How it all began
FrogPubs began life as a piece of homework for a couple of students studying for their MBA in Fontainebleau. Their task was to develop a project which would result in the creation of a new business venture. The opportunity they chose to evaluate (mainly because of the opportunities for applied in-depth market research that it offered!) was the potential for an English pub & micro-brewery in central Paris. After graduating, armed mainly with a satchel-full of not-very-coherent notes written late at night in different bars of the Capital & what they thought was a particularly subtle and witty name for their new pub, our intrepid would-be entrepreneurs set about raising money, finding a site, &, of course, learning to brew the flat, warm beer that up until that point no one had dared to introduce to the discerning and educated Parisian palate.
After a long and often frustrating (ever dealt with French bureaucracy?!) year-and-a-half, ‘The Frog & Rosbif’ opened on the lively and infamous rue St Denis in October 1993, where it was immediately a huge success, both with British expats and tourists, and also with the local Parisian population who particularly appreciated dropping in at lunchtime for ‘un Monaco’ (don’t ask – you wouldn’t like it anyway!) and a “ploffmons leurnch”. Over the following ten years we have opened three more pubs in Paris: ‘The Frog & Princess’, ‘The Frog at Bercy Village’, & ‘The Frog & British Library’, as well as ‘The Frog & Rosbif’ pubs in Toulouse and Bordeaux..
Along the way, we’ve learnt to brew all sorts of new styles of beer (including cold and fizzy ones!), cook for up to five hundred people at a time, play dance music too loud, unblock all forms of plumbing late at night, hold tip-top parties, and make any number of fiendishly-strong stripey drinks. We started out by creating pubs for all the British expats in Paris to meet up in. Today, however, the Frog Pubs attract a much wider variety of people: pretty much anyone who wants to have a good time and be well looked after. Each pub has its own identity, but we all do our very best to make sure that, whichever one you choose, you will enjoy yourself and want to come back soon. As well as our great beers that we brew on-site in each pub from a range including lagers, stout, bitters, wheat beers, fruit beers - even ginger beer, we show loads of televised sport, including all Premiership football games, have DJs at weekends, serve good home-made food day and night, and organise all sorts of one-off events, from party nights to old favourites, such as quizes and even the odd darts match.
We hope you’ll enjoy getting to know us, and, if you have any feedback that you’d like to give us – good or bad – on any aspect of what we do, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch directly by hitting the ‘Let the boss know’ icon below.
