By hello
Status: Closed in 1913. (en.wikipedia.org) Literary passage: “Occasionally he dined with a friend or two at the Café Anglais” — Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. (gutenberg.org) Why it matters: Café Anglais was one of the great names of boulevard luxury, and writers repeatedly use it that way. James makes it a mark of cultivated habit; Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, and Karen Blixen all draw on its aura of expense, appetite, and worldly distinction. In Babette's Feast, the restaurant becomes almost mythical: the remembered standard against which transformative art at the table is measured. (en.wikipedia.org)