Life is beginning to return to the streets of Paris, en fin.
It’s safe to say that the Covid crisis cast an eerie pall over many a major metropolis over the past year, turning tourist targets and pedestrian-heavy piazzas, from Times Square to Piccadilly Circus, into veritable ghost towns unlike anything ever seen before in this lifetime. One of the most disturbing sights, and a blow to francophiles everywhere, were the images of empty and abandoned cafés that once populated Parisian neighborhoods and have come to define the French lifestyle—at least through the American lens. After a dismal year of tight lockdowns, city-wide curfews, and distance limiting—at the height of the shutdown, residents weren’t allowed to travel beyond one kilometer of their homes without permission—the promise of a return to (semi) normal Parisian life is finally becoming a reality. Cafes are slowly beginning to reopen, and to celebrate, this month’s book club is dedicated to the history, art, and inspiration of Parisian Café Culture.
Scroll down to browse this month’s selections and start dreaming of people-watching over a warm croissant and a cafe au lait.
A Table in Paris (NEW RELEASE)
By John Donohue
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”Paris is a city like no other, beloved by travelers the world over for its incomparable architecture, atmosphere, arts, and, of course, food. The restaurants of Paris are rich with history, culture, and flavor. Whether you're a frequent visitor to the City of Light with memories of your favorite meals or an armchair traveler dreaming of the cuisine you could discover there, A Table in Paris will take you on a delicious visual journey through the arrondissements that you'll never forget. In his signature loose and evocative style, artist John Donohue has rendered an incredible sampling of the iconic institutions, hidden gems, and everything in between that make the Paris dining scene one of a kind.”
Hemingway’s Paris
By Robert Wheeler
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”In gorgeous black-and-white images, Hemingway’s Paris depicts a story of remarkable passion—for a city, a woman, and a time. No other city in any of his travels was as significant, professionally or emotionally, as Paris. And it remains there, all of the complexity, beauty, and intrigue that Hemingway describes in the pages of so much of his work. It is all still there for the reader and traveler to experience—the history, the streets, and the city.”
The Historic Restaurants of Paris
By Ellen Williams
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”The vanished world of nineteenth-century Paris still awaits behind the doors of select restaurants and gourmet shops that have delighted customers for more than a hundred years. Crossing these thresholds, the discriminating diner and shopper can step into a gilded Belle Epoque setting favored by Manet and Degas, a vintage confectioner that supplied bonbons to Monet, or a shaded café terrace frequented by Zola. From tiny pâtisseries, cozy bistros, and rustic wine bars barely known outside the quarter to bustling brasseries, elegant tea salons, and world-famous cafés, The Historic Restaurants of Paris is an indispensible guide to classic cuisine served in settings of startling beauty. Charming anecdotes relating to a restaurant’s history and celebrated former patrons, among them Proust, Balzac, George Sand, and the Impressionists.”
Cafe French
By L. John Harris
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”The iconic, strolling Paris flâneur of the 19th century often expressed his ironic observations of the spectacular city he loved in paint, prose and poetry. Celebrated artist-flâneurs like Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and their 20th-century successors—from André Breton’s surrealists to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialists—have served up brilliant, if sometimes dark, images of the City of Light. Now, following in their august footsteps, Berkeley writer and artist L. John Harris channels the historic flâneur with his witty café French “lessons” and whimsical illustrations taken from his Paris café journals. While Café French proposes to guide fellow Francophiles on a journey into the cultural and linguistic codes and canons of Paris café culture, the author—with a dash of Dada—chronicles his own discoveries: the cafés he inhabits, the language he struggles to learn, the food he eats and the dreams he pursues in the city he loves.”
Paris Cafe: The Select Crowd
By Noel Riley Fitch
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”Acclaimed author Noël Riley Fitch, abetted by noted artist Rick Tulka, serves the dish on Select, the famous Montparnasse café that for nearly nine decades has been so vital to Paris and its intellectual denizens: from Hemingway, Beauvoir, Picasso, James Baldwin, and George Plimpton to the writers and artists who continue to work quietly there in the back room or heatedly debate every topic imaginable into the night. The artists have their work on the walls; the novelists include the café setting in their fiction. The quiet and drama of the Sélect world illustrates the centrality of cafés — particularly this one — to Parisian social, cultural, and intellectual life. Blending pithy profiles and witty drawings of clientele and staff, the book is organized around a history of the café, its daily and seasonal rhythms, particular colorful patrons, and even its typical café/brasserie food.”
