Le Procope, Paris

Le Procope is a historic restaurant whose story reaches back to 1686. Its founder, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, was Sicilian and learned the coffee trade while serving Pascal, an Armenian café owner. He later opened his own richly decorated establishment near the Comédie-Française, and its theatrical clientele helped make the house a gathering place for writers and artists.

In the eighteenth century, Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert were regular visitors. During the Revolution, Danton, Marat and the Cordeliers club used the café for political meetings, turning it into a lively revolutionary headquarters. As local tradition has it, the Encyclopédie took shape through conversations here, while a plaque credits Benjamin Franklin with working at these tables on the alliance between France and the United States in 1778; parts of these stories are treated as legend.

The café closed in 1890, spent decades as a Chartier-style bouillon, and reopened under its historic name in 1957 as a restaurant. Its back entrance opens onto the Cour du Commerce-Saint-André, linking this dining room with a passage steeped in literary and revolutionary memory.