we don’t have block ice.
Although the idea was brought up because of sustainability, economically not having block ice also has a lot of advantages. If we were still implementing clear ice in our bar program, then we would have to compromise on the amazing independent French spirits [we use].
Beyond just designing the drinks or the menu, we had to design the space to not have ice from the start. Instead of having a typical bar station, where most of the space is taken up by the ice well, ours are based around a flexible refrigerated drawer unit, which can be both a fridge or a freezer, depending on how we decide to use it that day. It holds all our batches at the specific temperature that we want.
Pre-batching whole drinks in advance allows us to keep the time from the drink’s execution to the guest’s first sip as short as possible. (Of course pre-batching isn’t unique to us, and it’s one of the reasons why going iceless didn’t feel like a big challenge or shift; it’s fairly standard in the top tier of the industry as it ensures consistency and efficiency in service.)
After pre-batching, we had to think about the temperature once the drink gets to guests. At Comptoir De Vie, 99 percent of guests are taking a [curated cocktail tasting] experience with drinks that are a maximum of three sips in size, so there is very little need to keep drinks colder for extended periods of time. But for à la carte drinkers who take what most people would consider a “full cocktail,” we designed the service materials and glassware to help keep the drink as cold as possible for as long as possible. This includes pouring drinks tableside from insulated metal cups, using thicker recycled glassware so that long drinks retain the cold freezer temperature for longer, and designing ceramics with built-in “whiskey rock” pieces that create a larger thermal mass, which will, again, retain the temperature of the freezer.
We also have to think about different ways to do the dilution. We use teas [and] infusions, and for the sour-style drinks, we mix fruit or vegetable juices with other modifiers such as acids or sugars, and create a frozen cube designed to completely dissolve, either through blending or shaking, to bring the drink to its intended temperature and dilution.
In terms of signature drinks and stuff like that, [we don’t have one, because everything changes so often]. We’re very lucky that in France, the average person is much more aware of the season they are in because you see the reflection of it in the supermarket, in the markets. You don’t see that in the U.K. and definitely not in the U.S.
One of the things we try to embrace as much as possible in Comptoir De Vie is that inconsistency of availability is great, and it allows you to value things when they’re available, and you look forward to them when they’re not. We’ve found that our guests really enjoy that. What we would like, instead of people coming back regularly for the same thing again and again, is for people to be excited and think, “We can’t wait for citrus season because they’re going to do that drink again.” Our version of a bar is an attempt to give [some of] that consistency: There’ll always be a Martini, and there’ll always be a highball or whatever, but we’re not going to ask you, “Do you want a twist?” It will come as it comes, and it will change within the seasons.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
