Les Ambassadeurs (restaurant)

Le café-concert des Ambassadeurs. Edgar Degas, 1876-77. The singer is probably Victorine Demay.

Les Ambassadeurs was a restaurant in Paris, France. It closed on March 31, 2013, due to renovations of the Hôtel de Crillon. The hotel will reopen in 2015.^[1]

Location

It was situated in the Hôtel de Crillon, facing the Place de la Concorde in the heart of the city. Built in 1758, Les Ambassadeurs operated as a restaurant within the hotel since the mid 19th century.

History

Decorated in an 18th-century rococo style, Les Ambassadeurs reached its peak of fame as a restaurant and nightclub (known as a café-concert) in the 1870s 80s and 90s, a few hundred meters from the Palais Garnier. Always a center of entertainment for the aristocracy, in the 1870s it was a regular destination of some of the best known figures of art and the demi-monde. Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed visitors at the night club,^[2] and Aristide Bruant performed there.

Current restaurant

With chef Jean-François Piège, the restaurant had two Michelin stars.

References

1. See the website of the Hôtel de Crillon.
2. See Toulouse-Lautrec's Fashionable People at Les Ambassadeurs (1893). A Study is at the Tate Galleries. See also Degas' Cabaret (1876-77).

• George E. Smith, III. James, Degas, and the Modern View. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 56–72
• 2001 Review of Les Ambassadeurs at the Daily Telegraph
• PAUL GOLDBERGER. GRAND PARISIAN ROOMS ON A LEGENDARY SQUARE. The New York Times, July 7, 1985.

External links

• John Mariani. Virtual Gorment Review, July 10, 2005.

Coordinates: 48°52′02″N 2°19′18″E / 48.86732°N 2.32155°E