The 10 Prettiest Cafés To Visit in Paris in Fall When the Leaves Are Turning

I feel like I say this about every season, but Fall in Paris is just stunning. Where spring has the cherry blossoms, autumn has the changing of color. Those gorgeous burnt oranges, russet reds, and golden yellows bathe the city in a glow you don’t get in other months.

The cafés are full of people sitting with their coffee and croissant, watching the world go by. We all know the people-watching in Paris is some of the best in the world, especially sitting outside one of the many gorgeous cafés.

I don’t do Paris in July if I can help it. My two favorite times are the autumn months of September and October, and then the spring months of March and April. Both have loads to offer, but the cafés of Paris are something I do on every trip, and I’ve developed some favorites over the years.

The 10 Prettiest Cafes to Visit in Paris in Autumn

There are literally hundreds of cafés to choose from in Paris, and as we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, I want a mix of pretty and history. There’s no point in having a stunning-looking café if it doesn’t have a good story to go with it. So these are my top choices that combine the two.

Au Vieux Paris d’Arcole

Au Vieux Paris d’Arcole is one of my absolute favorites, and the owner is a lot of fun too and will come and sit down with you for a good old chinwag. It’s hidden away at 24 Rue Chanoinesse on Île de la Cité, barely 100 yards from Notre Dame. 

In fall, the wisteria that famously drips over the façade turns from green to yellow to bare black wood, and the geraniums in the window boxes get swapped out for something the owners have been experimenting with in recent years, usually russet chrysanthemums that pick up the color of the shutters.

The building dates to 1512, which makes it one of the oldest houses on the island. It was home to the canons of Notre Dame for centuries, then a bakery, then a boarding house, and it has been a restaurant since the 1720s. 

Sitting at one of the little terrace tables in October, with the cathedral bells going and the leaves being blown down Rue Chanoinesse, is one of the reasons people fall in love with Paris in the first place.

Café Saint Honoré

On Rue du Marché Saint-Honoré, just north of the Tuileries, Café Saint Honoré is a working neighborhood café with a curved red-and-cream corner façade, huge windows that catch the low autumn sun, and an interior that hasn’t been redecorated since the 1950s. 

The square it sits on has its own strange history. It was built over the site of the Couvent des Jacobins, the Dominican convent that gave the Jacobin Club its name during the Revolution. 

Robespierre and his allies met a few steps from the café. 

The convent was demolished in 1849 and replaced with the market and the surrounding buildings, which is why the whole square has that mid-19th-century Haussmann look while the streets around it don’t.

La Palette, Rue de Seine

Tucked into the 6th arrondissement between the art galleries of Rue de Seine and the École des Beaux-Arts, La Palette has been feeding art students, dealers, and the occasional slumming painter since 1902. 

The back room is classified as a historic monument for its ceramic panels showing painters at work, installed in the 1930s when the café was already the unofficial canteen of the neighborhood.

Cézanne drank there; Braque and Picasso, although Picasso drank everywhere. More recently, it was Jim Morrison’s local during his final months in Paris in 1971.

Le Procope, Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie

Le Procope claims to be the oldest café in Paris still operating; it opened in 1686 and was founded by a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, who is generally credited with popularizing coffee-drinking in the city. 

Voltaire supposedly drank 40 cups of coffee mixed with chocolate there a day, which sounds like a made-up number but is the number they use. Diderot and d’Alembert wrote parts of the Encyclopédie at its tables. 

Benjamin Franklin drafted bits of what would become the American Constitution while visiting Paris. Robespierre and Danton plotted there in the run-up to the Revolution.

Inside, it’s a warren of red-walled rooms hung with 18th-century portraits and framed letters, and yes, Napoleon’s hat sits in a glass case near the entrance, left behind, the story goes, as security for an unpaid bill in his lieutenant days. Believe as much of that as you like.

It’s more of a restaurant now than a café, but you can absolutely go in around 4 for a coffee and a slice of their millefeuille and sit under the chandeliers.

Café Charlot, Rue de Bretagne

Down in the northern Marais, on the corner of Rue de Bretagne and Rue Charlot, sits a café that looks like it’s been there since 1925 and technically has, though the current incarnation is younger. 

The building housed a boulangerie in the 1930s, and when the Costes brothers took it over in the 2000s, they kept the mosaic floor, zinc bar, mirrors, and enameled advertising panels.

The terrace wraps the corner and catches the morning sun, and Rue de Bretagne is one of Paris’s best food streets, with the Marché des Enfants Rouges (the oldest covered market in Paris, opened in 1615) just up the block.

Go for breakfast on a Saturday in October. Order the œufs Bénédicte and a café crème, and watch the market crowd shuffle past with baguettes under their arms, nibbling the tip as they walk.

Carette, Place du Trocadéro

Carette has 2 locations, and while the Place des Vosges branch is the prettier building, the Trocadéro one is where you go in fall. You sit on the terrace, order a café allongé and a religieuse au café, and the Eiffel Tower is right there, across the Seine, framed by the plane trees of the Jardins du Trocadéro as they slowly turn from green to gold.

The original Carette was founded in 1927 by a pastry chef of the same name and became one of the smart addresses of the 16th arrondissement between the wars, when the neighborhood was building all those cream-colored Art Deco apartment blocks. 

Grab a table on the outside edge of the terrace, ideally around 4 p.m. when the light hits the tower straight-on, and stay until it lights up on the hour. In fall, that’s earlier and earlier as the weeks go on, so by November you can catch the first sparkle while you’re still on your first coffee.

Café Kitsuné, Palais-Royal

The gardens of the Palais-Royal in fall are one of the great Paris walks. The rows of clipped lime trees turn butter yellow, the fountain runs until the frosts, and the arcades on all 4 sides are lined, all 2 minutes from the Louvre. 

Tucked into the Galerie de Montpensier is Café Kitsuné. It’s tiny inside, really just a mirrored counter to order at, but the tables spill out under the arcade, right along the colonnade, where you can sit for as long as you like with a coffee.

Maison Kitsuné started out in 2002 as a French-Japanese record label and fashion house, founded by Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki, and the cafés came later. This was only their second Café Kitsuné anywhere, opening a couple of years after the original in Tokyo.

La Closerie des Lilas, Boulevard du Montparnasse

At the far end of Boulevard du Montparnasse, near the intersection with Boulevard Saint-Michel and the entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, sits a café that opened in 1847 as a coaching inn, became a favorite of Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets in the 1880s, and by the time the Lost Generation showed up, it had been a literary hangout for 3 generations already.

Hemingway wrote most of The Sun Also Rises at a corner table on the terrace, and there’s a little brass plaque with his name on it screwed to the wood, along with plaques for Apollinaire, Verlaine, Cézanne, and about a dozen others. 

Café de Flore, Boulevard Saint-Germain

Everyone tells you to skip Café de Flore because it’s overrun and the coffee costs a fortune. Both things are true. But if you go to the upstairs room, which most tourists don’t bother climbing to, you feel like you’ve discovered a hidden treasure.

The Flore opened in 1887, and in the 1940s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir essentially moved in. They wrote there, took their mail there, met their students there, and treated the upstairs like an office because their apartments were freezing and the Flore had a coal stove. 

Picasso came, and Apollinaire had edited a magazine from the same room decades earlier.

Go mid-afternoon on a weekday in October, order a chocolat chaud (it comes in a little jug, you pour it yourself), and take the stairs. 

Les Deux Magots, Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Right next door sits Les Deux Magots. The name comes from the 2 wooden Chinese figures (magots) that stare down from a pillar inside; they came from a novelty shop that occupied the site in the 1810s before the café took over in 1884.

The list of people who ate and argued there is long. Verlaine and Rimbaud, when it was still the earlier shop. Hemingway drinking in the corner, Picasso meeting Dora Maar there in 1935, a story that ended with her stabbing a knife between her fingers on the tabletop to get his attention. 

James Joyce and Brecht. The café even runs its own literary prize, the Prix des Deux Magots, which has been running since 1933.

In fall, ask for a terrace table on the side facing the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés rather than the boulevard. The church is the oldest in Paris, with parts of it dating to the 6th century, and watching the light change on its bell tower over a glass of Bordeaux beats staring at buses on Saint-Germain any day.