Iconic Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities
- May 28
- 6 min read
Iconic Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities:
Where Paris's Cultural Icons Have Always Eaten — And Why These Tables Still Matter
There is a table at Brasserie Lipp, on the ground floor, against the wall — the kind of table you have to be known to get. François Mitterrand had his table there for decades. Before him, so did André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, and a long procession of writers, politicians, and intellectuals who understood that in Paris, where you eat is as much a statement as what you eat.
This is what separates Paris's great historic restaurants from the merely famous. They are not just places where celebrities happen to have been photographed. They are rooms where French cultural life has been conducted — where decisions were made, arguments were had, love affairs began and ended, and the particular drama of Parisian intellectual and artistic life played out, table by table, for more than a century.
When I take clients to these addresses, I'm not offering a celebrity-spotting exercise. I'm offering context. These rooms have witnessed so much of what makes France France. Sitting in them, if you know what you're looking at, is a different experience entirely.
Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities: Le Fouquet's — The Champs-Élysées Institution
99 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris
Fouquet's opened in 1899 as a coachman's bar — a humble address for the drivers waiting while their employers attended the theater. Within a decade, the establishment had transformed itself into one of the most fashionable addresses on the Champs-Élysées, and it has never looked back.
Since 1979, the César Awards — France's equivalent of the Oscars — have held their official dinner here. Actors, directors, and producers fill these rooms every February, and the tables have welcomed everyone from Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin to more contemporary figures of French and international cinema.
The building has been classified as a historic monument since 1988, which means its famous red awnings and distinctive interior cannot be altered. The menu, redesigned in collaboration with Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire, offers a contemporary take on French classics that is considerably better than the address's tourist reputation might suggest.
What I'd recommend: come for lunch on a weekday, when the room is full of Parisians rather than tourists, and order the terrace table if the weather allows. The people-watching is extraordinary.
Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities: Café de Flore — Where the 20th Century Was Written
172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris
Café de Flore opened in the 1880s, but its mythology belongs to the 20th century. During the German occupation of Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir worked here every morning — Sartre reportedly writing entire books at his corner table, choosing the café over his apartment because it was better heated. Albert Camus, Boris Vian, and a generation of existentialist writers made this room their headquarters.
The café's proximity to the publishing houses of Saint-Germain-des-Prés meant that literary Paris passed through these tables constantly. Manuscripts were read here. Editors made their decisions here. Movements were born here.
Today, the clientele is a mixture of tourists who come for the mythology and Saint-Germain regulars who simply like the coffee and the terrace. The hot chocolate — served in a small pot with a separate pitcher of steamed milk — is one of the best things you can order in Paris on a cold morning.
What I'd tell you: come early, before 9am, when the room is quieter and the light through the windows is beautiful. Order the tartine and the chocolat chaud. Look around. Try to imagine this room in 1943.
Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities: Les Deux Magots — The Other Side of the Boulevard
6 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 75006 Paris
Directly across the boulevard from Café de Flore sits its eternal rival. Les Deux Magots was Hemingway's café — he mentions it in A Moveable Feast — and the preferred address of James Baldwin, who spent significant years in Paris and wrote parts of Giovanni's Room in this neighborhood. Picasso had his table here. André Breton and the Surrealists gathered here in the 1920s.
The two cafés have been in gentle competition for more than a century, each claiming the more distinguished clientele and the better terrace. The truth is that both are magnificent, and the choice between them is largely a matter of which side of the boulevard you prefer.
Les Deux Magots awards its own literary prize each year — the Prix des Deux Magots — specifically created as an alternative to the more establishment Académie française. It has been awarded since 1933, making it one of the oldest literary prizes in France.
Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities: L'Avenue — Where Fashion Week Comes to Eat
41 Avenue Montaigne, 75008 Paris
L'Avenue sits at the corner of Avenue Montaigne and Rue François Ier, in the heart of the Golden Triangle — the few blocks of the 8th arrondissement that contain the flagship stores of Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, and most of French luxury fashion.
The restaurant is operated by the Hotel Costes group, and it has been the preferred lunch address of the fashion industry for decades. During Fashion Week, every table in the room is occupied by someone whose name you might recognize from the front rows of the major shows. The terrace is where deals are made, collections are discussed, and the business of French fashion is conducted over steak tartare and a glass of Burgundy.
Outside of Fashion Week, L'Avenue attracts a glamorous mix of business people, creative industry figures, and the occasional American celebrity who has been told by their hotel concierge that this is where Paris goes to be seen. They're not wrong.
The food is reliably good French brasserie cuisine — nothing that will surprise you, but executed with the kind of consistency that keeps a room this difficult to get into full every day for thirty years.
Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities: Brasserie Lipp — The Political Table
151 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris
Lipp opened in 1880, founded by a family from Alsace who brought with them the tradition of the Alsatian brasserie: choucroute, cervelas, great drafts of beer, and a particular kind of forthright hospitality that has nothing to do with the studied elegance of Parisian fine dining.
What made Lipp different was its clientele. The brasserie became the preferred address of the French political class — ministers, deputies, party leaders, and the journalists who covered them. Every significant development in French political life since the Third Republic has been discussed somewhere in these rooms.
The seating at Lipp is still hierarchical in a way that feels almost medieval. The best tables — ground floor, visible from the entrance — go to regulars and the famous. The upstairs room is for first-timers and tourists. The waiters have been known to relocate diners without explanation. It is one of the last restaurants in Paris where this kind of social architecture is maintained without irony.
Order the choucroute garnie. It is the honest reason this restaurant exists.
Paris Restaurants Loved by Celebrities: Le Relais Plaza — Fashion's Private Dining Room
25 Avenue Montaigne, 75008 Paris
Inside the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, Le Relais Plaza has a different kind of fame from L'Avenue across the street. This is where the fashion industry goes when it wants to be private rather than seen.
Yves Saint Laurent had his regular table here for decades. Christian Dior famously sent his models here to eat between fittings — so they could be seen by the other diners wearing his latest designs. The restaurant became, in a sense, an extension of the runway: a place where fashion was displayed and discussed and absorbed into the daily life of Paris.
The Art Deco interior, designed in 1936 and carefully preserved, is one of the most beautiful dining rooms in the city. The menu focuses on classic French cuisine with elegant seasonal variations. The "wall of fame" near the restrooms — photographs of the legendary figures who have dined here — is worth a slow look on your way back to the table.
How to Experience These Rooms the Right Way
A table at any of these addresses can be booked independently, and I'd encourage you to do so. But there is a difference between sitting in a historic room and understanding what you're sitting in.
The difference is context. Knowing that the corner table at Café de Flore was Sartre's, that Lipp's upstairs was the consolation prize for the unfamous, that L'Avenue's terrace is where the business of fashion gets done — this changes what you see and hear and feel in these rooms.
