Le Procope, Paris — claims 1686

The claim

The oldest café in Paris, opened in 1686 by a Sicilian, Procopio Cutò, who fitted out a bath house with mirrors, chandeliers and marble tables and served coffee in porcelain. Voltaire, Diderot, Franklin and Danton all drank here, and the Comédie-Française across the street gave the road its name. A restaurant today, with a coffee room open in the afternoons without a booking, in rooms inscribed as a historic monument.

What the records show

Le Procope dates itself to 1686, and so does most of what is written about it. Procopio Cutò, a Sicilian who had taken over an Armenian's lemonade stall on the rue de Tournon, moved his business that year into a former bath house on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Prés, fitted it with mirrors, chandeliers and marble tables, and sold coffee in porcelain cups — a drink that had been served in taverns until then. The street is named for the Comédie-Française, which opened opposite in 1689 and made the café's fortune. That is drink-led trade at the claimed date on these premises, which is what the grade A means here; no archive document has been read for it, and the year rests on published histories of the Parisian café rather than on a deed. The French press was not of one mind about it. The album of cuttings about the café that the Bibliothèque nationale de France keeps in its Arts du spectacle department, dated 1910 to 1959, carries pages that say 1686 and rather more that say 1689, one of them tying the opening to the year the Comédie-Française opened its doors opposite and another scolding a fellow writer for not knowing that the Procope was founded in 1689. The same cuttings confirm the bath house — a maison de bains on the spot in the seventeenth century, where attendants brought customers their warm bathing gowns and pressed a collation on them — and add what happened after the closure: shut and sold at auction in 1872, the café became the property of the baroness Thénard, who let it in 1893 to a cabaret-keeper named Théo Bellefonds. What the plaque on the wall claims beyond that does not stand. It says the oldest continuously working café in the world, and the original closed in 1872: the rooms were leased for a private artists' club, became a restaurant, and in the 1920s a café called Au Grand Soleil, before somebody saw what the old name was worth. English Wikipedia dates the house trading today to 1957, and it was refitted in an eighteenth-century manner in 1988 and 1989. The French register of historic monuments inscribed the premises in part on 20 January 1962, as an eighteenth-century house — younger than the café it holds. Whether you can drink here without eating is settled by the house: it says its coffee room is open from three until six, Monday to Friday, without a reservation, and it publishes a drinks list priced by the glass, from a pastis to a kir royal, beside the wine list.

Dated evidence for Le Procope, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1686	Claimed founding	The pub
1686	First record of a drinking house here	Ministère de la Culture

What to look for inside

Where the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert is said to have been conceived
The Phrygian cap of the Revolution was first shown here
Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were all customers

Visiting

Le Procope is in Paris, France, at 13 rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, 75006 Paris. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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