In Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, far exterior town’s sightseeing epicenter, there’s a bar known as Cravan. It’s, for many vacationers, manner an excessive amount of of a trek. (A second, a lot bigger location lately opened within the more-central Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.) However it’s also, in line with this vacationer, definitely worth the journey. It’s there that I first tried a drink known as Yellow, and I haven’t stopped excited about it since.

Cravan proprietor Franck Audoux is an avid scholar of French cocktail historical past, a subject he has plumbed to nice depths in researching his recipe guide French Moderne. Audoux, nevertheless, is just not curious about merely preserving these drinks in amber, however in respiration new life into them to make them really feel as related in the present day as they had been a century in the past. This doesn’t imply hitting them with acid powder, working them via the rotovap or the ultrasonic homogenizer. As an alternative, Audoux finds a technique to make simplicity really feel transcendent.

The Yellow typifies this method. The combo of gin, yellow Chartreuse and Suze was a well-liked combined drink loved alongside France’s Côte d’Azur, and takes its identify from the colour of its star elements. At Cravan, Audoux provides one other yellow ingredient—lemon juice—to convey the drink into bitter territory, for a cocktail that reads like a mellower Final Phrase. On paper, there’s nothing extraordinary about this drink—4 off-the-shelf elements shaken collectively in equal components—however like each memorable cocktail does, it manages to be extra than simply that. The Yellow is tart, natural and sophisticated in measures higher than its ingredient record would recommend, remodeled by nothing greater than a cocktail shaker and ice.