Hennessy Very Special Tour in Paris: a pairing night at Journey

The Hennessy Very Special Tour crossed France in 2025, from Bordeaux to Nice and Lyon, two to three weeks a city, before closing its road in Paris. The Paris leg ran at Journey, on rue des Petits Carreaux in the 2nd arrondissement, from 13 November to 6 December. These images are the opening night.

The idea fitted in one line: a chef meets a bartender, and every glass is given a plate. Bartender Robin Jude Le Texier had built four cocktails on Hennessy Very Special; chef Sho Miyashita, of Haikara and Haikara Deep Fried, answered with three contemporary pairings. That is exactly what the images show: four glasses lined up on the counter, three plates coming back with one or the other.

The venue was no accident: Journey builds its own menu around pairing, no cocktail without a plate, on a green marble counter and polished concrete. A brand out to prove that cognac belongs at the table finds a room that already argues its case.

The activation was produced by Double Dragon; the photographic commission and the invoicing went through Skillz Agency, with whom I work regularly on this kind of evening. It is not a studio shoot dressed up as an event: the pairings are photographed while the room fills, on whatever corner of the counter you are given.

That is the whole difficulty of photographing a pairing. A hot dish wants raking light that digs into the surface: the crust, the gratin, the crunch. A glass wants exactly the opposite, a broad clean source that goes through the liquid without darkening it and draws a hard edge along the rim.

Putting both in one frame means either losing one of them, or building a light that does both jobs at once. The answer here was position: a single flash, high and three-quarters on, wide enough to wrap the glass, oblique enough for the garnish to keep its texture. The background then falls away into black on its own, which settles the question of a working bar behind the subject.

A pairing menu is not photographed like a menu. The same dish comes back with a different cocktail, and it is precisely that change that has to read: otherwise the brand ends up with two images that look alike and can only publish one.

Here, moving from the amber glass to the red highball changes the dominant colour of the whole frame, and it is that second pairing which opens this page, at the centre of the band. I kept the same plating, the same angle and the same light from one frame to the next, so that the only variable is the colour in the glass. That is what lets them be published as a series, one after the other, without the audience feeling they have seen it already.

The order of the files says it better than I can: every still life without exception is made before the first frame of a full room. That is not a scheduling accident, it is the rule of this kind of commission.

A bar becomes unworkable the moment the room is full. Glasses move, the work station gets covered, and there is neither the space nor the calm left to set a flash. The only window in which you can work properly is the one before the guests arrive, and it lasts an hour. Whatever is not made inside that hour will not exist.

The whole night was shot on a Canon EOS R5 with the RF 24-70 mm f/2.8, without changing lens once. On an event where you go from a still life to a portrait to a full room in a few minutes, changing lens costs more than the focal length gained.

The rest is a matter of aperture, and it tells the night on its own. The pairings are made between f/11 and f/18: everything has to be sharp, from the edge of the plate to the label on the bottle. The portraits are flashed against black, on the pavement or in the doorway. Then, once the room is full, you open up to f/3.2 and let the evening decide.

From the moment the guests arrive, the brief changes nature. You stop building and start following. That is the other half of the work, and it is the half that gives the set its depth: a series with nothing but perfectly lit pairings would tell a menu, not an evening.

The group photograph happened late on, without anyone asking for it. That kind of image cannot be set up: you recognise it a second before it arrives, and either you are already in the right place, or you have lost it.

A brand night is judged as much on the guests as on the product. What the client is looking for in these images is not proof that the bar was full, it is proof that people were happy in it: two glasses held at once, a conversation nobody interrupts, a coat still on because you have just walked in.

None of these images can be asked for. They come from staying in the room after the commissioned work is done, with the same lens and no added light, and accepting that a good half of them will be of no use.

The last frames are made long after the last plate. By then the subject is no longer the cognac, it is what the brand managed to create in the room: a deck, a glass handed across the console, and light coming from nothing but the neons.

It is also the most useful part for the brand’s own channels. A pairing image is published once; an end-of-night image is republished every year, because it says what the evening felt like and not only what was in the glass.

A pairing night like this one is put together almost nowhere but Paris: it is where spirits brands gather press, tastemakers and bartenders, and where you find venues that can be taken over on a weeknight and handed back the next morning.

I come up from Marseille for these evenings, with travel not billed, and that is not a handicap: arriving the night before with no other shoot in the day means being on site while the back bar is still being built, which is the only moment the still lifes are possible. The food photographer in Paris page sets out how those days are organised.