This cafe's location in one of the grandest of Mitterrand's grands travaux guarantees a crowd passionately devoted to music; the recorded sounds that play in the background are likely to be more diverse and more eclectic than those in any other cafe in Paris. The red-and-green velour setting might remind you of a modern opera house, with windows overlooking nearby place de la Fontaine. Although it originated in the late 1990s as a cafe serving light platters, sandwiches, and drinks, its cuisine became dramatically more sophisticated in 2002, the year it was taken over by culinary wunderkind and nightlife impresario Alain Poudou. The menu was inspired by the cuisine within one of Paris's trendiest hotels, the Costes, and is likely to include lobster-studded risotto, roasted rack of lamb with thyme, very fresh salads of the type you'd find in Italy, brochettes of shrimp with spinach, and sliced baked salmon in champagne sauce. As the evening progresses, this place takes on more of the ambience of a hip nightclub, when DJs spin some kind of music most nights, and with an especially dense concentration of urbanized, young, and restless hipsters appearing on Friday and Saturday nights.