Le Gauclair

Le Gauclair a été un restaurant ouvert sous le Premier Empire, très en vue dans l'entre-deux-guerres, installé 96 rue de Richelieu, à Paris, à côté du quotidien Le Journal, près de l'Opéra-Comique.

Dans Paris à la carte, guide des restaurants des années 1900, il est écrit à destination des touristes britanniques : « one of these, Gauclair's, was founded in 1800, and still flourishes on its old site, especially at the luncheon hour »[1].

Dans The Gourmet's Guide to Europe il est dit : « If you walk up Restaurant Gauclair to the Rue de Richelieu from the boulevards you come, after a hundred yards Rue St-Marc or so, to what appears to be one of the ordinary Parisian drinking houses. The bar, however, is of marble, and if you look up to the first floor you see an illuminated sign telling that this is the Restaurant Gauclair. Round the corner in the Rue St. Marc is the entrance. There is a small white room on the ground floor, and this is the favourite dining-place. There are three other dining-rooms on the first floor, and a little salon for private parties. The house at meal times is always in a bustle, and resonant with the voices of the waiters shouting orders down speaking-tubes to the cook in the basement. The cookery ot the Gauclair to-day, under M. Maurice, is very much what it must have been when the restaurant was first founded in 1810. It is the good bourgeoise cuisine, everything excellent of its kind. Nor is it likely to deteriorate, for most of its clientele are the gentlemen who drive quills and occasionally wield the epee de combat on behalf of the Temps & the Matin, and other great papers which have their offices in the neighbour-hood. Most of these gentlemen are gastronomes on the highest order »[2].