The Gazette Café is, by its own description, "l'autre lieu" — an unclassifiable, hybrid space in the heart of Montpellier, a stone's throw from the Saint-Roch station. It's a place you come to for a drink, a meal with friends, a talk or a concert, a tasting, an exhibition, a dance class, or simply to enjoy a good book, all with a single guiding idea: to create connection. Born from an original initiative led by a team of young people around Édouard Serre, with the backing of the weekly newspaper La Gazette de Montpellier, it opened in 2015 in a former Peugeot garage, transformed into a temple of culture and healthy food while keeping its industrial soul intact — and it has continued to grow since, most recently with a fresh extension. Under its glass roof, an olive tree anchors a dining room hung with rotating photo and painting exhibitions.
On the food side, the Gazette Café is a proudly locavore brasserie where the chef selects the best regional produce — seasonal fruit and vegetables, flavoursome French-origin meats, fresh fish — all prepared in kitchens that open onto the room, with always a vegan option on the menu. The cooking blends tradition and modernity, with starters like a coconut-milk lentil soup or a sea bass ceviche with house sweet-potato chips, and mains running from a spinach-and-tomme-catalane veggie burger and a vegan Indian masala dosa to an Aubrac beef burger, oven-baked royal sea bream with sauce vierge, or a beef faux-filet with chimichurri — finishing with treats like a banoffee pie, mango panna cotta, or café gourmand. In the evening, the kitchen shifts to sharing tapas — sweet-potato fries, patatas bravas, gyozas, chorizo grilled in Muscat de Frontignan, the chef's roast camembert, burrata with pesto — to enjoy around the olive tree, in front of the stage, or in the quiet of the patio. The bar is mostly organic, with regional Occitan wines, local craft beers, bio fruit juices and hot drinks, apéritifs, and a house cocktail that changes every month.
But what truly defines the place is its cultural life. There's live music in the evenings — blues, swing, Latino and world music, French chanson, jazz, trad, rock — and the venue has given a real boost to emerging regional talent, alongside its many "cafés littéraires": conferences, debates, screenings, and meetings on every imaginable theme. A little theatre, a musical stage, a reading salon with its well-stocked library, and a daytime co-working mezzanine round out the experience. The Gazette Café also hosts swing nights and regular festivals devoted to classical piano, theatre, and literature, and welcomes seminars and private events in its various rooms. Open from morning until late, with much of its cultural programming free of charge, it's a genuinely singular, warm, and convivial institution in the heart of Montpellier — a true café littéraire for the twenty-first century, where good food, good wine, music, books, and human connection all come together.