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Le Procope, at 13 rue de l’Ancienne Comédie in the 6th arrondissement, is Paris’s oldest café address, founded in 1686 by the Sicilian Procopio Cutò. It is open every day from 12:00 to midnight, takes reservations on 01 40 46 79 00, and publishes no formal dress code — booking platforms classify it as smart casual, and no jacket or tie is required. Set menus run €24.50 to €41.50 and most main courses land between €23.50 and €34.50. Expect an 18th-century-style dining room and a hidden courtyard terrace; expect food that reviewers rate well below the room.
Le Procope at a glance
Détail | What to know |
|---|---|
Adresse | 13 rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, 75006 Paris |
Téléphone | 01 40 46 79 00 (+33 1 40 46 79 00 from abroad) |
Opening hours | Monday to Sunday, 12:00 to 00:00 |
Café salon | Monday to Friday, 15:30 to 17:30, no reservation needed |
Nearest metro | Odéon (lines 4 and 10), about a 2-minute walk |
Code vestimentaire | None published by the restaurant; platforms list smart casual |
Outdoor seating | Yes — a courtyard terrace off the cour du Commerce Saint-André |
Paiement | Visa, Mastercard, Carte Bleue, American Express, cash, titres restaurant |
Set menus | €24.50 to €41.50 depending on time and day |
Réservation | Online via procope.com, or by phone |
What is the dress code at Le Procope?
Le Procope publishes no dress code of its own. Reservation platforms classify it as smart casual with a casual-elegant dining style, and no jacket or tie is required. Clean jeans with a shirt or a blouse will not raise an eyebrow at lunch or at dinner.
That is worth stating plainly, because the room misleads people. Chandeliers, red banquettes, gilt-framed portraits and a listed 18th-century interior read as formal, and visitors regularly arrive expecting a jacket rule that does not exist. This is a busy historic brasserie serving several hundred covers a day, not a gastronomic temple with a doorman.
Two practical caveats. Shorts and beachwear will look out of place in the evening even though nobody will stop you, and the upstairs salons used for private hire hold events with their own dress expectations, so ask when you book a group. If you are pulling together an outfit for a wider trip, our guide to the meilleur moment pour visiter Paris covers what the seasons actually demand.
How much does Le Procope cost?
Two people eating three courses from the carte with a glass of wine each should budget roughly €75 to €100 per person. The set menus cut that sharply: the lunchtime Menu Procope is €24.50 for two courses and €31.50 for three, which is among the cheaper ways to eat inside a listed Paris monument.
What you order | Published price | Remarques |
|---|---|---|
Menu Procope, 2 courses | €24.50 | Monday to Saturday, 12:00 to 18:00. Excludes public holidays |
Menu Procope, 3 courses | €31.50 | Same window. Drinks not included |
Menu Philosophe, 2 courses | €34.50 | Daily from 18:00, and all day Sunday |
Menu Philosophe, 3 courses | €41.50 | The evening equivalent of the Menu Procope |
Starters | €9.00 to €22.50 | Onion soup €10.50; six Burgundy escargots €11.90; foie gras mi-cuit €22.50 |
Historic recipes | €27.50 to €41.50 | Braised ox cheek €27.50; coq au vin and calf’s head €28.50 |
Meat main courses | €23.50 to €29.50 | Beef tartare €23.50; duck breast €29.50 |
Fish main courses | €25.50 to €48.50 | Salmon €25.50; whole sole €48.50 |
Desserts | €8.50 to €13.50 | Floating island €8.50; Procopio tiramisu €12.50 |
Wine by the glass | €7.00 to €14.00 | Juliénas €7.00; Sancerre €14.00 |
Champagne by the glass | €14.00 to €17.00 | Jacquart €14.00; Louis Roederer €17.00 |
Coffee, infused, 25cl | €7.90 | The house Ethiopian grand cru, served in the café salon |
The set menus are the reason to come at lunch rather than dinner. Ordering the same three courses from the carte in the evening costs about €10 more per person than the Menu Philosophe, and about €20 more than the lunchtime Menu Procope. Sunday is the exception: the cheaper lunch menu does not run, so a Sunday visit starts at €34.50 whatever the hour.
When is Le Procope open?
Le Procope serves from 12:00 to midnight, seven days a week. The kitchen runs continuously through the afternoon, which makes it one of the more reliable options in Saint-Germain between 15:00 and 19:00, when most Paris kitchens close.
Separate from the restaurant, the café salon opens Monday to Friday from 15:30 to 17:30 and takes no reservations. It came out of a 2024 refit that gave the ground floor a dedicated tea room and an ice-cream counter trading as Glacier Procopio. That is the cheapest way into the building: a pot of house-infused coffee runs €7.90 and a scoop of artisan ice cream €12.50, against a €24.50 floor in the dining room. If you want the interior without the dinner bill, that two-hour weekday window is the answer.
L'établissement Le Procope dispose-t-il d'une terrasse ?
Yes. Le Procope has a courtyard terrace tucked into the cour du Commerce Saint-André, the covered passage that runs alongside the building. The restaurant describes it as its hidden terrace, and outdoor seating is listed among its services.
It is not a boulevard terrace. There is no traffic to watch and no wide pavement, which is the point: the passage is sheltered, cobbled, and one of the oldest surviving streets of its kind in the city. Its facades, shopfronts, three entrances and glass roof were listed as historic monuments in 1987. Some diners have found the alley setting underwhelming when they were expecting a street-front table, so ask for the dining room if the courtyard is not what you pictured.
What should you order at Le Procope?
Order from the historic recipes section. It is the part of the menu the kitchen has kept for centuries and the part reviewers praise most consistently: braised ox cheek with parmesan rigatoni at €27.50, coq au vin at €28.50, and calf’s head casserole served the way it was in 1686, also €28.50.
The calf’s head is the dish people travel for and the one that divides the room hardest. It is a slow-cooked tête de veau in a rich sauce, closer to a terrine in texture than to anything on a modern menu, and it is an acquired taste rather than a safe historical curiosity. If you are unsure, the ox cheek delivers the same 18th-century register without the gamble.
Two things to skip. The coq au vin draws the most negative comments of any dish here, with reviewers reporting overcooked chicken often enough that it is a pattern rather than an unlucky night. And the €41.50 revolutionaries’ beef fillet is the priciest plate on the carte without being the best-reviewed one. On desserts, the chocolate-coffee tart is signed by Christelle Brua, named world’s best pastry chef in 2018, and at €12.50 it is the strongest value on the sweet list. For context on where these dishes sit in the wider canon, see our guide to classic Plats français.
Is Le Procope a tourist trap?
Le Procope is a genuine historic monument that serves ordinary brasserie food at above-average prices. Diners rate the room far higher than the plate, and the gap between those two scores is the single most useful number for deciding whether to book.
Source | Score | Sample | What that source is measuring |
|---|---|---|---|
Le Procope’s own site | 4.6 / 5 | Verified booking-platform diners | People who booked directly and were surveyed afterwards |
OpenTable overall | 4.0 / 5 | 25 reviews | Diners who booked a table in advance |
OpenTable, ambience | 4.5 / 5 | 25 reviews | The room, the history, the decor |
OpenTable, food | 3.9 / 5 | 25 reviews | What actually arrives on the plate |
OpenTable, value | 3.9 / 5 | 25 reviews | Whether the bill felt justified |
TripAdvisor | 3.8 / 5 | 6,270 reviews | Walk-ins and bookings, the widest sample |
Read down that table and the verdict writes itself. Ambience scores 4.5 and food scores 3.9 from the same 25 people, which is a 0.6-point gap inside a single sample. The restaurant’s own page shows 4.6 because it surveys diners who chose to book direct; TripAdvisor shows 3.8 across 6,270 reviews because it catches everyone, including the walk-in who queued for a table and expected a Michelin kitchen. Neither number is dishonest. They are counting different people.
The recurring complaints are consistent enough to plan around: slow service when both floors are full, occasional trouble locating reservations made through third-party platforms, and bills worth checking line by line. Book direct through the restaurant rather than an aggregator and most of that risk disappears. You can also read the full TripAdvisor review history for Le Procope before committing.
Who should book Le Procope, and who should not
Book it if you are visiting for the building. A meal here buys two hours inside a room where Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Danton and Robespierre argued, at lunchtime prices that undercut most guided tours of comparable monuments.
- Book it if you want Enlightenment history with a meal attached, you are eating between 15:00 and 19:00 when other kitchens are shut, or you want the €24.50 lunch menu.
- Book it if you have a group. The historic upstairs salons are available for private hire, and the ground floor handles large tables better than most Saint-Germain dining rooms.
- Book elsewhere if the food is the point. At €28.50 a main course you are inside the price band of kitchens that cook considerably better a short walk away.
- Book elsewhere if you are on a tight schedule. Service slows badly at peak, and several reviewers report waits of an hour between ordering and eating.
- Book elsewhere if you want a street-facing terrace. The outdoor tables sit in a covered passage, not on a boulevard.
Why is Le Procope historically important?
Le Procope is where the Paris café was invented. The Sicilian Procopio Cutò — Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli in Italian, François Procope in French — moved his lemonade stall to this street in 1686 and served coffee and sorbet at the table in porcelain cups. He fitted the room with crystal chandeliers, wall mirrors and marble-topped tables stripped from a bath house he bought, and those three fittings became the template for European cafes.
In 1689 the Comédie-Française opened a theatre directly across the road, which is how the street got its modern name and how the café got its clientele. Actors brought writers, and the room became the meeting place of the Parisian intellectual establishment. Voltaire drank his coffee here mixed with chocolate, and Diderot and d’Alembert conceived the Encyclopédie at these tables. Rousseau walked out of his own play in 1752 and came here to say so. By the 1790s the room had turned political: the Cordeliers, Danton, Marat and Robespierre used it as a meeting place, and the Phrygian cap that became the symbol of Liberty was first displayed at the Procope. The 19th century brought Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Verlaine, Anatole France and Léon Gambetta; Alexander von Humboldt lunched here daily from 11:00 to noon through the 1820s.
Benjamin Franklin did use the café, alongside John Paul Jones and Thomas Jefferson, and a plaque inside commemorates his work on the Franco-American alliance. The claim that parts of the United States Constitution were written here does not survive a date check: Franklin left Paris in 1785 and the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787. Franklin’s connection to the room is real; that particular story is not.
The plaque also calls this the oldest continuously functioning café in the world, and that claim does not hold either. The original Café Procope closed in 1872. The premises passed through a private artists’ club, a restaurant, and a 1920s café called Au Grand Soleil before a later owner recognized the value of the old name and restored it. The current restaurant dates from 1957 and was refitted in 18th-century style in 1988. Oxford’s Queen’s Lane Coffee House has traded without a break since 1654. What is not in doubt is that this is the address where Paris café culture started, and that the passage beside it — the cour du Commerce Saint-André, with its facades, shopfronts, entrances and glass roof — has been a listed historic monument since 1987. For the wider neighborhood, our guides to Saint-Germain-des-Prés et le Quartier latin cover what else is within a short walk.
The bicorne hat in the glass case is presented as Napoleon’s, left against an unpaid bill when he was a young officer. Napoleon Bonaparte is named on the café’s own commemorative plaque, but the hat story itself is house legend, widely repeated and thinly evidenced. Enjoy it as folklore rather than provenance.
How do you get to Le Procope and book a table?
Take metro line 4 or line 10 to Odéon and walk about two minutes north. Le Procope sits at 13 rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, with a second way in through the cour du Commerce Saint-André passage off boulevard Saint-Germain.
Reservations are accepted but not required, and are strongly advised for dinner and for any table of four or more. Book on the restaurant’s own site or call 01 40 46 79 00. Several reviewers describe arriving with a third-party booking the restaurant could not find, so a direct reservation with a confirmation number is the safer route. The nearest car parks are École de Médecine, Mazarine and Marché Saint-Germain, though driving into the 6th is rarely worth it. Card payment is standard, including American Express, and cash is accepted. Planning the rest of the day around it is covered in our choses à faire à Paris guide, and travelers weighing up sightseeing passes can check La revue du Paris Pass : est-ce que ça vaut le coup ? Wider practical advice sits in our Paris travel tips.
What this review previously got wrong
This page was rechecked against Le Procope’s own website, its published carte, current review platforms and the documented history in August 2026. Eight statements were corrected.
Previously said | Corrected to |
|---|---|
Open until 1:00 AM | Open until midnight, every day |
“Le Procope does not have a terrace” | It has a courtyard terrace in the cour du Commerce Saint-André |
Rated 4 of 5 on TripAdvisor, ranked #1,717 of 18,925 | Rated 3.8 of 5 across about 6,270 reviews, ranked around #2,050 |
“Various price ranges” with no figures | A full published price table, from €7.90 to €48.50 |
Franklin completed parts of the US Constitution here | He was in Paris until 1785; the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 |
“The oldest continuously operating eatery” | The original café closed in 1872; the current restaurant dates from 1957 |
Napoleon’s hat presented as established fact | Flagged as house legend, not documented provenance |
No phone number, no metro line, no café salon | All three now stated |
Frequently asked questions
Quel est le code vestimentaire du Procope ?
Le Procope publishes no dress code of its own. Reservation platforms classify it as smart casual with a casual-elegant dining style, and no jacket or tie is required. Clean jeans with a shirt are fine at lunch or dinner, though shorts and beachwear look out of place in the evening.
What are Le Procope’s opening hours?
Le Procope is open every day from 12:00 to midnight, with the kitchen running through the afternoon. The separate cafe salon opens Monday to Friday from 15:30 to 17:30 and takes no reservations.
L'établissement Le Procope dispose-t-il d'une terrasse ?
Yes. Le Procope has a courtyard terrace in the cour du Commerce Saint-Andre, the covered passage beside the building. It is a sheltered cobbled alley rather than a street-front terrace, so ask for the dining room if you want a boulevard view.
How much does a meal at Le Procope cost?
Set menus run from 24.50 euros for two courses at lunch to 41.50 euros for three courses in the evening. Main courses from the carte range from 23.50 to 48.50 euros, and desserts from 8.50 to 13.50 euros. Two people eating three courses with wine should budget roughly 75 to 100 euros each.
Quelle est la note de Le Procope ?
TripAdvisor rates Le Procope 3.8 out of 5 across 6,270 reviews. OpenTable diners score it 4.0 overall but split it 4.5 for ambience against 3.9 for food, and the restaurant’s own site displays 4.6 from verified direct bookings. The room consistently outscores the cooking.
Do you need to book a table at Le Procope?
Reservations are accepted but not required. Book ahead for dinner and for groups of four or more, and book directly with the restaurant on 01 40 46 79 00 or through procope.com, because several diners report third-party bookings the restaurant could not locate on arrival.
What should you order at Le Procope?
Order from the historic recipes section. Braised ox cheek at 27.50 euros and the 1686-style calf’s head casserole at 28.50 euros are the dishes the kitchen is built around. The coq au vin draws the most consistent criticism, so it is the one to skip.
Did Benjamin Franklin go to Le Procope?
Yes. Franklin used the cafe during his years as American envoy to France, as did John Paul Jones and Thomas Jefferson, and a plaque inside commemorates his work on the Franco-American alliance. The popular claim that he wrote parts of the United States Constitution here is false: Franklin left Paris in 1785 and the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787.
Is Le Procope really the oldest coffee house in the world?
It is the oldest coffee house address in Paris, founded in 1686, but the claim of continuous operation on its plaque is not supported. The original business closed in 1872 and the current restaurant dates from 1957. Queen’s Lane Coffee House in Oxford has traded without interruption since 1654.
How we checked this
Address, phone number, opening hours, café salon hours, terrace and payment methods were read from Le Procope’s own website in August 2026. Prices come from the restaurant’s syndicated carte, last revised June 2024, cross-checked against a second published carte where the two differ. Ratings were read from TripAdvisor and OpenTable on the same date, and review totals move daily. The historic-monument listing of the cour du Commerce Saint-André dates from 1987. The history, including the 1872 closure, the 1957 reopening and the café’s own commemorative plaque, follows the sourced account in the Wikipedia entry for Café Procope and the works it cites. Where a widely repeated claim could not be substantiated, including the Constitution story and the Napoleon hat, this page says so rather than repeating it.
Last updated 7 August 2026. This revision corrected the closing time, the terrace answer, the TripAdvisor rating and ranking, the Benjamin Franklin claim and the “continuously operating” claim, and added the first published prices, phone number, metro lines and café salon hours this page has carried.
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