Bar · Montparnasse · 14e arrondissement

The Dingo Bar

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowL'Auberge de Venise

The Dingo closed in the 1930s, but the room is still a working restaurant: L'Auberge de Venise Montparnasse, which keeps "Dingo American Bar" in its trading name and marks the Hemingway connection with a plaque. You can eat in the room where he met Fitzgerald.

The American bar where Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald in late April 1925 — two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.

Address: 10 Rue Delambre, 75014 Paris
Years: 1923–c. 1930s

Artistic reconstruction The Dingo Bar's dark wooden façade at dusk, lamps lit behind the curtained windows

The room where Fitzgerald introduced himself, as it might have glowed in 1925.

Artistic reconstruction

The place, briefly

The Dingo opened in 1923 on a side street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse and became the Anglo-American annex of the quarter almost immediately — one of the few bars that stayed open all night and served drinks the way New York did. Its true institution was the barman: Jimmie Charters, a Liverpool ex-boxer whom the expatriates trusted with their credit, their secrets, and their deliveries home, and whose own memoir of the era Hemingway later introduced.

The bar's place in literary history was fixed in one encounter. In late April 1925, two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published, Scott Fitzgerald walked in, introduced himself to Hemingway, and began praising his work with an intensity that embarrassed him. The chapter Hemingway made of it in A Moveable Feast — the endless questions, the champagne, Fitzgerald's face tightening as the drink took hold — is the memoir's set-piece portrait, affection and cruelty in exactly the proportions he reserved for the people who mattered most.

The Dingo's other regulars did their part for literature too: Duff Twysden and Pat Guthrie, the originals of Brett Ashley and Mike Campbell, ran their tabs here before Hemingway ran their likenesses into The Sun Also Rises. The bar itself didn't outlive the era it hosted — it closed in the thirties, and the room at 10 rue Delambre has long since passed to an Italian restaurant. By local tradition, the zinc counter is the original.

In their words

‘I’m coming over some night. The Dingo. That’s the great place, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes. That, or this new dive, The Select.’

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 5

The same evening about seven o’clock I stopped in at the Select to see Michael and Brett. They were not there, and I went over to the Dingo. They were inside sitting at the bar.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), Chapter 9

Key facts

Open: 1923 – c. 1930s
What it was: American bar, open late — the expatriates' annex
The barman: Jimmie Charters, the most trusted man in Montparnasse
Neighborhood: Montparnasse, off the Boulevard on the rue Delambre
Notable regulars: Fitzgerald, Duff Twysden, Pat Guthrie — the Sun Also Rises crowd
Today: Closed — an Italian restaurant keeps the room, and reputedly the bar

Documentary photographs

Archival and present-day photographs, reproduced with rights verified.

Brass commemorative plaque for Ernest Hemingway at 10 rue Delambre, marking the former Dingo American Bar — The brass plaque at 10 rue Delambre, where the Dingo American Bar and Restaurant stood — the address is now the Auberge de Venise. The plaque's own account is affectionate rather than exact: it misspells Fitzgerald and credits Hemingway with inventing the Long Island Iced Tea, a drink of the 1970s.2018 · Celette, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Dingo American Bar on the rue Delambre, curtained windows glowing under the awning — The Dingo on the rue Delambre — open all night, American style.Editorial illustration

The Dingo Bar's dark wooden façade at dusk, lamps lit behind the curtained windows — The room where Fitzgerald introduced himself, as it might have glowed in 1925.Artistic reconstruction

Timeline

1923
Opens on the rue Delambre; Jimmie Charters takes the bar.
1924–25
Becomes the court of the Anglo-American crowd, tabs and all.
1925
Late April: Fitzgerald introduces himself to Hemingway — the 'Scott Fitzgerald' chapter begins here.
1926
Hemingway puts the bar's regulars in print in The Sun Also Rises, thinly veiled.
1930s
The Dingo closes as the quarter's American era winds down.
Today
The room survives as a restaurant; the era survives in the chapter.

On the map

Related books

Recalled in the memoir

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · 1964

Where Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time in April 1925 — two weeks after Gatsby was published. The friendship — and its comedy — starts here.

Writers who knew this place

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American · The Jazz Age's laureate — famous at twenty-three, author of Gatsby at twenty-eight, and owner of the longest posthumous comeback in American letters.

Frequented by · 1925

Fitzgerald's Montparnasse haunt in the spring of 1925 — where he introduced himself to Hemingway weeks after Gatsby published, the scene that opens A Moveable Feast's Fitzgerald chapters.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964); Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969)

Ernest Hemingway

American · Author of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast; his pared-down style, developed in 1920s Paris, became the most imitated in American prose.

The era's most famous introduction: Fitzgerald, two weeks after Gatsby published, walks up to Hemingway at the Dingo bar — the friendship begins.

Literary generation · c. 1921–1929

The Lost Generation gathered here

The writers remade by war and expatriate Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound, and the rooms, presses, and bookshops that turned their encounters into literature.

Enter the movement

Within walking distance

The same imagined Black Manikin shopfront in colour, cream awnings and green tilework against a pale stone Haussmann façade

Bookshop · Montparnasse

Black Manikin Press (4 Rue Delambre)

Edward Titus's Montparnasse bookshop and small press, where D. H. Lawrence settled terms on 5 April 1929 for the cheap Paris edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover that finally undercut the pirates.

Visit the place

Café · Montparnasse

Le Dôme

The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.

Visit the place

Restaurant · Montparnasse

La Coupole

The giant brasserie of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, opened in December 1927 with a party the quarter never forgot — Blaise Cendrars was in the opening-night crowd.

Visit the place

Café · Montparnasse

La Rotonde

The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.

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.