An Expert’s Guide to Coffee in Paris
By James HansenUnpacking the differences between London and Paris is by now akin to pretending to your child that the Channel Tunnel has glass walls to see the fish: boring and quite sad. The differences between London and Parisian coffee culture, however, track with the factors that make Paris’s greatest restaurants great. Its most exciting cafés, like many of its most exciting restaurants, tend to emerge from a phenomenon referred to as the “enabling constraint.”
Nearly every coffee shop listed here, whether on a busy first arrondissement street or a quiet part of the fourteenth, is small, sometimes very small, with space for few customers and even fewer baristas. Fast takeout flow isn’t anathema for reasons of snoot, it just isn’t feasible; things take time not for overwrought fastidiousness, but because it’s how long they take. If reading this as a local, you might think, “sûr”, but it feels important to state this as a frequent visitor and returner of most of these places, which are often littered with one-star reviews simply because people didn’t meet them where they were.
That’s the culture, and it does not stand still: Paris’s standout cafes are now pricing coffees according to their specialness in a city where cheap espresso remains supreme, without alienating potential customers. It’s also home to perhaps the single most exacting and exciting coffee experience in all of Europe as of 2024.
Motors
In the heart of Les Halles, come for super special drip – and not of the fashion variety. Founded by Thomas and Lola Phillips, Motors has earned its place as a central pitstop with an array of not just the best roasters in Europe and America – Manhattan, Fried Hats, Sey, Coffee Collective, Rose – but their most exciting and singular coffees, often with rare varieties or innovative methods of processing the beans before roasting. Most of these find their way on to that “super special drip” menu, where pour-overs can cost as much as €15-20 but the quality can make that feel like money well spent.
7 Rue des Halles, 75001
Télescope
A chic and tiny monument to being, well, chic and tiny, Télescope is a refuge in central Paris for superb coffee, often from Sweden’s Koppi or Belgium’s Caffenation. The menu and terms of engagement are resolutely Parisian, with café crèmes over flat whites and payment in espèces over carte preferred, but the focus on quality brewing and roasters is global. So too is the chicest thing of all: the precise, acerbic, and witheringly short shrift given to grumps on Google Reviews.
5 Rue Villedo, 75001
Terres de Cafe
This is one of Paris’s most expansive and well-established specialty coffee chains, with nine locations scattered across the arrondissements. Borrowing subtly from the familiar hierarchies of wine, it lists its coffees by quality with “grand cru” at the top, and majors in careful filter brewing (probably on a clean and light wooden bar.) Coffee fiends might expect the Versailles location to get the nod (something about letting them drink espresso.) Finding a space for culinary quality and value on the Rue Saint Honoré, the beautiful fashion and atrocious food parade par excellence, just sneaks it.
150 Rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 (also 75003, 75004, 75006, 75007, 75014, 75017, and 78000 — Versailles.)
Substance Cafe
This is the most exciting coffee experience in Europe – and you have to make a reservation to take part. There are so many remarkable things about Joachim Morceau’s hospitality at Substance, from his gently painstaking method of coaxing out your tastes, to the offer to smell the grinds for each drink, to the dedicated focus on each party’s whims and desires. But the most remarkable thing of all is that what radiates through his apparently limitless knowledge, brilliant technique, and range of some of the finest coffees in the world, is not seriousness but something simpler: an almost childlike and infectious joy.
30 Rue Dussoubs, 75002
Kawa
A running theme in a lot of these cafés is the way they intertwine a more traditionalist city’s coffee culture with the precepts of specialty coffee. Kawa, on a quiet part of the Rue des Archives before it bursts fully into the Marais, is a place where every espresso comes with a glass of sparkling water, whether it’s a classically chocolatey Mexican profile or an experimental gesha varietal from Guatemala. Staff are exceptionally friendly, there are always four options on both espresso and filter, and the miniscule space (another running theme) is surprisingly comfortable (ibid.)
96 Rue des Archives, 75003
I/O Cafe
Another cornerstone of contemporary good coffee in Paris is a tastefully decorated, very small wood-panelled space, with kind but firm staff, some nice baked goods that have nothing to do with viennoiserie whatsoever, and excellent, probably Scandinavian-roasted beans. I/O fits the bill – named for the on/off switch symbols. N.B.: Recto Verso in the same area also comes highly recommended, but was temporarily closed on a recent reconnaissance mission.
16 Rue Dupetit-Thouars, 75003
Crible
Next to the beautiful botanic Jardin des Plantes in the 5th, owner Samah’s Crible is eye-catching for the lurid greens, pinks, and blues on display. The green and pink come from meticulously whisked up matcha and pink lattes, while the turquoise comes from the bags of beans from Drop, a Swedish legend of specialty coffee that doesn’t make too many appearances in cafés these days.
75 Rue Buffon, 75005
Kott
Kott fits many of the principles already adhered to in this guide, but its standout feature is a commitment to operating a multi-roaster model that largely favours Parisian roasters. Hexagone (see below) and Kawa (see above) are fixtures on their menu of frozen rare and special coffees. An enviable array of merch, collabs with roasters local and international, and winking sense of fun that asks if you like a Viennese einspänner with your single-origin pour over makes this a café that has built its own culture, alongside its place in Paris.
19 Rue Ternaux, 75011
Dreamin’ Man
Now as much a fixture of Rue Amelot as the renowned restaurant Clown Bar, Dreamin’ Man is another nook of a space that belies its small stature with quality and warmth, even when it gets full at apparent warp speed, drinkers spilling elegantly on to the street outside. There’s now a second location in the 3rd, but this is the place to come for Yuichiro Sugiyama and Yui Matsuzaki initial expression of what Parisian coffee culture means to them.
140 Rue Amelot, 75011
Hexagone
Hexagone in the 14th might be a time machine from the future. When it opened in 2015, it anticipated the now dominant mode of trying to weave specialty products into Parisian coffee culture, rather than trying to treat the two as separate worlds. Coming up on ten years, it’s still running hot, except on limited days in spring and summer, when beautifully elegant kakigōri appear on the menu, only to melt away in mere weeks.
121 Rue du Château, 75014
James Hansen is a freelance culture writer and editor based in London. See also James’s coffee guides to London and Los Angeles. Header image by Guillaume Meurice, Pexels.