Hotel Costes Paris evening one

As we were only in Paris for a couple of nights, we wanted to hit the party spots and make the best of our time.
Hotel Costes is a sexy, bordello chic, luxurious hotel on Faubourg St Honore, the perfect place to dress up to the nines and watch the world go by.
We realised that we needed to book and one of our French friends secured a table for us in the bar (or so we thought).
With typical British promptness we got there at 8.30 and were greeted warmly by the lovely man on the door.  The seating lady was a little less warm, and despite being a. the only people there, b. the only people with a booking, she told us very firmly we could not sit outside in the courtyard, but would have to have an inside table.  Her colleague shrugged her shoulders and looked at us sympathetically, but her manner suggested that to argue would only make things worse.
On a balmy summer evening we would have liked to have been here...

But ended up here...

We settled down to an evening of gossip and fun and ordered a round of cocktails at 20 euro each AND a bottle of Rose in case we got thirsty.  We also asked for a carafe of water, to which we were told 'non', I thought may be they had misunderstood the request and thought we wanted a carafe of wine. I explained we just wanted some iced water (in French Eau du Robinet) to which we were told, 'We don't have any' Which would mean no taps in a five star hotel, interesting. Since we had already spent a couple of hundred Euro, it seemed a little odd.
The comedy of errors turned into a farce when the waitress asked us what we would like to eat, as tonight, the table where we were sitting was a restaurant table.  We explained that we had booked a table for the bar and the seater had refused to give it to us, telling us we had to sit here.  She went to ask her manager, who told us to move to the bar.  Again I explained to him, that we were more than  happy to move to another table, but we weren't going to just stand in the bar, since all of this had been their mistake.
He took us into this bar...

Which didn't actually look buzzing like the picture above, there was one other couple (she v young, he v old, they looked like they were hiding and married, but not to each other!)
For us it didn't matter, we had years to catch up on and the whole experience was by now so funny that it would be a great story for the future.
The waitress was about as warm as the first seater, but we started to chat to her, about the uniform of massively high heeled shoes and mini flared skirts and what a nightmare this must be on the the shiny courtyard surface, suddenly everything warmed up and she even found that she had a tap and brought us some water with whatever number round of drinks we were up to by now.  We drank lots of these mojitos...

The previous terrible service and attitude brought out the naughty school girl in all of us as we tried to purloin as many freebies as we could, we did quite well from magazines, to notepaper and pens, even a couple of tankards, I did draw the line at a lit candle that someone was eying up to slip into my handbag!

All I can say about Costes is that I would never go back, actually scratch that, I probably would, the arrogance is so astounding that I might just go for a coffee for the amusement factor.  But unless you are very confident or very young, or very beautiful, I would give it a miss as by the end of the evening they have every intention of trying to make you feel like a two headed leper (regardless of how much you are spending with them).