La Closerie des Lilas
La Closerie des Lilas is a restaurant, brasserie and bar in the Notre-Dame-des-Champs district in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. It is located at the eastern end of Boulevard du Montparnasse.
I lunched there recently, having not been there for over 20 years. The garden decor and interior decoration are really beautiful. I also found the menu creative and innovative, unlike many other traditional brasseries, which suffer from corporatisation. But as with much in France, the attraction is absorbing the historic atmosphere.
This former boulevard café transformed into a gourmet restaurant takes its name from the former Closerie des Lilas ballroom (1847-1940), better known as the Bullier ballroom. Along with Le Dôme, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole, all located on Boulevard du Montparnasse, La Closerie des Lilas is one of the artists’ and intellectuals’ cafés (nicknamed “the Montparnos”) which, especially in the first half of the 20th century, brought life to Montparnasse.
In the early 1860s, the café at La Closerie des Lilas was the meeting place of the “intransigeants”, a group of painters emerging from Charles Gleyre ‘s studio at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and including Bazille, Renoir, Monet and Sisley, soon joined by Pissarro, who would become the Impressionists. Also meeting there were Émile Zola, Paul Cézanne, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt.
La Closerie, whose nightlife became legendary, was one of the high places of the American intelligentsia – Ernest Hemingway , Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller. It was on the terrace of La Closerie that Fitzgerald had Hemingway read the manuscript of The Great Gatsby .
Since 1980, a large canvas by the visual artist Jean-Claude Meynard, entitled Closing Time, has overlooked the bar of La Closerie des Lilas. It depicts night owls leaning on a bar — the bar of La Closerie — including the Parisian gallery owner Jean-Pierre Lavignes.
Since 1997, La Closerie des Lilas has belonged to the Siljegovic family, also owners of the Café de Flore .
La Closerie des Lilas has a rich and important history linked to literature. This link still continues today through the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas 6. Since 2007, this literary prize has crowned a French-language novelist whose work is published in the January 7 back-to-school period. Furthermore, the jury for the Prix du livre incorrect meets at the beginning of each year at La Closerie des Lilas.