Underground & cool · Rum & cocktail bar · €€ · 2e · Bourse & Sentier
Mabel
A grilled-cheese café up front; a back room behind it stocked with more than a hundred rums and built by Joseph Akhavan into one of the city's serious cocktail dens. The toasties are not a gag — they are the food menu.
Order a tiki-leaning rum cocktail and a grilled cheese together; it gets loud late Thursday to Saturday.
Getting there
- Sentier330 m · 1 min walk
- Bourse3370 m · 7 min walk
- Bonne Nouvelle89390 m · 7 min walk
Around the corner
La Maison Stohrer · 320 m away
La Maison Stohrer is a pâtisserie. Established in 1730 and located in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, it is credited as the oldest pâtisserie in the city.
Wikipedia ↗Walks that pass nearby
- Sweet Parisstop 3 of 6 · 320 m
Stohrer
51 Rue Montorgueil, opened 1730 by Nicolas Stohrer, pâtissier to Louis XV. The oldest patisserie in Paris. The baba au rhum was invented here. Walls are classified historic. The window display alone is a 290-year-old argument for sugar.
Order a baba au rhum (the original recipe; ask them to add the rum at the counter) and walk it across the street to one of the benches on Rue Montorgueil. The Puits d'Amour — caramelised cream puff — is the second classic.
- Markets of Parisstop 2 of 6 · 350 m
Rue Montorgueil
Pedestrianised market street running through the 1st and 2nd. Cheese, fish, oysters, bread, wine, all on one block. Stohrer (1730) is mid-street; Le Rocher de Cancale (1846) was already a writers' hangout when Balzac was alive.
Walk the whole length, north to south, between Rue Tiquetonne and Rue Saint-Sauveur. The fish stall opposite Stohrer opens at 7 am with the previous day's catch. La Maison Stohrer (no. 51) is on the Sweet Paris tour; allow time to detour in.
- Covered Passagesstop 3 of 6 · 400 m
Galerie Colbert
Opened 1826 immediately next door to Vivienne, deliberately as competition. Bigger rotunda, less lively now — owned by the Bibliothèque nationale, which uses it for exhibitions. The dome is the architectural showpiece.
Enter from 6 Rue des Petits-Champs, right beside Vivienne. Look up immediately — the dome is the whole point. The exhibits in the side rooms are usually free and worth the five minutes.
- Rainy Day Parisstop 1 of 6 · 440 m
Galerie Vivienne
1823. The grandest of the covered passages — barrel-vaulted glass, mosaic floor by Italian craftsman Giandomenico Facchina, bookshop running since 1826. Already a stop on the Covered Passages tour but the obvious starting point on a rainy day.
Enter from 4 Rue des Petits-Champs. Sit at À Priori Thé for an hour with a book — full menu, slow service, glass roof above. The Galerie Colbert (next door, sister arcade) is worth a five-minute look immediately after.
Within a few minutes' walk
- LockwoodCafé & cocktail cellar€€ · 1 minA specialty coffee bar by day on Rue d'Aboukir; downstairs after dark, a candle-lit stone cellar pours cocktails until late. Two operations in one address, both done properly.
- Frenchie Bar à VinsWine bar with small plates€€ · 3 minGreg Marchand's no-reservations wine bar sits across the cobbles from his fully-booked Frenchie, doing brick-walled penance for the mothership's exclusivity. Small plates and wine by the glass, loud and a victim of its own popularity.
- Mắm From HanoïNorthern Vietnamese€€ · 4 minA Hanoi-born couple cook Northern Vietnamese food in a small Sentier room, and the 2026 Bib Gourmand has only made the table harder to get. The phở carries the saltier, bone-marrow-heavy broth of the north.
- O'KariHammam (women only)€€€ · 5 minA women-only Moroccan hammam near Montorgueil, sold as timed rituals — steam, black-soap gommage and rhassoul clay — by appointment rather than drop-in.
- The Hoxton, ParisDesign hotel€€ · 5 minAn 18th-century residence turned design-led social hub in Sentier, with a leafy courtyard wine bar, an all-day brasserie and a speakeasy below.
- Rex ClubElectronic club€€ · 7 minParis's longest-running room for techno and house, running its programming through a Funktion-One rig that rewards the people who came for the sound rather than the scene. Long sets that don't bother with last call until daylight.
The district · 2e
Bourse & Sentier — Covered passages and start-upsThe smallest arrondissement, threaded with nineteenth-century glass-roofed passages and, lately, the city's tech and restaurant energy around Rue Montorgueil and the old textile Sentier.
Best for: Eaters and drinkers who want to walk home; central without the Louvre crowds.
Everything we've verified in the 2e →How we verified this
Confirmed currently operating as of June 2026,cross-checked against 1 source:
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