In Paris’s 16th arrondissement, far outside the city’s sightseeing epicenter, there’s a bar called Cravan. It is, for most tourists, way too much of a trek. (A second, much larger location recently opened in the more-central Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.) But it is also, according to this tourist, worth the journey. It’s there that I first tried a drink called Yellow, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Cravan owner Franck Audoux is an avid student of French cocktail history, a topic he has plumbed to great depths in researching his recipe book French Moderne. Audoux, however, is not interested in simply preserving these drinks in amber, but in breathing new life into them to make them feel as relevant today as they were a century ago. This does not mean hitting them with acid powder, running them through the rotovap or the ultrasonic homogenizer. Instead, Audoux finds a way to make simplicity feel transcendent.

The Yellow typifies this approach. The combo of gin, yellow Chartreuse and Suze was a popular mixed drink enjoyed along France’s Côte d’Azur, and takes its name from the color of its star ingredients. At Cravan, Audoux adds another yellow element—lemon juice—to bring the drink into sour territory, for a cocktail that reads like a mellower Last Word. On paper, there is nothing extraordinary about this drink—four off-the-shelf ingredients shaken together in equal parts—but like every memorable cocktail does, it manages to be more than just that. The Yellow is tart, herbal and complex in measures greater than its ingredient list would suggest, transformed by nothing more than a cocktail shaker and ice.