The Best Bars and Cafés Where Writers Drank
Eleven rooms with a literary past — Pessoa in bronze outside his Lisbon café, Dylan Thomas's New York bar, Borges in a Buenos Aires basement, and the London pub that invented its Samuel Johnson.
Every old bar claims a famous writer. These are the ones where the connection holds up — and where it doesn't, we say so. All eleven are still open, and you can still order a drink at the same tables.
London has three. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street was drunk in by Dickens, Chesterton and Mark Twain; it also sells Samuel Johnson, whom no record puts inside, a legend traced to a dinner in 1892. The Grapes in Limehouse is the likely model for the riverside tavern in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. And in the Cittie of Yorke, Dylan Thomas scribbled an ode to the bar that stayed lost until 2014.
Paris gets two cafés on the Left Bank. Le Dôme in Montparnasse, open since 1898, was a gathering point for Picasso, Hemingway and the interwar crowd. Café de Flore in Saint-Germain counted Huysmans, Bataille, Queneau and Picasso among its regulars, and gave its name to Les Amants du Flore, the 2006 film about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
A Brasileira in Lisbon opened in 1905 selling Brazilian coffee and became where the city's writers met in the 1920s, Fernando Pessoa among them — he now sits outside in bronze. Café Gijón, on Madrid's Paseo de Recoletos since 1888, was the meeting place of Spain's post-war Generation of '36, with tertulias of poets around Gerardo Diego. In Venice, Harry's Bar was a favourite of Ernest Hemingway, and is where Giuseppe Cipriani invented the Bellini in 1948.
In Havana, La Bodeguita del Medio was drunk in by Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral and Nicolás Guillén, whose poem to the bar still hangs framed on its wall. Its most famous line is less secure: "My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita", signed Hemingway, has never been authenticated.
The White Horse in New York's West Village was a longshoremen's bar until Dylan Thomas and other writers started drinking there in the early 1950s; James Baldwin, Jane Jacobs and Norman Mailer followed. Thomas drank there in 1953 before he died in the city — the story that he downed eighteen whiskies is legend, not record. And in Buenos Aires, the basement of Café Tortoni held La Peña from 1926 to 1943, an arts club whose visitors included Jorge Luis Borges and Alfonsina Storni.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
London, United KingdomRebuilt in 1667, the year after the Great Fire, and the birthplace of London's most durable invented pub legend.
The Grapes
London, United KingdomOne room wide, with a veranda over the Thames, no straight floor, and a real claim to be the tavern Dickens wrote into Our Mutual Friend.
Cittie of Yorke
London, United KingdomA drinking house on this spot since about 1430, in a building from the 1920s — plus a Dylan Thomas poem that stayed lost for sixty years.
Le Dôme Café
Paris, FranceAn 1898 Montparnasse seafood brasserie Anthony Bourdain called second only to the Eiffel Tower as a Paris must-visit.
Café de Flore
Paris, FranceA Saint-Germain café since the 1880s whose regulars ran from Huysmans to Picasso — and whose most famous couple got a film named after it.
A Brasileira
Lisbon, PortugalA 1905 Chiado café where Fernando Pessoa spent his time — and still sits, in bronze, at a table on the terrace.
Café Gijón
Madrid, SpainAn 1888 café on the Paseo de Recoletos that became the meeting place of Spain's post-war writers, with poets' tertulias at its tables.
Harry's Bar
Venice, ItalyGiuseppe Cipriani's 1931 bar by the San Marco waterfront, a Hemingway favourite and the place the Bellini was invented.
La Bodeguita del Medio
Havana, CubaAn Old Havana bodega turned bar, its walls covered in signatures — where Neruda and Nicolás Guillén drank, and Hemingway's famous mojito line may not be his.
White Horse Tavern
New York City, United StatesAn 1880 West Village bar that went from longshoremen to writers in the 1950s — Dylan Thomas, James Baldwin, Jane Jacobs, Norman Mailer.
Café Tortoni
Buenos Aires, ArgentinaBuenos Aires' 1858 café on Avenida de Mayo, whose basement arts club drew Borges and Alfonsina Storni, and where Gardel was a regular.