The Historic Bistro Where Picasso Had Dinner (Saint-Germain, Paris)

In 1937, Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in his studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins, in Paris's 6th arrondissement. A few doors down the same street, a former cobbler's shop turned restaurant fed the neighborhood's artists. It still does.

The street where Guernica was born

Picasso kept his studio on rue des Grands Augustins from 1936 to 1955, in the very building where Balzac had set his story of an obsessive painter, "The Unknown Masterpiece" — a coincidence Picasso relished. The plaque is still on the wall at number 7, a hundred meters from the Seine.

His neighborhood table

Roger la Grenouille opened in 1930 at 26-28 rue des Grands Augustins. Its founder, Roger Spinhirny, served frog legs to the artists, writers and night owls of Saint-Germain — Picasso and Balthus among them, along with Saint-Exupéry, the singer Mistinguett, and later guests as unlikely as Pope John XXIII and the British Queen Mother. The 1930s dining room has kept its décor, its frog figurines and its irreverent spirit.

Make it a walk

Start at the Guernica plaque (7 rue des Grands Augustins), stroll to the Seine and the bouquinistes, loop through Saint-Germain-des-Prés — then end where the locals always did: over a plate of frog legs in the dining room Picasso knew.

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