The 5 Coffee Shop You Can’t Miss in Paris
“Coffee shop” means two almost unrelated things in Paris, and the city is one of the few places where both
are worth your morning. There is the historic café — a boulevard institution with mirrors, banquettes and a
century of arguments in it, where the coffee is beside the point — and there is the newer specialty counter,
usually small, usually run by people who care about the roast, that arrived in force over the last fifteen
years and now runs from République down to the Marais. We went through every coffee shop with a Google
Business listing across the central arrondissements — 60 of them, once the obvious mismatches were filtered
out — and weighted each one’s rating against how many people actually left it, because a 4.9 from fourteen
hundred reviews and a 3.9 from fourteen thousand are not making the same claim at all. Five came out clearly
ahead, and between them they cover the whole spread: an all-day brunch counter by the Louvre, a tiny
high-scoring shop on Boulevard Henri IV, a specialty bar on Place de la République, a hidden garden terrace
off the Faubourg Saint-Martin, and the single most famous café in France.
Baguett’s Café, 1st arrondissement
Start with the one that wins on rating and volume together: Baguett’s Café,
4.7★ from 5,697 Google reviews, which is a very hard combination to hold this close to the Louvre. It
sits on Rue de Richelieu, a street behind the Palais-Royal quiet enough that stepping into it from Rue de
Rivoli feels like leaving the tourist current rather than joining it. The kitchen is French brunch done
properly and entirely fait maison — pain perdu, pancakes, œufs bénédicte, avocado toast, all-butter
viennoiseries — served alongside café de spécialité and fresh-pressed juice, and the brunch menu is
composable rather than fixed, so you build the plate rather than pick a set. The other thing worth knowing:
brunch runs toute la journée, all day, which in a city where the kitchen usually shuts at 2:30 PM is
the actual selling point. Open 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM on weekdays, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM at weekends.
LIV Coffee Shop, 4th arrondissement
The highest-rated name on this list, and by some distance: LIV Coffee Shop holds
4.9★ across 1,390 reviews, a score almost nothing in central Paris sustains past a few hundred. It has no
website, no press push and nothing to say for itself online — what it has is 44 Boulevard Henri IV, the stretch
running from Bastille down towards the Seine and the Île Saint-Louis, and Google’s cheapest price band of any
shop here. That combination — lowest prices, highest score, no marketing whatsoever — is about as clean a
signal as this kind of data ever gives you. It also opens earliest and keeps the most consistent week of the
five: 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 7:30 PM on Saturday and Sunday.
République of Coffee, 10th arrondissement
République of Coffee is the one on this list that is a coffee shop and nothing
else — not a brunch room, not a restaurant with a coffee machine — and it has planted itself at 2 Boulevard
Saint-Martin, which is to say directly on Place de la République, one of the busiest interchanges in the city.
Holding 4.5★ over 2,607 reviews in a spot where most of the footfall is people passing through rather than
staying is a genuinely difficult trick; high-traffic addresses usually drag a rating down. It runs no website
of its own beyond an Instagram account, so there is no founder story to relay here — what the data says is a
specialty counter, moderate prices, open 8:30 AM to 7:00 PM on weekdays and from 9:00 AM at weekends, which
makes it the obvious first or last stop on anything that starts or ends at the République métro.
Café A, 10th arrondissement
The strangest address of the five, and the best one on a warm afternoon. Café A
is not on the street at all — it operates inside the Maison de l’architecture Île-de-France at 148 Rue du
Faubourg Saint-Martin, and what you come for is the garden: in its own words, une terrasse cachée, un havre
de paix au cœur de Paris, a large planted courtyard you would never guess at from the pavement. It is
explicitly a two-shift venue — “la journée, c’est le calme, la lumière et le temps pour soi. Le soir, le lieu
s’allume, la musique monte” — so the same place is a quiet daytime coffee garden and a bar with a sound system
after dark, and the menu spans vegetable plates, meat, fish and shellfish rather than café snacks. That
double life explains its 4.2★ from 5,260 reviews, the widest spread of opinion here: people who arrived
for calm and found a party, and vice versa. Google lists it 10:00 AM to 2:00 AM Tuesday through Friday, from
11:00 AM on Saturday, and 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Monday and 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Sunday — but its own site
puts last kitchen orders at 9:30 PM, so come for food well before that. Ten minutes’ walk from République, and
close to the Canal Saint-Martin.
Café de Flore, 6th arrondissement
And then the outlier, which is here on weight rather than score. Café de Flore
carries 14,411 Google reviews — nearly three times the next name on this list — at 3.9★, and both halves
of that are the story. It opened on Boulevard Saint-Germain in 1887, named after a sculpture of the small
divinity across the street, and then spent a century being the room things happened in: Apollinaire introduced
Philippe Soupault to André Breton here in 1917, the surrealists took it over through the 1920s, and during the
occupation it became Sartre and Beauvoir’s office in all but name — “the paths of Le Flore have been for me the
paths of freedom for four years,” as Sartre put it. The Belle Époque interior is still there, mirrors,
banquettes and all, and since 1994 the house has run the Prix de Flore, a literary prize for “an audacious young
author with promising talent” that pays its winner 6,100 euros and a glass of Pouilly-Fumé “to consume without
moderation.” Order the Chocolat spécial Flore at 10€ and understand what you are paying for: not the best coffee
in this article, but the only address in it with a hundred and forty years of argument in the walls. Open every
day, 7:30 AM to 1:30 AM — by far the longest hours of the five.
All five, on the map
The interactive map has all 60 qualifying coffee shops we found across central
Paris, these five marked and numbered, and a button that hands the walking-and-métro route between them straight
to Google Maps on your phone.
Getting the most out of a coffee crawl in Paris
Four of these five sit in a rough arc from Place de la République down through the Marais to the Louvre, which
is genuinely walkable in an afternoon; Café de Flore is across the river in Saint-Germain and wants a métro leg
of its own. If you’re visiting rather than living here, a local eSIM from Airalo
means Google Maps and the RATP app work from the moment you land instead of after you’ve found café Wi-Fi, and a
booked transfer from Welcome Pickups takes the guesswork out of CDG or
Orly at the start. Paying in euros without a foreign transaction fee on every coffee, pastry and métro ticket
adds up faster than people expect across a week — a Wise card is the simplest
fix, and a Revolut account does the same job if you’d rather keep it inside an
app you already use. Baguett’s Café is a five-minute walk from the Louvre and Café de Flore is around the corner
from the Musée d’Orsay, so if the crawl is doubling as a museum day, Tiqets
covers the skip-the-line tickets and keeps the queueing out of it. And if the plan is to actually order in French
rather than default to English at the counter, a handful of lessons on Preply
before the trip covers more ground than a phrasebook — Paris café ordering is a small, fixed vocabulary, and it
changes how the interaction goes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best coffee shop in Paris?
By rating alone, LIV Coffee Shop on Boulevard Henri IV at 4.9★ from 1,390 reviews. By rating weighted
against review volume — which is the fairer test — Baguett’s Café near the Louvre, at 4.7★ from 5,697.
The two answer different questions: LIV for a cheap, excellent, unadvertised neighbourhood counter, Baguett’s for
an all-day brunch you can build a morning around.
Why is Café de Flore only rated 3.9 stars if it’s so famous?
Because fame and satisfaction are different measurements. Café de Flore carries 14,411 reviews, more than
three times any other shop here, and a large share of them are visitors paying institution prices — 10€ for the
house hot chocolate — for a room whose real value is historical. It is on this list because of what it is, not
because the data says it’s the best cup in the city.
Which Paris arrondissement has the most coffee shops?
The 10th and the streets around Place de la République carry the densest cluster of the newer specialty
places — two of the five here (République of Coffee and Café A) sit in the 10th within a ten-minute walk of each
other, with the 1st, 4th and 6th contributing one each.
Can I get filter or specialty coffee in Paris, or is it all espresso?
Both, but not in the same places. The specialty end of this list — République of Coffee, Baguett’s Café,
which advertises café de spécialité explicitly — is where the newer roasting and brewing culture sits.
A historic boulevard café like Café de Flore is a traditional French café first, and its coffee is served on that
tradition’s terms.
Which of these opens earliest, and which stays open latest?
Café de Flore, at 7:30 AM every day and running to 1:30 AM. LIV Coffee Shop opens at 8:00 AM daily and is the
earliest of the specialty shops; Café A runs to 2:00 AM Tuesday through Saturday but stops serving food at
9:30 PM. Check the individual listing on the map before a specific visit, since hours shift seasonally even when
the Google profile hasn’t caught up.
- 1. Baguett’s Café — 33 Rue de Richelieu, 75001 Paris
- 2. LIV Coffee Shop — 44 Bd Henri IV, 75004 Paris
- 3. République of Coffee — 2 Bd Saint-Martin, 75010 Paris
- 4. Café A — 148 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, 75010 Paris
- 5. Café de Flore — 172 Bd Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris