Restaurant · Place de l'Alma · 8e arrondissement

Chez Francis

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowChez Francis

Chez Francis remains an operating brasserie on the Place de l'Alma. Customers can eat inside or on the terrace; check the official site for current hours and reservations.

The brasserie on the Place de l'Alma that Cendrars scholarship names as one of the writer's regular stops — a Right Bank address in a café life mapped mostly through Montparnasse.

Address: 7 Pl. de l'Alma, 75008 Paris

Illustration Chez Francis today — black awning, glassed-in terrace and hedge planters below the stone facade on the Place de l'Alma

The same corner today — black awning, glass, and the Alma traffic beyond.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Chez Francis sits on the Place de l'Alma in the 8th arrondissement, at the point where the avenue Montaigne and the avenue George V meet the Seine. From its terrace the view runs across the Alma bridge to the Eiffel Tower. It is a classic Right Bank brasserie: a corner room, a zinc, a terrace facing the square.

Its place in this atlas comes from Blaise Cendrars. Claude Leroy's study La main de Cendrars catches him here in 1923, drinking champagne on the place de l'Alma, and Cendrars studies treat the brasserie as one of his characteristic stopping places. That makes it an unusual entry in his map of the city: most of the cafés attached to his name — the Rotonde, the Closerie des Lilas, the Dôme — cluster around the carrefour Vavin, while Chez Francis put him among the couture houses and embassies of the 8th.

The brasserie still operates on the square under the same name, one of the few tables in Cendrars's Paris where you can still order a drink at the address he knew.

Key facts

Address: 7 place de l'Alma, at the foot of the Pont de l'Alma
What it is: Brasserie — named in Cendrars scholarship as one of his regular stops
Neighborhood: Place de l'Alma, 8th arrondissement

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Chez Francis brasserie terrace on the Place de l'Alma, its awning and menu board beneath a Haussmann facade — The terrace on the Place de l'Alma, under its Haussmann corner building.Editorial illustration

Chez Francis today — black awning, glassed-in terrace and hedge planters below the stone facade on the Place de l'Alma — The same corner today — black awning, glass, and the Alma traffic beyond.Editorial illustration

Timeline

On the map

Writers who knew this place

Blaise Cendrars

Swiss-born; naturalized French in 1916 · The one-armed adventurer-poet of the Paris avant-garde — La Prose du Transsibérien, Moravagine, the memoir tetralogy — and the living writer Henry Miller ranked above all others.

Frequented by

Claude Leroy's study La main de Cendrars catches him at Francis on the place de l'Alma in 1923, drinking champagne with a friend, and Cendrars studies treat the brasserie as one of his characteristic stops.

— Claude Leroy, La main de Cendrars, ch. IV, La débâcle; Olivier Renault, Le Paris de Cendrars

Within walking distance

The theater's pale stone-and-concrete front in daylight, gilded reliefs above the marquee and trees along the avenue

Theatre · Champs-Élysées

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

The concrete temple of the avant-garde — where The Rite of Spring caused a riot in 1913, and the Ballet Mécanique caused another in 1926, with Ezra Pound shouting over the pianolas.

Visit the place

The Square de Robiac in soft daylight, pale stone and cobbles curving past the doorway of No. 2

Apartment · Champ de Mars (Gros-Caillou)

2 Square de Robiac

James Joyce's longest Paris address — the family flat in a quiet cul-de-sac off the rue de Grenelle, with the cool quiet study where Work in Progress cost twelve hundred hours a chapter.

Visit the place

Landmark · Champ de Mars

Eiffel Tower

The tower at the era's edge of vision — and in the twenties and thirties, a champagne advertisement three hundred meters tall, fizzing in lights over everyone's night walks.

Visit the place

The same Haussmann-era façade in colour, in warm stone with black iron balconies

Apartment · Chaillot

44 rue de Villejust

The ground-floor apartment Colette rented on her own after leaving Willy, remembered as a place of new independence. The building no longer exists.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.