Where to eat · Station brasserie · €€ · 8e · Champs-Élysées & Madeleine

Lazare

Éric Frechon's brasserie built into Gare Saint-Lazare, packed from breakfast to last train, where the saucisse-purée and the quenelle de brochet are done with three-star muscle at canteen-adjacent prices.

Getting there

• Gare Saint-Lazare312131410 m · 1 min walk
• Gare Saint-LazareRER E90 m · 2 min walk
• Havre - Caumartin39250 m · 5 min walk

Walks that pass nearby

• Painters' Viewsstop 2 of 7 · 160 m

  Monet at Gare Saint-Lazare

  Twelve paintings of the train sheds and steam, executed 1877 from inside the station. Monet got special permission and a private steam-train demonstration to study the light and smoke. Several of the canvases are at the Musée d'Orsay; one is at the Met in New York.

  Walk into the western train hall (track 27 area) and look up at the iron-and-glass roof — the Monet structure, still intact. Most travellers rush through; pause for two minutes and the resemblance is unmistakable.

• Cocktail Barsstop 3 of 6 · 260 m

  Le Forum

  4 Boulevard Malesherbes, opened 1931 — Art Deco interior virtually unchanged since opening: wood-panelled walls, brass railings, a chandelier in the back room. Considered Paris's most consistent classic-cocktail bar; the bartenders are old-school and the menu is 200+ classics.

  The back room is the secret — quieter, with a small library of cocktail-history books on the shelves you can read while you drink. The Negroni is the consensus best in central Paris. Tweed jacket weather; this is not a tank-tops place.

• Where the Writers Livedstop 5 of 6 · 420 m

  Proust, 102 Boulevard Haussmann

  Proust lived in apartment on the second floor from 1907 to 1919 — the period when he wrote most of À la recherche du temps perdu. He had the bedroom walls lined with cork to silence street noise, slept by day, wrote by night, hardly went out. The cork bedroom itself is preserved at the Musée Carnavalet (4 km east).

  The actual building is private offices now, with a discreet plaque. To see the cork-lined bedroom, you have to go to the Musée Carnavalet in the Marais — the room was transferred there piece by piece in 1971.

• Belle Époque Parisstop 5 of 6 · 510 m

  Galeries Lafayette dome

  The 33-metre Art Nouveau stained-glass dome inside the Haussmann store. Designed by Ferdinand Chanut and Jacques Gruber in 1912. Free to walk in, ride the lift to the rooftop terrace for the view.

  Enter at 40 Boulevard Haussmann, walk to the centre of the store and look up. Take the escalators (not lifts) to the top floor; the rooftop terrace exit is signposted, and on a clear day you see Sacré-Cœur, the Opéra, and the Eiffel Tower in one panorama.

Within a few minutes' walk

• Musée du Parfum FragonardFree perfume museum€ · 10 minA step from the Opéra Garnier, the Grasse house Fragonard fitted out a Napoléon III apartment as a perfume museum: copper stills, a wall of antique scent bottles, and a 'perfume organ' of labelled raw-material vials a nose would blend from.
• Galeries Lafayette dome & rooftopDepartment-store experience€ · 10 minWorth entering for the building rather than the goods. Jacques Gruber's 1912 stained-glass cupola hangs over the central hall; eight floors up, the open rooftop terrace gives a free 360-degree view from the Opéra to Sacré-Cœur and the Eiffel Tower.

More where to eat, nearest first

• Les Canailles PigalleBistro (Bib Gourmand) · 9e · 780 m€€
• Le Petit VendômeCounter sandwiches & bistro · 2e · 800 m€
• SalicorneMarket bistro · 17e · 1.0 km€€
• PoussinWine bar / cave à manger · 17e · 1.0 km€€
• Les Caves PopulairesWine bar · 17e · 1.0 km€