Café Louvre, Prague

Café Louvre is a café set within the former Louvre commercial and office building on Národní třída in New Town. Its name honours Paris’s Louvre palace and museum, a fitting choice for rooms that became a stage for Prague’s intellectual life. It opened in nineteen oh two, under Austria-Hungary.

Karel Čapek, Franz Kafka, and Albert Einstein during his Prague professorship were among the guests; actor Eduard Vojan kept a regular table here. A German philosophical circle led by Berta Fantová met here from nineteen oh two, and Kafka and Max Brod later had a room of their own. After the communist takeover in nineteen forty-eight, the café shut and its furnishings were lost or destroyed. It returned after nineteen ninety-two following a full renovation, and billiards remain part of the café.