There is a private club feel to the decoration by Christian Liaigre which is sober, elegant and as great as everything the designer creates. The menu, the numerous beautiful people and model-looking waiters all conspire to make this place ultrachic !
Alain Passard gave him the taste for magnifying vegetables and his mentor Marc Veyrat went even further by teaching him how to cook herbs, flowers and roots….Travels completed his experience. David Toutain’s recipe to blow our minds? Playing with textures, colours, twisting products, making bold associations, hinting at molecular cuisine and offering divine food and wine combinations.
This small loft with New York vibes has a lovely atmosphere and offers breakfast with pancakes, waffles and whipped cream, and hot chocolate from 10 AM, plus a real multilingual menu featuring everything we love to snack on: club sandwiches, bagels, hot-dogs, BBQ wings, salads, fish and chips…and a genuine carrot cake as the finishing touch !
An intimate and lovely setting, a bistronomic cuisine revisiting tradition with the right twist and on top of that, a lovely team treating each customer as regulars. There are actually loads of them, as well as many foreign tourists who come back there during their Parisian stay. Booking advised.
The most illustrious café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It was the favourite spot of the intelligentsia of the 30’s, from Surrealists to editors, artists and filmmakers and it became the meeting point of post-war Existentialists. There gathered Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, writers and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, Juliette Gréco Brigitte Bardot, Roman Polanski, Françoise Sagan, Romain Gary as well as the world of fashion. Nowadays the Café de Flore still caters for a subtle blend or artists, writers, intellectuals, politics and anonymous people.
Created in 1926 by Christian Zervos, the Cahiers d’Art review belongs to the legend of SaintGermain-des-Prés. Picasso, Giacometti, Matisse, Léger, Beckett and Miro took part in it before it became slightly neglected. ‘Les Cahiers’ were purchased by the Swede Staffan Ahrenberg and are now headed by Samuel Keller and Hans-Ulrich Obrist and back to their former place and lustre.
Philippe Bismuth worked as a 20th century painting and sculpture expert for ten years before teaming with Vincent Amiaux, a specialist of Cubism to open the gallery in 1998. Works by Giacometti, Foujita, Dubuffet, Lhote, Picabia, Utrillo, Picasso, Warhol and 20th century masters are regularly on show.
Since 1958, the gallery has offered a vast selection of graphic and photographic editions of the greatest figures of the Surrealist movement, namely Hans Bellmer, Giorgio De Chirico, Salvador Dali, Leonor Fini or Wassily Kandinsky. It also exhibits Pre-Columbian art focusing on the cultures from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
The gallery is dedicated to the major painters of the “Nouvelle Ecole de Paris” (a term coined in the 50’s) including : Karel Appel, Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean René Bazaine, Roger Bissière, Camille Bryen, Serge Charchoune, Chu Teh-Chun, Corneille, Olivier Debré, Jean Dubuffet, Maurice Estève, Jean Fautrier, Otto Freundlich, Hans Hartung, Jean Hélion, Auguste Herbin, Asger Jorn, Wifredo Lam, André Lanskoy, Alberto Magnelli, Alfred Manessier, André Masson, Georges Mathieu, Serge Poliakoff, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Victor Vasarely, Bram van Velde, Geer van Velde, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva or Zao Wou-ki.
Design, architecture, photography, fine arts, fashion…situated inside the Hermès boutique rue de Sèvres, the Chaîne d’encre bookshop is a quiet corner where epicureans will find an extremely well crafted book selection.
Jean-Bernard Gillot is first and foremost a librarian, but he also infuses his bookshop with his passion for photography and travels. He also regularly organises exhibitions on modern and contemporary photographers.
Taking over Jean-François Piège, he runs the restaurant located just upstairs from Brasserie Thoumieux. the young chef is only fourty but he has already been rewarded with 2 Michelin stars for Strato in Courchevel and l’Oustau de Baumanière in the Baux-de-Provence.
In his place, Sylvestre Wahid offers both his signature dishes and brand new creations inspired by his current ideas and moods.
