Holiday Café is a teeny tiny, typically Parisian café and restaurant in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. It was inaugurated by Frank Durand, the French art-director behind the reedition of the American magazine since 2014.
It is one of those fashionable places you would rather think of avoiding with kids… but let me tell you: you would miss out on a very nice experience and amazing food!
The café might not be spacious but it is welcoming, beautifully decorated and has an extremely nice, willing to help, friendly waiter: Alexandre. Along with the top quality ingredients and delicious meals, he certainly helps to make Holiday Café a special place!
The guideline for the short but sharp menu is that the base ingredients are of the best quality and don’t require undergoing any transformation. The café itself describes their way of cooking as assemblage. Put simply, eating at Holiday is like grabbing a quick luxury lunch. My husband had a panini which he still dreams of and I had a simple green salad and a small plate of pata negra, both delicious. We shared a piece of the pecan covered chocolate fondant, probably one of the best cakes we have ever eaten! Prices are quite fair too, when you’re used to Parisian standards.
As we went for lunch on a Saturday and had heard about the limited space in the restaurant, I called first to know if having our stroller with us would be a problem. I highly recommend you doing that if one of your kids still needs one, just in case, to avoid arriving there and finding another family who already took up the space with theirs. I was told that if it was not too big they could make it fit. (We have a Bugaboo Bee, which is already considered to be rather big in Paris!) And although the restaurant was clearly not designed to house strollers and was fully booked, it worked well and the waiter was not bothered by us. We went in the Winter but during Summer months, the restaurant has a terrace, making everything a lot easier if you’re carrying a stroller.
Holiday Café is open from 10 AM to 11 PM, making it the perfect place to stop for coffee in the morning if you are staying close by or to enjoy lunch before heading elsewhere in the 16th arrondissement, to the beautiful Greenhouses of Auteuil for example!
As you can imagine, if coming at meal times, reservation is key as the seats are limited. There is an online booking link on the website, or you could call directly if you have additional questions.
Holiday Café
192 avenue de Versailles
75016 Paris
Open Wednesday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 11:00 PM, Tuesday and Sunday from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM