Latin Quarter cafés, four checked addresses

Four addresses, no filler

Cafés are the easiest thing to list and the hardest to vouch for: they change owners and names. We kept the four that we could tie to a source dated in 2026 or an editorial entry, all in the 5th arrondissement. Where a café has no recognised editorial review, as with the café of the Institut du monde arabe, we say so and give its own official information only.

The addresses

• Chanceux Notre-Dame (Galande), 63 rue Galande. A coffee shop and “signature” sandwich shop. Time Out’s article of 13 November 2023 calls the original Chanceux Galande the sandwich king of the 5th; the brand’s website, carrying a 2026 copyright, now lists the address under the longer name. Time Out: €€.
• Tram librairie-café, 47 rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève. A bookshop café with brunch and tea. The nearby place de la Contrescarpe has its own page. Le Fooding gives 9 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., breakfast until 11.30 a.m., lunch from noon to 2.45 p.m. and closing on Monday; another source also closes it on Sunday. The shop’s Facebook page, which speaks of its 2025–2026 team and a fifteen-day summer break, is our proof of activity.
• Salon de thé of the Grande Mosquée, 39 rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. Mint tea and oriental pastries, including baklawa, corne de gazelle and makrout, with a terrace. The tea room’s site gives every day of the year from 9 a.m. to midnight without a break. The only editorial trace we hold is a Time Out card of 2020 on the mosque itself, which is why we treat the tea room as a landmark rather than a reviewed address. The mosque is covered in the Grand Mosque of Paris.
• Café littéraire of the Institut du monde arabe, 1 rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard. The Institut’s café, open Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the week and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at weekends, according to a page of the Institut’s site modified on 4 October 2026. The same page gives a self-service counter, a panoramic restaurant and a tea room, covered in the Institut’s restaurant page.

Photo: Cédric Sicot, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Where they sit

Chanceux is on rue Galande and Tram on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève; the Grande Mosquée and the Institut du monde arabe are on the Jardin des Plantes side. For the gardens themselves, see the Jardin des Plantes.

Photo: Dinkum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The streets of the first two addresses

Chanceux stands on rue Galande, which Wikipedia gives as 165 metres long and opened in 1202 on the Garlande vineyard; in the eighteenth century it was lined with bookshops, and its metro is Maubert-Mutualité on line 10. Tram sits on rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, which is 345 metres long and 23 metres wide, climbs steeply, and follows a Gallo-Roman road between Lutetia and Fontainebleau; it has existed since the thirteenth century. Wikipedia lists the museum of the Préfecture de police at no. 4 (opened in 1975), the publisher YMCA-Press at no. 11 and the former Séminaire des Trente-Trois at no. 52, and gives Maubert-Mutualité and Cardinal Lemoine on line 10 as its stations. Both streets are on the slope between the Seine and the Panthéon, so expect to walk uphill from the river.

Choosing your hour

The four addresses do not keep the same day. Tram, according to Le Fooding, is open from 9 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., serves breakfast until 11.30 a.m. and lunch from noon to 2.45 p.m., and is closed on Monday; another source also closes it on Sunday, so confirm before a Sunday visit. The Grande Mosquée’s tea room is the only one open until midnight, every day of the year from 9 a.m. The café of the Institut du monde arabe works on the institute’s calendar, Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and to 7 p.m. at weekends. Chanceux’s hours are not on the page we read, so we give none. Of the hours we read, only the tea room’s run into the evening.

The two Arab-world cafés

The tea room of the mosque and the café of the institute are 788 metres apart as the crow flies, about 13 minutes on foot by the site’s method. The tea room serves mint tea “generously garnished with fresh mint”, with baklawa, corne de gazelle and makrout, according to its site, and takes no reservation. The institute’s café is one of three places to eat on the ninth floor, with the panoramic restaurant and the self-service counter, and the institute says it has renewed its menu. It shares its floor with a view of the east end of Notre-Dame, which the institute describes, and the terrace below is free. Neither site gives prices on the pages we read.

Getting there

For Chanceux and Tram, use Maubert-Mutualité or Cardinal Lemoine on line 10, which avoids the closure of Saint-Michel on line 4 until 19 December 2026. For the tea room, Place Monge on line 7 is about 228 metres from the mosque as the crow flies, and for the institute, Jussieu on lines 7 and 10 is about 343 metres away.

Combining a coffee with a visit

• Chanceux, rue Galande: the bouquinistes and Notre-Dame are the natural pairs on the river side.
• Tram, rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève: the Panthéon and Saint-Étienne-du-Mont are on the same hill.
• The mosque tea room: the Grand Mosque visit and the Jardin des Plantes, 408 metres from the mosque.
• The institute’s café: the Institut du Monde Arabe and its free terrace.

Two streets of the south side

The tea room of the Grande Mosquée is at 39 rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, a street 570 metres long and 14 to 20 metres wide, named since 2 April 1868 after the zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), a professor at the Muséum. Wikipedia lists, at no. 5, the pavilion of the former horse market, built in 1760 and a historic monument since 1925, and at no. 36 the gate of the Muséum and the Jardin des Plantes. The Pitié hospital occupied the area until its demolition in 1912. The street is served by line 5 at Campo-Formio and by lines 7 and 10 at Jussieu and Monge.

Near Chanceux, the place Maubert holds an old market, established there in 1547 after a transfer from the Île de la Cité; it runs on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays on boulevard Saint-Germain, according to Wikipedia, and Maubert-Mutualité on line 10 serves it. It is a way to place a coffee on a market day.

Where to stay near them

The hotels closest to the Collège de France are listed further down, in the nearby-hotels list, with their walking times. For the Mouffetard side, see the hotels near rue Mouffetard.