Cafés in France Paris and Lyon

Marseille, Versailles and the Atlantic ports

Coffee reached France across the Mediterranean. In 1660 about 20,000 quintals of coffee from Turkey arrived in Marseille, and in 1669 the Turkish ambassador in Paris offered it to Louis XIV.² A century later the trade had moved to the Atlantic: Bordeaux imported about 28,000 tonnes in 1786, and at the end of the 18th century Le Havre received 15,000 tonnes, over a third of French imports.²

Much of that coffee grew in French colonies. In 1720 the naval officer Gabriel de Clieu carried seedlings from the royal botanical garden in Paris to Martinique and, by his own account, shared his rationed drinking water with them.³ His claim to have brought coffee to the Americas is disputed, since it was reportedly growing in Saint-Domingue from 1715.³ By 1789 more than 80% of the world's coffee came from the Americas.²

Bourbon pointu, the coffee of Réunion

France still grows coffee on Réunion, the Indian Ocean island once called Bourbon. A royal order of 27 June 1715 led to six Mocha plants being sown at Saint-Paul that September.² A natural mutation later produced the Bourbon pointu, a compact, conical tree with narrow leaves. Plantings grew from about 2,000 ha in 1865 to nearly 6,000 ha in 1880, then sugar cane and disease pushed coffee out, and by around 1950 it had gone.⁴

Interest from Japanese buyers helped revive it in 2002, and a research program with CIRAD, the French agricultural research center, traced close to 2,000 surviving trees.⁴ The variety holds about 0.4–0.75% caffeine, against 1.2–1.6% for other arabicas.⁵ Today the Bourbon Pointu cooperative, founded in 2008, has 53 growers on about 15 hectares, who produce around 1 tonne of green coffee a year, or 500–600 kg after a cyclone.⁴

Cherries are picked from June to December, and most of the crop stays on the island: the cooperative sells about 80% of its green coffee and all of its roasted coffee locally, at markets, grocers and museums, and exports an average of 300 kg a year, mainly to Japan, the United States and Switzerland.⁴ An AOP (protected designation of origin) for coffee grown at 600 to 1,200 m between Saint-Joseph and Saint-Paul was due to be finalized during 2026.⁴

Chicory from the Nord

Northern France also drinks chicory. The roasted root became a coffee substitute on a large scale during the Continental Blockade of 1806, when coffee ran short, and France is now the world's largest producer, at about 90,000 tonnes a year, sown in April and lifted in October and November.⁶ Drunk alone or mixed with coffee, chicory is still treated as a regional symbol in Belgium and Nord-Pas-de-Calais.⁶

The main processor, Leroux, has been in Orchies since 1858 and works with more than 200 growers and roasters, most of them on the plains of Flanders.⁷

The café gourmand

The café gourmand is younger than it looks. Bernard Boutboul, head of the restaurant consultancy Gira Conseil, created it for the La Criée restaurant chain, and it was first served in Paris in September 1990.⁸ It is an espresso brought with at least three mini desserts, such as chouquettes, a small crème brûlée or macarons.⁸

Paris and Lyon

Paris turns café service into a sport. The Course des cafés, a race for waiters, first appeared in 1914 according to the historian Laurent Bihl, stopped for lack of funding and was revived by the city in 2024; in 2025 it ran 4 km through the Marais from the Hôtel de Ville.⁹

Competitors carry a tray with a glass of water, a coffee and a croissant, walk fast without running, and win only if nothing is spilled or eaten.⁹ The 2026 edition, set for 20 September, was postponed, with no new date announced as of August 2026.¹⁰

A Paris café also hosted the Lumière brothers' first paid public screening. On 28 December 1895, 33 spectators paid one franc each in the Salon indien of the Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capucines, to watch films that included La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon, workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon.¹¹

Lyon, about two hours from Paris by train, is described by Sprudge as one of Europe's fastest-growing specialty coffee markets.¹² Its pioneer was the roaster Mokxa, founded in 2011, whose former base at 3 Rue de l'Abbé Rozier, in the 1er arrondissement, now houses another coffee bar.¹²¹³ Lyon Coffee Fest, run by the association Lyon Coffee Events, ran from 27 April to 3 May 2026, with its main fair at H7 in the Confluence district.¹⁴