Paris | The Turkish Café

Louis Léopold Boilly (La Bassée 1761-1845 Paris)
The entrance to the Turkish Garden Café 1812 [1]

Mavi Boncuk |The Turkish Café ('Jardin Turc' or 'Café Turc'), which was located on the south side of the Boulevard du Temple (no. 29) [2] in the Marais district in the east of central Paris, opened in 1780 as an ice cream parlor. After its operations where taken over by Bonvalet in 1811, it evolved into a proper restaurant, known for its fine wine cellar and exceptional cuisine. The historian Victor Fournel, writing of 'vieux Paris' in 1887, recounted that the Café Turc 'was the largest and most beautiful on the boulevard, the one where one was the best served. It was renowned for its excellent ice creams. There one could take one's reveries out for an airing through two charming gardens, discuss politics or news of the day seated on a bench with some nice old rentier from the Marais, play chess, dominoes, draughts on a café table, or else spin tops, play toad in the hole, or swing under the cool shadows.' (Quoted in Siegfried, 1995, p. 137)

The café's most distinctive features were its decorations à la turque, and its spacious gardens with exotic, Turkish-styled pavillions. The café's easily recognized green-striped awnings, canopies, and tented kiosks surmounted with crescent finials. Fantasy architecture of this sort found its origins in aristocratic garden follies, and the Café Turc served in some ways as a more democratic and public 'surrogate villa'. It was the oldest commercial operation of its kind in Paris, though other cafés with exotic decor and pleasure gardens soon followed its success, such as the Chinese Café.

The proprietor of the Jardin Turc, Bonvallet, was among the Marais citizens who strenuously objected to Louis Napoleon's coup d'état of 2 December 1851. Bonvallet continued the café of the Jardin-Turc into the years before World War I.

Boulevard du Temple. Le Café Turc by Frederick Nash(1782-1856), British painter of architectural subjects.

[1] Christies sold it for a record-shattering $4,562,500 to Getty Museum / January 27, 2010.
[2] It runs from the Place de la République to the Place Pasdeloup, and its name refers to the nearby Knights Templars' Temple where they established their Paris priory.
Caffé Turc sur le boullevard [sic] [du Temple by Jean Baptiste Lallemand (1716, Dijon - 1803, Paris) French painter, mainly active in landscapes and genre art.