Where to eat · Natural wine bistro · €€ · 5e · Latin Quarter

Café de la Nouvelle Mairie

A terrace on a quiet square behind the Panthéon, a low-intervention wine list, and a short blackboard of well-sourced plates. The Left Bank without the crowd.

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Getting there

• LuxembourgRER B370 m · 7 min walk
• Cardinal Lemoine10510 m · 10 min walk
• Maubert Mutualité10580 m · 11 min walk

Around the corner

Panthéon · 140 m away

The Panthéon is a monument in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France. It stands in the Latin Quarter, on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, in the centre of the Place du Panthéon, which was named after it. The edifice was built between 1758 and 1790, from designs by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, at the behest of King Louis XV; the king intended it as a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve, Paris's patron saint, whose relics were to be housed in the church. Neither Soufflot nor Louis XV lived to see the church completed.

Wikipedia ↗

Walks that pass nearby

• Latin Quarter under 30 minutesstop 6 of 6 · 140 m

  Panthéon

  1758–1790, originally Saint Geneviève's church. Converted into a secular mausoleum during the Revolution; now holds the tombs of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, the Curies, Dumas, Foucault (the pendulum), and Soufflot (the architect, who lived just long enough to see his own design completed).

  Climbable to the dome on most days (paid, separate ticket). Inside the crypt, follow the signposted route — Voltaire and Rousseau face each other across a small chamber on the south side. Foucault's pendulum hangs from the dome's centre and is genuinely doing the original 1851 experiment.

• Markets of Parisstop 5 of 6 · 440 m

  Rue Mouffetard

  Roman-era road (it's been a thoroughfare for 2,000 years), market street since at least the 17th century. The lower stretch, descending from Place de la Contrescarpe, is the food market — the upper stretch is mostly bars.

  Start at Place de la Contrescarpe (top) and walk down — the slope is the experience. Sundays before noon are the busiest. The Saint-Médard church at the bottom marks the end of the food street; the Eglise Saint-Étienne-du-Mont (Hemingway's 'good wide street') is a five-minute walk west.

• Cinemas That Survivedstop 5 of 6 · 500 m

  Le Champo

  51 Rue des Écoles, opened 1938. A favourite of François Truffaut, who watched films here as a teenager and later credited it with his New Wave education. Two small screens, the upstairs salle Jean-Cocteau decorated with frescos. Classified historic 2000.

  The upper salle (Cocteau) is a steep, narrow auditorium with vintage seating — uncomfortable but the experience. The cinema does Truffaut and Rohmer retrospectives every winter; check the program. Café Universel across the street has live jazz most evenings.

• Where the Writers Livedstop 2 of 6 · 510 m

  Hemingway, 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine

  Hemingway and his first wife Hadley rented a fourth-floor walk-up here from January 1922 to August 1923 — their first Paris apartment, no running water, no toilet. He wrote In Our Time on the kitchen table. There's a small plaque on the facade.

  Look for the green plaque next to the door. The apartment is private; just stand on the cobbles opposite and read A Moveable Feast's opening pages on your phone. Hemingway's local café was the now-gone Café des Amateurs at the bottom of the hill.

Within a few minutes' walk

• Au P'tit GrecGalette counter€ · 9 minA takeaway window on the Mouffetard slope folding griddle galettes to order since 1981 — the complète, heavy with ham, egg and Gruyère, is the one people queue for.
• The Red Wheelbarrow BookstoreIndependent bookshop€ · 9 minPenelope Fletcher's English-language bookshop, facing the Luxembourg gardens — a tightly chosen Left Bank selection of literary fiction, poetry, small-press and food writing, with the bilingual children's offshoot next door.
• BVJ Quartier LatinNon-profit hostel€ · 9 minNon-profit hostelling since 1948, a few streets from Notre-Dame on Rue des Bernardins: 140 beds in single-sex dorms and a handful of private rooms, plainly furnished, breakfast thrown in, and about as central as a €19 bed gets in Paris.
• Hôtel MarignanBudget hotel€ · 10 minA family-owned holdout with a guest kitchen and free laundry — economies rare in the 5th — though there is no lift and the rooms are slight.
• Le ChampoRepertory cinema€ · 10 minA two-screen repertory house on the rue des Écoles since 1938, run on retrospectives and ciné-clubs rather than new releases — a complete István Szabó cycle one season, the occasional seven-hour anime marathon with coffee and croissants at dawn.
• Arènes de LutèceRoman amphitheatre€ · 10 minA surviving 1st-century Roman amphitheatre sunk into the Latin Quarter, now an open public ground where locals play pétanque and kick footballs on the sand that once held gladiators.

Where to stay near Café de la Nouvelle Mairie

• Hôtel Grand Cœur LatinBoutique hotel€€ · 7 minA 2023 reworking near the Sorbonne where the basement holds the rarity: a fifteen-metre lap pool modelled on Roman baths, plus a hammam, included with the room.
• Hôtel des Grandes ÉcolesGarden boutique hotel€€ · 7 minThree 19th-century houses around a tree-shaded garden where breakfast is taken in good weather; rooms keep their toile de Jouy and deliberately skip televisions.
• Young & Happy Latin QuarterSocial hostel€ · 9 minParis's first independent hostel, in an eighteenth-century building partway down Rue Mouffetard, with a spiral staircase and a vaulted cellar bar at the foot of the market street. The Latin Quarter at its least studious.

More where to eat, nearest first

• Bouillon RacineBouillon · 6e · 570 m€€
• Le LoubnaneLebanese / mezze · 5e · 680 m€€
• Le Buisson ArdentTraditional bistro · 5e · 690 m€€
• Le Grenier de Notre-DameVegetarian restaurant · 5e · 770 m€€