As the centre of Bohemian Paris shifted from Montmartre to Montparnasse at the start of the 20th Century, artists like Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall began to frequent La Rotonde where they brushed shoulders with Russian revolutionaries and later with Alice Prin, the singer and artists' model known as 'Kiki' or the Queen of Montparnasse. During the interwar period, the Surrealists took over along with American expat authors and members of the Lost Generation including Authur Miller, F. Scott. Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, as well as George Gershwin. 

You may recognise this hole-in-the-wall from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. In the film, it's here that Owen Wilson's character first meets Ernest Hemingway. Located in the Latin Quarter, this historic restaurant was one of the author's many haunts as it was popular with the intellectual set of his day. Over the years, everyone from Victor Hugo to James Joyce has dined at Le Polidor and it's fair to say that the cuisine hasn't changed much in that time (nor have the facilities - the toilet is 'Turkish style', which basically means a hole in the floor with foot prints to stand in).

One of several Montparnasse cafés favoured by artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century - Paul Verlaine and Emile Zola and Charles Baudelaire were regulars. After World War I, La Closerie became a regular hangout for American expat authors. Here Hemingway worked on The Sun Also Rises and read Fitzgerald's manuscript of The Great Gatsby.