A Visual Tour of 35 Literary Bars and Cafés from Around the World

In our habitual fantasies, writers do nothing but sit at small café tables, sometimes meeting with their friends, other times gazing wistfully into a pint or swirling an espresso before they scribble down their latest brilliant thought. It may have worked for Hemingway, but I’m here to tell you: that’s not usually what writing looks like. But hey, it’s Friday. So what better time to indulge our daydreams and salivate over a few of the bars and cafés that famous writers frequented in days of yore? I mean, writerly fantasies aside, I wouldn’t mind reading for a while in any one of these. Of course, this is nowhere near a complete list of every place a famous writer ever drank—not least because in the interest of avoiding the New York/Paris/Dublin trap, I’ve limited the choices to one per city—so feel free to add on to the list. Now, without any further ado: 35 literary watering holes in 35 cities. Which one would you visit?

Café Tortoni

Ramon Corvera

Café Tortoni, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Address: Av. de Mayo 825, 1084 CABA, Argentina

Literary Pedigree: Jorge Luís Borges and modernist poet Alfonsina Storni were frequent visitors in the ’70s, and they’re still there, in wax figure form, at Borges’s regular table, hanging out with Carlos Gardel.

Francis McKee

Café la Habana, Mexico City, Mexico

Address: Calle Morelos 62, Cuauhtémoc, Juárez, Ciudad de México, México

Literary Pedigree: Roberto Bolaño (who changed the name to Café Quito when he referred to it in his work), Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (not to mention Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, meeting to plan the revolution) were regulars here.

National Trust/Greene King

National Trust/Michael Caldwell

The George Inn, London, England

Address: Borough High Street, London, SE1, United Kingdom

Literary Pedigree: Charles Dickens drank here (and he refers to it in Little Dorrit); so did William Shakespeare (although the actual building he frequented was burned down).

Justin Goldman

Konrad Glogowski

SF Weekly

Vesuvio Café, San Francisco, California, USA

Address: 255 Columbus @ Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach, San Francisco, California

Literary Pedigree: Just across the alley from Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s City Lights bookstore (said alley was renamed “Jack Kerouac Alley” in 1988), Vesuvio was a Beat hotspot, the favorite haunt of Jack Kerouac (obviously), Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg.

Amy Goodman

Tzooka | Dreamstime

El Floridita, Havana, Cuba

Address: Obispo 557 esq a Monserrate Habana Vieja, Havana 10100, Cuba

Literary Pedigree: The first of many places on this list that Ernest Hemingway frequented—it was just down the street from the hotel where he kept a room for years, but even afterwards, he’d take Martha Gellhorn there. A life-size bronze statue of Papa still sits at the bar, listening for good dialogue. Ezra Pound, John dos Passos, and Graham Greene were also patrons.

Bildarchiv Foto Marburg

Romanisches Café, Berlin, Germany

Address: Budapester Str. 47, 10787 Berlin, Germany

Literary Pedigree: After opening in 1916, this café-bar quickly became a regular meeting place for Berlin’s intelligentsia, including Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, and Erich Maria Remarque. The whole building was destroyed in a 1943 air raid.

David Block

Café Haiti, Lima, Peru

Address: Diagonal 160, Miraflores Lima 18, Peru

Literary Pedigree: Julio Ramón Ribeyro was a regular here.

The Barley Mow, Dorset, England

Address: Long Ln, Wimborne BH21 7AH, UK

Literary Pedigree: Evelyn Waugh took rooms here while he worked on his first novel, Decline and Fall—and spent no little time in the pub downstairs.

Sailko

Telegraph

Caffé Pedrocchi, Padua, Italy

Address: Via VIII Febbraio, 15, 35122 Padova PD, Italy

Literary Pedigree: The café’s proximity to the University of Padua made it a frequent haunt of students and intellectuals, including Lord Byron, Stendhal, and Dario Fo.

Donzoko, Tokyo, Japan

Address: 3-45-3 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

Literary Pedigree: Takes its name from the Japanese title for Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths, and was also a favored watering hole of Yukio Mishima (though it sounds like Mishima drank in quite a number of bars).

Parisianist

Parisianist

Les Deux Magots, Paris, France

Address: 6 Place Saint-Germain des Prés, 75006 Paris, France

Literary Pedigree: Paris is filled with literary cafés (La Rotonde, Dingo Bar, Le Procope, Café de Flore, etc. etc. etc.) but since I can only choose one, it will have to be Les Deux Magots, arguably the most famous, and as far as I know the only café with its own literary prize. Famous for being frequented by Verlaine and Rimbaud, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Bertolt Brecht, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and even Julia Child.

Rob K/Gone Adventuring

Rob K/Gone Adventuring

Rob K/Gone Adventuring

The Woody Creek Tavern, Aspen, Colorado, USA

Address: 2858 Upper River Rd, Woody Creek, CO, 81656

Literary Pedigree: The favorite bar of Hunter S. Thompson, who lived nearby. The bar’s regulars report frequent appearances by “Hunter hunters” on a pilgrimage—and that they like to give them the wrong directions.

Duval Street

Duval Street

Sloppy Joe’s, Key West, Florida, USA

Address: 201 Duval Street, Key West, FL 33040

Literary Pedigree: This is the site of the annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest—though the Sloppy Joe’s the author actually visited is down the street, and renamed Captain Tony’s Saloon. Still, tourist dollars are tourist dollars.

Ninaras

Literaturnoe Kafe (Wolff et Beranget Confectionery), St. Petersburg, Russia

Address: 18, Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg

Literary Pedigree: Another restaurant with a wax effigy of a literary legend: this time it’s Aleksander Pushkin, sitting at a table by the window. It’s fitting: this spot, then a candy shop-cum-Chinese café (whatever that means), was where Pushkin met his second and had his last meal on the way to the duel that would kill him. Mikhail Lermontov and Taras Shevchenko were regulars. It’s also where Fyodor Dostoyevsky met Mikhail Petrashevsky for the first time, ultimately joining his utopian socialist circle.

Trip Advisor

Trip Advisor

Liguanea Club, Kingston, Jamaica

Address: Knutsford Boulevard, New Kingston, Kingston 5, Jamaica, W.I

Literary Pedigree: Ian Fleming spent a lot of time here after establishing his estate in Jamaica, and it just so happens to be the inspiration behind the Queen’s Club in Dr. No.

Alice Silver

Alice Silver

Cervecería Alemana, Madrid, Spain

Address: Plaza Santa Ana, 6 28012, Madrid, Spain

Literary Pedigree: You have to drink somewhere after the running of the bulls. In a piece in a 1960 issue of LIFE magazine, Ernest Hemingway called it “a good café and beer place on the Piaza Santa Ana in Madrid which I had frequented for many years.”

Sailko

Caffé Giubbe Rosse, Florence, Italy

Address: Piazza della Repubblica, 13/14r, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Literary Pedigree: Where all the Futurist poets used to hang out. See also.

Andreas Praefcke

Café Bräunerhof, Vienna Austria

Address: 01, Stallburggasse 2, Vienna, Austria

Literary Pedigree: The favored drinking hole of Thomas Bernhard.

Urban Adventures

Spectra

The Frolic Room, Los Angeles, California, USA

Address: 6245 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Literary Pedigree: Reportedly one of the many places in L.A. that Charles Bukowski liked to get drunk.

Hartyányi Norbert / We Love Budapest

Centrál, Budapest, Hungary

Address: Karolyi utca 9., Budapest 1053, Hungary

Literary Pedigree: The favored café for the staff of Nyugat, Budapest’s most influential literary magazine, as well as a watering hole for Hungarian authors Géza Gárdonyi and Ferenc Molnár.

Travel + Leisure

George Terezakis

Antico Caffé Greco, Rome, Italy

Address: Via dei Condotti, 86, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

Literary Pedigree: Famous for serving coffee to a slew of artists, philosophers, and other luminaries, the literary of which included: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, Nikolai Gogol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, and Stendhal.

Tiffany Devoy

DIMSFIKAS

Nol Aders

Café A Brasileira, Lisbon, Portugal

Address: R. Garrett 122, 1200-273 Lisboa, Portugal

Literary Pedigree: Another hotspot for intellectuals of all stripes, including the novelist Aquilino Ribeiro and the poet Alfredo Pimenta, but the most famous denizen must be Fernando Pessoa, who still sits outside, forever in bronze. (Apparently the secret is that his favorite café was actually somewhere else.)

Zonars Archive

Yiorgos Kordakis

Zonars Archive

Zonars, Athens, Greece

Address: Voukourestiou 9, Athina 106 71, Greece

Literary Pedigree: In the 1930s, many writers and other intellectuals stopped here while traveling through Greece, including Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Evelyn Waugh.

Betta27

MissClaire

Pasticceria Caffe Pirona, Trieste, Italy

Address: Largo della Barriera Vecchia, 12, 34129 Trieste TS, Italy

Literary Pedigree: Rumor has it that James Joyce worked on Ulysses in this café—rumor has it he wrote the opening pages there, standing up—but either way, he definitely frequented the place, as he lived across the street for two years. Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba were also patrons.

Tom Murphy VII

The Eagle and Child, Oxford, England

Address: 49 St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3LU, UK

Literary Pedigree: Where J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and the rest of their writers’ group, the Inklings (who knew they could be so corny), had weekly lunches for many years—in the private lounge they called the Rabbit Room.

Christian Bickel

Café a Porta, Copenhagen, Denmark

Address: Kongens Nytorv 17, 1050 København K, Denmark

Literary Pedigree: Hans Christen Andersen lived above the café for three years, and was a regular; after he’d moved out, Karen Blixen frequented the spot as well.

Joannna Travelling

The Elephant House, Edinburgh, Scotland

Address: 21 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1EN, UK

Literary Pedigree: This café is famous for being the place where J.K. Rowling started writing the first Harry Potter book—but as it opened in 1995, but that fact seems rather up for debate. The fans have accepted it as a place of pilgrimage, however, something the management does nothing to dissuade. Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall-Smith have also had their tea there.

Prague Stay

Jan Prerovsky

Café Louvre, Prague, Czech Republic (or Café Monmarte)

Address: Národní 22, 110 00 Nové Město, Czechia

Literary Pedigree: Franz Kafka (and his BFF Max Brod) used to eat here. See also: Café Monmarte.

Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Address: 214 Royal St, New Orleans, LA 70130

Literary Pedigree: According to the Monteleone’s website, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Anne Rice and Rebecca Wells all stayed at the hotel and drank at the bar—and Capote even used to claim, over drinks, that he had been born there. “He wasn’t,” the hotel assures us. “Though his mother lived at the historic hotel during her pregnancy, she safely made it to the hospital in time for Truman’s debut.”

My Nordic Food Tales

Mellqvist Kaffebar, Stockholm, Sweden

Address: Rörstrandsgatan 4, 113 40 Stockholm, Sweden

Literary Pedigree: In his Millennium trilogy, Stieg Larsson gave Mikael Blomkvist his own favorite coffee shop. It’s located just below the offices of Expo, the magazine where Larsson was editor from 2004 until his death (another detail he gave his characters).

Kawiarniany

Kawiarniany

Nowa Prowincja, Kraków, Poland

Address: Bracka 3-5, 31-005 Kraków, Poland

Literary Pedigree: Reportedly a favorite spot of Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska and a revolving cast of other Polish writers, including Czesław Miłosz.

Boston Literary District

Ritz-Carlton, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Address: 15 Arlington St, Boston, MA 02116 United States

Literary Pedigree: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton used to meet at the hotel bar for martinis (usually at least three) after their poetry seminar with Robert Lowell. Tennessee Williams is also rumored to have written parts of A Streetcar Named Desire at the bar. (It is now the Taj Boston.)

Bjørn Erik Pedersen

Grand Café, Oslo, Norway

Address: Karl Johans gate 31, 0159 Oslo, Norway

Literary Pedigree: According to the restaurant’s website, this was once Henrik Ibsen‘s daily lunch spot. Also, not for nothing, they say that “Edvard Munch once offered to swap the painting “Sick Girl” in return for 100 steak dinners.” I hope they took that deal.

Irish Times

Grogan’s Castle Lounge, Dublin, Ireland

Address: 15 William St S, Dublin 2, D02 H336, Ireland

Literary Pedigree: Almost every bar in Dublin is a literary bar. But I’ve heard that this bar, in addition to being a favorite of Flann O’Brien‘s, is where the literary dudes still hang out, so that pushed it over the edge. See also: Kennedy’s, Davy Byrnes, Brazen Head, The Palace Bar, etc.

Ephemeral New York

The White Horse Tavern, New York, New York, USA

Address: 567 Hudson St, New York, NY 10014

Literary Pedigree: There are a zillion literary bars and cafés in New York City to choose from—but we can only put one here, and for my money, the White Horse is the most famous. After all, it’s where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. On the other hand, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara all made it out more or less alive. See also: Elaine’s, Cedar Tavern, Algonquin, Chumley’s, Pete’s, etc. etc. etc.!