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.
La Coupole opened on 20 December 1927 at 102 boulevard du Montparnasse, a few doors down from the Dôme, whose former managers Ernest Fraux and René Lafon built it. It was conceived at a scale Montparnasse had not seen: a vast Art Deco dining hall on the site of a former coal yard, its rows of pillars painted by artists of the quarter, Fernand Léger among them.
The opening party became legend on its own — the crowd overwhelmed the room and the champagne reportedly ran out before the night did. Blaise Cendrars attended the opening celebration, and the room stayed in his repertoire: in his memoir L'Homme foudroyé he writes of passing the night at La Coupole and leaving at dawn.
La Coupole arrived just as the golden decade of Montparnasse was ending, and it outlived the era it was built to serve. The interior was listed as a historic monument in 1988, and the brasserie still operates at full scale on the original site — the last of the great Vavin rooms where the size of the twenties is still measurable in floor space.
Opens on 20 December with an enormous party; Blaise Cendrars is among the opening-night guests.
The Art Deco interior is listed as a historic monument.
Frequented by · 1927
Cendrars was in the crowd at La Coupole's opening celebration on 20 December 1927, and in L'Homme foudroyé he writes of passing the night at La Coupole before leaving at dawn — his own record of time spent in the room, beyond the opening itself.
Léger was among the artists of the quarter — 33 by the standard count — who painted the pillars of the new brasserie for its December 1927 opening.
The all-night café of the Vavin crossroads and the closest thing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has to a home address — the crowd always ends up at the Select.
Visit the place
The American bar where Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald in late April 1925 — two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.
Visit the place
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
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 placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
