Les Deux Magots
Two lacquered Chinese figurines — magots, symbols of wisdom — have watched over this corner of Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés since the 1880s, long enough to have seen Verlaine nurse an absinthe and Simone de Beauvoir fill a notebook. The red banquettes, mahogany tables and wall-length mirrors haven't changed much either, which is partly the point.
The terrace tables face the west façade of the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés directly across the square. Sit there long enough and the street performs for you: tourists, philosophers-in-training, delivery bikes, pigeons on the abbey's stone.
💛 What travellers fall for
Regulars tend to skip the lunch crush and arrive before 9 a.m. for coffee and a croissant when the room is quiet enough to hear the chandeliers. The signature hot chocolate is worth ordering once — properly thick, made with care in a city where that's rarer than it should be. Reserve ahead for weekend brunch.
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Book directly at the providerHow Les Deux Magots came to be
The name predates the café by decades. In 1812 a silk and novelty shop called Les Deux Magots — borrowed from an 18th-century play about two Chinese merchants — opened at 23 rue de Buci. The business moved to Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1873 and reinvented itself as a café and liqueur bar in 1884, the two Mandarin figurines coming with it and staying ever since.
In 1914, with the business near bankruptcy, Auguste Boulay bought it for 400,000 francs. His family — now the Mathivats — have owned it for four generations. The symbolist poets came first: Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud. Then the surrealists — Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon. Then Sartre and de Beauvoir made it their daily office; Hemingway wrote at a first-floor table; Picasso met Dora Maar here. In 1933 the café founded the Prix des Deux Magots, a literary prize awarded annually to a French novel — Raymond Queneau won the first.
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.