The Great Cafes of Paris

By Otto Friedrich

After we got married, one spring afternoon in Paris, we wandered dazedly across the Place St. Sulpice, past the baroque fountain where the four stone bishops stand guard, and ordered a bottle of Moet & Chandon at the Cafe de la Mairie. Since that all happened exactly 40 years ago, it seemed a good time to return to Paris (When is it not a good time to return to Paris?) to inspect some of the cafes where we had spent much of our youth.

Indeed, one can recall not only one's own past but that of all Paris through its cafes. Both Robespierre and Lenin plotted revolution in Paris cafes; Hemingway and Joyce wrote in cafes; impressionism has been described by historian Roger Shattuck as "the first artistic movement entirely organized in cafes." Parisian cafes are not just places that serve food and drink but places to meet friends and talk and work and make deals and read the papers and watch life passing by.

These grand institutions began during the 17th century with the spread all over Europe of the Arab taste for coffee. The oldest cafe in Paris is the Procope, which has been operating on the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie ever since 1686. The Procope was nearly a century old when it claimed Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire among its customers. Later came the revolutionaries, Robespierre, Danton, Marat and even Napoleon.

The Procope was refurbished with a vengeance in 1988 -- Pompeian red walls, l8th century oval portraits, crystal chandeliers, flintlock pistols and, for the waiters, quasi-revolutionary uniforms. Also a tinkly piano. If that all seems something that even Napoleon might call de trop, the food is generally good (Michelin recommends it), and the oysters are a joy.

Most of the old Montmartre cafes where Manet and Renoir once held court have long since given way to appliance stores and garages, but the artistic oases of the Left Bank have remained hospitable. Montparnasse reached its height during the 1920s, when Hemingway used to sit and write stories in the Closerie des Lilas, which had been a lilac-shaded country tavern during the 17th century. Hemingway complained bitterly when the management tried to attract a younger clientele by tarting up the bar and ordering all the waiters to shave off their mustaches. The Closerie is once again cozily moribund, and Hemingway, like the friendly red lampshades, has become part of the decor: a brass plate on the bar marks his presence, and his face ornaments the menu, which includes a rumsteak au poivre Hemingway.

Montparnasse was quite dead after World War II, but it enjoyed a modest revival in the '70s and '80s, when restaurantification became the new fad (and source of higher profits). Old-timers still mourn the fate of the Coupole, a barnlike old brasserie that had served as home to Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Samuel Beckett; it was acquired by a restaurant chain, torn down and rebuilt in 1988 into a sort of yuppie grazing center. More felicitous was the 1986 transformation of the Cafe du Dome, a plain, bare sort of place, where an impoverished writer used to be able to get a saucisse de Toulouse and a plate of mashed potatoes for about $1. One section of the Dome has been turned into a really excellent fish restaurant (Michelin gives it one star), with a comfortably old-fashioned decor and atmosphere. The baked turbot is superb, and the Macon makes it even better. But if the sausage is only a memory, so is the old price: dinner for two costs $100.

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," Hemingway once wrote, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." In my case, the moveable feast was spread at the crossroads outside Paris' oldest church, the 6th century shrine of St. Germain-des-Pres. Baron Haussmann cut a boulevard through here during the Second Empire, and in came what memory still rates as the three best cafes in Paris, and thus the world. The first was the Flore (1865), celebrated as the headquarters of existentialism. "It was like home to us," Jean-Paul Sartre once said, and Simone de Beauvoir wrote part of The Second Sex here. One good reason is that the Flore has a rather secluded second floor, where one can work in peace; another is that the Flore always stayed warm.

After the Germans smashed the Second Empire in 1870, a number of refugees from occupied Alsace fled to Paris. Among them was Leonard Lipp, who opened across the boulevard from the Flore a little brasserie ornamented with luxurious blue and green tropical birds on its tiled walls. Lipp's has long been famous for its choucroute (a.k.a. sauerkraut), and purists argue whether it deserves its reputation. But one outsider's view is that anyone who willingly orders choucroute deserves whatever he or she gets. The Alsatian plum tarts are much better. The main attraction, though, is the beer, which comes in glasses of increasing size, starting with a demi for a half-liter, working up to a serieux and finally a distingue, a mug holding a liter.

The other specialty of the house is politics. The National Assembly is just a few blocks down the boulevard, and when sessions run late, legislators traditionally repair to Lipp's for sustenance, discussion and intrigue. One of the regulars over the years has been Francois Mitterrand, now, of course, President of the Republic. Any cafe that can claim a President among its customers has little need of further endorsements.

The greatest of these three great cafes, the Deux Magots, is the newest (1875), but it seems the most venerable and the most welcoming. If Lipp's wonders who you are, and the Flore wonders how much you've got, the Deux Magots wonders what you'd like to be served. Located just across from the old church, the Deux Magots derives its strange name from two large Chinese statues that sit high up in the center of the cafe. Prices today are appalling: a Coca-Cola costs $5, a Bloody Mary $10. But as one sits on the eastern terrace of the Deux Magots in a spring sunset, looking out toward the medieval church spire across a newly installed array of lilacs, tulips and apple trees all in flower, one can hardly help feeling that such a vista is worth almost any price.

Even back in the '40s, when prices were a lot lower, one went to Lipp's or the Flore only on special occasions. For hanging around, there were cheaper places, the Royal or the Bonaparte or the Mabillon. And though St. Germain is still full of wealthy and successful people, the artistic center seems to be moving back to the Right Bank, to the slummy area being rapidly gentrified between those two new cultural real estate projects, the flamboyantly ugly Beaubourg art museum and the unflamboyantly ugly Bastille Opera. "Try the Cafe Beaubourg," says one young American, "but I don't think anybody's writing any novels there." "Try the Cafe Coste in Les Halles," says another.

Both are handsome new establishments, with a balcony for crowd-watchers, and there are lots of youths and lots of action, lots of blue denim, brown leather and black suede. But one suspects that among all the fire eaters and street jugglers, there are more drug peddlers than artists in this crowded scene. "Terrible people," says one old-timer, speaking of Les Halles the way New Yorkers speak of New Jersey. "Terrible suburban gang kids."

Aging and nostalgic visitors who find the cafe scene not what it used to be also find good reasons for that. One is that Paris cafes flourished because residential hotel rooms were often dark and cold; prosperity has changed that. Another is that, with prices high, many people prefer the neighborhood cafe to the famous institutions. Still, the 40th anniversary can be celebrated only at the Cafe de la Mairie, and though it has become a bit fancy -- the old goldfish tank has disappeared, along with the chessboard -- it is still a neighborhood cafe. It bears its literary traditions lightly. It hardly remembers that Saul Bellow used to drink here, and William Faulkner too, or that Djuna Barnes set several scenes in Nightwood here. In fact, when the proprietor was once asked what she remembered of Barnes, she said she had never heard of her. But the two coupes of icy Pommery tasted grand. Hemingway was right: Paris is much changed, but the moveable feast can still be celebrated.