If you find bohemian life of Paris interesting, Cafe de Flore is the place which is necessary visiting. For a hundred and twenty years since its foundation Cafe de Flore has saved up the unique aura filled with creativity of many well-known people creating in these walls.
Located on Saint-Germain-des-Près in the centre of quarter of boutiques, Cafe de Flore is breathing the Bohemianism and history. The interior in style of the twentieth years, huge mirrors, leather armchairs, smell of coffee and croissant. However, Cafe de Flore is not famous for its interior and style but for those people who visited and continues to visit it.
From the end of 60-ies and up to now Cafe de Flore is a place of attraction for film bohemia, musicians and fashionable designers. Here just some names: Jane Fonda, Roman Polanski, Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Brigitte Bardot, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Morrison, Cher, Tim Burton, Harvey Keitel, Givenchy, Sonia Rykiel, Yves Saint-Laurent.
A little earlier, before film industry development, Cafe de Flore was popular with artists, writers, poets and philosophers. Those days, starting with 20th years, the history of world art was created in cafe. Every day, as if to work, poet Jacques Prévert came. He used to collect menus from tables, pieces of paper (happened, toilet too), wrote on them, sometimes forgot. After his leaving the owner of cafe Bubal accurately collected them and handed over to Prévert next day. Guillaume Apollinaire the great poet and the expert on painting, thanks to his articles written here after long conversations with artists, has for ever changed a sight of the world on cubism and surrealism.
Milan Kundera, Paco Rabanne, Karl Lagerfeld, Roland Barthes, Françoise Sagan, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre – all these glorified names relate to Cafe de Flore. At will of destiny in the early thirties the cafe was a favorite place of fascists, but during German occupation – a place of meetings of the French communists. After war it was often visited by Lev Trotsky, Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus.
Today the cafe is on peak of its popularity and simple mention that Johnny Depp and Sharon Stone happen to be here is enough for attraction of a considerable quantity of tourists. They write novels about cafe, it is mentioned at cinema, they compose verses about it and it can be recognized on pictures painted in Paris. “Lovers of Cafe de Flore” – is the name of a world-known novel about mutual relations of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
This place associates with French and a Bohemianism so strongly that this impression finds the reflection even in music. Modern music of Cafe de Flore is original musical sub-style or mini-style of music either old, or stylized so to absorb the spirit and to pass charm of the French song of bygone days. Such a mix of Cool Jazz and French chanson.
To make out the prices in Cafe de Flore, check up an official web site. Visiting Cafe de Flore remember that Parisian cafe is not a place in which it is possible to eat tasty during the lunchtime, for these purposes try to choose a restaurant. In Cafe de Flore it is necessary to enjoy the atmosphere behind a coffee or French wine cup slowly. By the way, Cafe de Flore is one of rare places in Paris where Dom Pérignon is possible to get in a glass.
Choose an evening if you love noisy parties and music. Well and if noise and crowd is not your cup of tee – the best time, free from tourists, is a morning week-day. The cafe is open at 7:30 am and if you rent apartment close Cafe de Flore for the period of visiting of Paris you can enjoy morning coffee, absorbing the bohemian romanticism, though every day.
172, boulevard Saint-Germain
75006 Paris
Tel. 01 45 48 55 26
For the domestic music fan a word “chanson” is for a long time a conception; however this musical genre is not always understood correctly. The present chanson has appeared not in Russia in “perestroika” times but thanks to legendary musicians from France. And speaking about the French or Parisian chanson, it is necessary to tell about such legendary person in the music world, as Charles Aznavour.