A cemetery with cocktails: La Coupole and the spirit of the brasserie

La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have an Esprit Brasserie loyalty card, as I have, you can dine in homage to dead continental intellectuals — plus Ernest Hemingway — whenever you wish, and with 20 per cent off. They sit, dead in black and white on the walls in their spectacles, like the toys Star Wars sold but more rigorous and interesting. Ernest Hemingway is to Parisian brasseries what Mickey is to Disney World; Edith Piaf — or Salvador Dalí — is Daffy Duck. Me, I sat under a playful cartoon of Jewish intellectuals murdered by the Nazis. Happy Easter, Europe.

The street is a shrieking boulevard; the exterior is Art Deco at its most inhumane and bulbous; the room is vast. The only restaurant of similar size I have seen is Britannia on the Queen Mary 2, which is based on La Coupole (established 1927), although I doubt it would admit it. La Coupole has 650 seats; waiter station upon waiter station, a small restaurant-city. The dominant colour is pale brown, which is a shame — brown booths, brown banquettes, a flinty brown bar. England, for whom the brasserie is a themed restaurant, like the hot-dog bar or the Stringfellows bar, does them prettier, but less well. The bones of this is business. It is not about the art. It is about the money.

Even so, there are 13 famous pillars, painted by early customers, and memorialised on the register of historic monuments, for everything is listed in Paris, even, I imagine, the bins, in a narcissistic frenzy of peculiarly French nationalism. The website rudely calls them ‘the minor masters of the Roaring Twenties’ — but how can they complain, being dead and beyond bad service? There are naked women — naked women of all kinds, as long as they are naked — pliant or furious and everything in between, and stranger things: a man in spats fishing; a cat staring out a demon; a painting of — am I right? — necrotic flesh.