With the exception of Bruges, Montpellier is the city I’ve visited most in the last three years. I went pretty much on a whim back in 2022 and loved the place – so much so that I went again later in the year for my big summer holiday. And I loved the city so much that, less than two years later, it wound up being the place where Zoë and I went on honeymoon last May. We both loved that so much that we went back again this year, that same week in May, for another idyllic week eating, drinking, soaking up the sun, people watching and taking photographs.

All of this only happened because at one of the lunches I organise for readers of this blog, regular readers Phil and Kath waxed lyrical about Montpellier, giving me the clear impression that it was the best city break I’d never had. They’d stopped there almost by chance themselves, years back, and become regular visitors as a result. They got the bug. Having had that conversation with them I became a regular visitor myself, and here I am writing this. I got the bug, too. So be warned: if you get to the end of this guide you too might end up developing a fun, if costly, habit.

It does feel though like a city not many people know about, not an obvious candidate for a trip in the same way as Paris, Nice, Bordeaux or Lyon might be. So here’s my attempt to sell it to you: it is an absolute beauty, with a gorgeous old city full of winding lanes and sun-washed squares, wide palm tree-lined boulevards with trams whooshing past. It is a fantastic juxtaposition of old and new, with all that grandeur coexisting with a young, vibrant, metropolitan populace and a lively craft beer scene. It has wine, if you like that, and natural wine, if you like that too.

It has its own Arc de Triomphe and a fantastic neoclassical district, Antigone, built in the Eighties, which looks like it has been there for centuries. It has scruffy street art and plenty of fine art, it has galleries and churches and a thoroughly charming botanical garden. It has little squares like Place de la Canourgue filled with green space, lined by mansions and pavement cafes, and it has Les Arceaux, a grid of little streets under a huge and handsome aqueduct. The food market there during the week is a phenomenal plethora of everything you could want to eat and drink, at night people play skittles in the square or dine outside La Cigale.

It has two excellent indoor markets too, and those trams – in an impressive four-line network that is free for residents and a crazy twenty Euros a week for the rest of us – cover plenty of the city, heading almost all the way to the sea out east. I have never in all my time in Montpellier felt like going somewhere else, but if you do the trains are quick and easy to the likes of Nimes and Avignon – or the port of Sète, which remains on my list to visit some day.

My sales pitch doesn’t scratch the surface. I’ve not mentioned the street food scene at Marche du Lez, or gone into detail about the paintings at Musee Fabre, nor have I mentioned the rue de l’Ancien Courrier, possibly the most beautiful shopping street I have ever seen, like the Marais transplanted somewhere that is nearly always sunny, nearly always warm. I’ve not talked about the splendour of the Promenade de Peyrou, the attractive square with an incredibly photogenic water tower at one end, the Arc de Triomphe at the other.

I could go on and on, but I suspect the rest of this city guide will be long enough as it is. Because apart from Montpellier just being the most amazing place to be: to be a flâneur, to amble and loaf, to sit in the sun and watch the city living and breathing with a mixture of admiration and envy, it is also a stupendous place to eat and drink. And that of course is my focus, why I keep going back and why I’m writing a guide to some of its (many) best bits for a third time. So let’s get on with that, and hopefully once I’m done you’ll want to go there too: easyJet flies there directly from Gatwick, although if you’re time rich you could take the train there from Paris, which would also make it easier to bring back all manner of food and drink.

My previous guide to Montpellier was a bit of a halfway house, written in 2022 and updated in 2024. This one is almost completely overhauled, which means that unless I visited a place in 2024 or this month (or both) I’ve taken it out of the guide.

Many places I’ve left out might well still be good, but I can’t 100% vouch for them. If you’re a completist, you might want to consider Pastis, Reflet d’Obione, Green Lab or Le Reservoir from that guide. I’ve also removed a few places that I revisited in 2025 but didn’t like as much or that, with hindsight, have been supplanted by better options – like l’Artichaut and Popular Brewing.

Where an entry in this guide dates from 2024 I’ve made that clear, otherwise the recommendation is as fresh as they come, at the time of writing. This guide has fewer entries than the previous edition, but I know it’s still a long list. I did seriously consider slimming it down further, but in the end I didn’t: everything in here is worthy of its place.

Two other things before I get started. First of all, although this guide distinguishes between places to eat and places to drink, this is Montpellier and so the two can’t easily be separated. You can drink wonderful stuff at all of the restaurants and often eat cracking food at the bars, so the whole list is worth considering. I had some of my best meals at lunchtime, followed by an evening eating small plates in a bar.

Secondly, I’ve had a few people ask me where to stay in Montpellier. I think the old city can be tricky, because rooms are often cramped and/or expensive, and I never found an Airbnb I liked enough, despite the many advantages that come with having a kitchen and a fridge – although I suppose if I’d been eating stuff from the markets every day this guide wouldn’t exist.

I stay at Les 4 Etoiles, a guesthouse in Les Arceaux, and I can honestly say I wouldn’t recommend anywhere else. The welcome from Pierre is absolutely faultless, the breakfast – fresh fruit juice, freshly made fruit salad, baguette and pastries from a nearby bakery, good coffee – is marvellous, the rooms are wonderful and the little roof terrace comes into its own on a sunny day with a good book and a cold drink. Not only that, but the neighbourhood really does feel like a village close to the heart of the city: six minutes by tram, or a fifteen minute walk away from the centre.

I am already trying to work out when I can return. And when I do, I plan to fill some of the gaps in this guide: further research into Montpellier’s many wine bars is in order, along with a serious deep dive into the patisserie scene, something I promised last time but which is still overdue. I’m not currently in a position to judge between the varying merits of Maison Bonnaire, Clara Jung, Maison l’Oeuf and Scholler, but fingers crossed next time I will be.

Where to eat

1. Bistro Urbain

Bistro Urbain is a lovely little spot in the Écusson, the old city, and when I visited it in 2024 I had possibly my meal of the trip. I still think about the asparagus tartlet I ate there, and the magret de canard, skin seared, pink-centred, served with a terrine of courgette and rhubarb, a curveball ingredient the kitchens of Montpellier like to chuck in to a savoury course to keep you on your toes. I vowed to go there for dinner the next time I visited the city, to do it properly.

I did exactly that, and I had a wonderful meal although, in truth, it just reinforced that lunchtime diners get an astounding deal in this city because the menu didn’t differ hugely, in size, width or quality. The main difference seemed to be that two courses was not an option, so you chose between four – with a very generous amuse bouche and a choice of fish or meat main, or the “menu Pandore” where you got both main courses, but slightly less of each.

I did the latter and although I loved my meal I suspect that next time I would keep it simple. Ravioli of pork with some kind of fermented asparagus panna cotta was 40% good and 60% interesting, and I rather liked the slow-cooked tuna, given a pop with confit lemon and complexity by the addition of smoked haddock. But the other main, the shredded beef with another exceptional courgette terrine – what this restaurant can do with the humble courgette! – wild garlic, wholegrain mustard and a deep, intense jus was so marvellous that I wished I’d just had a bigger portion of that.

In that respect the menu Pandore was aptly named: at the end you kind of wished you hadn’t opened the box. But they made amends with a ludicrously moreish baba au rhum, at its heart a glossy and spiced chai ice cream that gave an old stager a new lease of life. Dinner for two with an excellent bottle of wine came to one hundred and fifty pounds – one of our only pricey meals of the trip but a steal for cooking of this quality.

I am pretty sure Bistro Urbain had a Bib Gourmand when I was deciding to visit them the first time and have lost it since. Based on my visit, that’s about as mystifying as everything else the inspectors do (how Newbury’s Woodspeen or Bristol’s Paco Tapas got a star remains beyond me: both have since been removed).

Bistro Urbain
5 rue Alexandre Cabanel
https://bistrourbain.com

2. Mahé

If Bistro Urbain was my discovery of 2024, I can say without hesitation that Mahé was my discovery of 2025. It’s a little out of the way – I ended up getting there by taking a combination of a tram and a bus – and if it wasn’t worth the detour I wouldn’t waste a moment in telling you so. But no, it is an exceptional place and I’m certain that if it was right in the centre it would be even busier and cost a darned sight more.

Mahé really is one hell of a restaurant. From the roadside, just down from the bus stop, it looks like an unexceptional, squat, concrete structure. What you don’t see until you go in is not only an extremely tasteful dining room but, beyond that, an absolutely gorgeous terrace that captures the sun, a place to completely escape from the noise beyond and, in my experience, any cares you might have.

The menu, at lunchtime, is a crazy forty Euros for three courses and this isn’t the kind of disappointing menu of compromises you’d expect at the likes of, say, London Street Brasserie. Mahé, like Bistro Urbain, gives you a narrow range of choices but that narrowness doesn’t make it any easier. I forewent the chance to eat crab ravioli – one of my favourite things – or pork with black garlic houmous and lacquered aubergine, and it would have hurt a lot more if everything I’d eaten hadn’t been so delectable.

First off, a raft of bang-on asparagus completely buried by its precious cargo of quail – enormously generous amounts of the stuff – covered in shaved foie gras and covered in a muscat reduction, the whole thing beautified with edible flowers. Dishes like this are why French restaurants bring you excellent bread, and no butter.

Even better was to follow with an astounding piece of veal, cooked pink, served with rosemary glazed carrots, a buttery pomme purée and morels that had soaked up a deep, delicious jus like sponges. This dish on its own was worth forty Euros, and might have cost it elsewhere, that it came with two friends in tow at that price almost beggared belief.

Dessert was a classic example of this region’s ingredients allowed to shine without too much mucking about: layer on layer of the lightest, most delicate pastry trapping an indulgent crème mousseline, singing with orange blossom. And under that? Loads and loads of the sweetest, brightest strawberries, quite possibly from the market I’d attended in wonder and envy that morning.

Mahé has interesting opening hours – closed two days a week, only open for lunch two days a week, only open for dinner one day a week. Only on Thursdays and Fridays can you pick a daytime or evening slot. Next time I go to Montpellier I will be sorely tempted to eat there twice.

Mahé
581 Avenue de la Pompignane
https://www.mahe-restaurant.fr

3. Ébullition

I’ll never forget the first thing I ate at Ébullition, back in 2022. It was September, the tail end of the summer, and my starter was a kind of symphony of tomatoes. In the U.K. it would have been called something naff like “textures of tomato” or “tomatoes three ways” but it was just an astounding love letter to a fruit that, somehow, is only ever magical when eaten on the continent: confit tomatoes, tomato sorbet and so on. I can’t remember the rest, but I’ll always remember how that dish made me feel.

I had the a la carte on that occasion, and then last year I had the tasting menu. I would say, actually, that both are equally valid ways to eat there. The former puts more risk on individual courses – but makes you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot when they’re good, as my rolled veal with citrus, jus and liquorice was – the latter is a proper three hour experience but has all the benefits and drawbacks of a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it approach to dishes.

I didn’t go back this year, and writing this now it’s one of my regrets. I’m not the kind of restaurant reviewer to appoint myself Michelin inspector – I leave those pronouncements to the really pompous ones – but when I wrote about Ébullition in 2022 I said their food felt a whisper away from Michelin star status. So I was absolutely delighted when I read that they’d won one this year. Far better than many starred restaurants I’ve visited in the U.K., and well worth a visit if you go to Montpellier.

Ébullition
10 Rue du Pila St Gély
https://restaurant-ebullition.eu/en/english/

4. La Cigale

Cigale was the first place I visited on my 2024 visit to Montpellier. It was a recommendation from Pierre when we checked in after a freakishly early flight from Gatwick, the kind where your airport taxi picks you up so early it’s barely worth going to sleep at all. It was just around the corner from our B&B and we sat outside, exhausted and newlywed in the blazing sunshine and had an extremely good lunch.

This year we returned for lunch on Sunday, a day when Cigale is resolutely open but many places in Montpellier are not. It was the one day of our trip when the heavens opened, a necessary clearing of the air: before that it was almost-warm and overcast with threatening clouds, after that it was nothing but sunshine. That meant that we got to eat inside, something I suspect rarely happens at Cigale, and check out their unobtrusively cool dining room which is great without ever trying too hard.

The food was every bit as good as I remembered. Haddock fritters with yoghurt, mint and coriander felt like they were a few courgettes away from being full-on Greek, but they were outrageously good all the same. It was chucking it down outside, but all sunshine on the plate. I followed it up with a steak tartare, every bit as good as the one I ate there the previous year, but Zoë had an even more covetable dish – a huge, craggy Milanese with a generous amount of Roquefort sauce on top. All that and great wine by the glass. Or, if you’re Zoë, Tripel Karmeliet on draft for a ridiculous seven Euros fifty for a pint.

La Cigale is one of those places that is always open and always busy, true cuisine non-stop. In the morning the terrace is full of paper-reading, coffee-drinking smokers, it is packed at lunch but even in the evening, on a warm day, it buzzes long after the sun has gone down. It is well worth a visit, wherever in the city you’re staying, before exploring the beautiful backstreets of Les Arceaux. I increasingly daydream about living there, getting my meat from the butcher, my fish from the fishmonger, my cheese from the cheesemonger and most of my other needs met by La Cave des Arceaux, the superb wine shop on pretty rue Marioge.

La Cigale
7 Boulevard des Arceaux
https://www.instagram.com/la_cigale_montpellier/

5. La Morue

It has taken me over three years of coming to Montpellier to finally get round to visiting La Morue, a fish and seafood restaurant. That’s despite Phil and Kath raving about it, and Pierre repeatedly marking its location on the Montpellier map he gives us at the start of every holiday. Well, more fool me, because it’s a marvellous little spot.

It’s a very fetching place just along from Place de la Canourgue, with tables that catch the sun and a gorgeous, intricate awning that casts just enough shade. But if you do have to move in, as we did when the sun got too much, it’s an equally attractive dining room with bare tables, wicker shades and memorabilia from nearby Sète on the walls. I’ve not yet visited Sète on any of my visits to Montpellier, but after eating at La Morue I am resolved to.

The menu is largely fish and seafood and everything I had was properly outstanding. Chipirones, baby squid, were far and away the best I’ve had and even better than any of the many specimens I’ve sampled on numerous trips to Andalusia. The coating was irresistible, beautifully seasoned, the squid was tender and the lake of aioli plonked on top left me honking for the rest of the day, as you would want it to.

Zoë’s truffle risotto with grilled scallops was also exceptionally good, but I only had eyes for the ray wing. Two of them turned up on the place, luxuriating in a perfect beurre noisette, golden and crinkled at the edges, scattered with capers and samphire, and I absolutely couldn’t have been happier. A little earthenware dish of potatoes, tomatoes, courgette and yes, still more aioli was a wonderful accompaniment, but I would have been happy just with those wings.

Service was brilliant, the albariño was crisp and delicious and I sat there soaking it up, wanting to build a time machine to go back to 2022 me and tell him not to be an idiot and to go to La Morue toute suite. My lunch there felt like a holiday within a holiday – a kind of Inception-esque experience, but a really enjoyable one.

La Morue
23 rue du Palais des Guilhem

6. Rosemarie

Rosemarie occupies one of the loveliest, most sun-struck spots in the Écusson, not far from the church of Saint Roch. I didn’t make it there until 2024, a fact entirely connected to the fact that they only recently embraced online bookings and, prior to that, their phone just rang and rang. It’s probably because they were so busy, because they occupy one of the loveliest etc. etc., but finally welcoming the internet a quarter of the way through the century is a very welcome development, for me at least.

Eating there last year I was stuck that the food was a lot better than it needed to be, given their enviable spot. I liked my jambon, speckled with almonds, very much and I loved my squid ragout with red Camargue rice and olives. Returning this year the standard didn’t dip at all, and if Rosemarie’s fish croquettes didn’t quite reach the standard of the fritters at La Cigale, the apple millefeuille fell a little short of the dessert at Mahé, the food was still good enough, especially combined with the location, to make it an excellent choice.

Besides, my panzerotto, stuffed with chicken and olives, was joyous. And my main course, a slab of lamb shoulder soaked in jus, topped with lemon and resting on a spelt risotto was even better, the meat falling apart even faster than my resolve not to race through a bottle of white in the sunshine.

In other cities, you could dismiss a restaurant like Rosemarie as just standard tourist bait and maybe, even in Montpellier, it is that. But nevertheless, it’s still rather good.

Rosemarie
3 rue des Soeurs Noires
https://rosemarie-montpellier.fr

7. Les Freres Poulards

My favourite street in Montpellier isn’t its prettiest or its most photogenic. It doesn’t have stone glowing in the sun, or bunting strung overhead. Rue du Faubourg du Courreau is a dusty, scruffy road that connects the edge of Les Arceaux with the boulevards at the perimeter of the old city. At its eastern end there’s a craft beer shop, and a bakery called Flour that is almost the cliché of Instagrammable but, because this is Montpellier, still does amazing cookies. At the western end it has Lebanese restaurants and cafes where men sit outside in the late afternoon, smoking and drinking coffee. Halfway down, somewhere between those things, you’ll find Les Freres Poulards.

It does loads of other stuff on its menu, and when I sat outside last week I’m pretty sure some of my neighbouring tables were eating food from the Italian restaurant opposite – the lasagne looked good, I couldn’t help noticing – but if you go to Les Freres Poulards you’re going for the rotisserie chicken. It really is extremely good, and you get a whole chicken, a well-dressed salad, plenty of flawless frites and a little pot of jus for just over forty Euros.

The chicken lacks the whistles and bells of, say, Bonjardim, but for my money is almost as good – so tender, the skin salted, crispy and as life-affirming as it is lifespan-shortening. But you’ll eat it and really not care about that, and wonder at how everything parts company with the bone so easily. The range of starters is very small – on one visit I had herring and fried potato, which I loved, on another a couple of fried eggs in a skillet, served simply with a strip of bronzed bacon and plenty of thyme. Both were great, but you come here for the chicken. And I always do.

Les Freres Poulards
27 rue du Faubourg du Courreau

8. Le Couperet

Le Couperet is an unusual beast, a smokehouse tucked away in the old city. I first went in 2022, and although I had a blast it rather passed in a blur. I had been to two different beer spots (both in this article) already by then, taking part in the by now regular tradition of, as Zoë puts it, “tearing the arse out of it” on the first night of a holiday. I resolved to go back, but it wasn’t until this trip that I got to try it again.

It is still a really lovely little spot, and although it has tables in the street outside on this occasion I ate in the dining room, which is altogether more tasteful than you might expect with none of the ersatz Americana that blights these kinds of restaurants in the U.K. (that said, I still wish I could go back in time and buy shares in whoever it is that makes Tolix chairs).

Le Couperet’s menu is streamlined and efficient, and if anything makes this a quicker, more casual dining experience, so well suited to drinks elsewhere afterwards. It has a handful of starters, and then the main event is a “planque” with one kind of dead animal per person and as many sides as you think you can handle. And my goodness, but you do get a lot of very nice food: this meal, of all the meals of the trip, was the one deserving of the epithet Zoë gives to big portions: a gut bash (the language of Shakespeare is safe in my wife’s hands).

Don’t be fooled, though, into thinking this is quantity 1, quality 0. Everything I had was extremely enjoyable. I loved my giant pile of ribbon-thin smoky pastrami, plonked on a puddle of spiced mayo and topped with a few pickles in case Vitamin C is something you remotely care about. And then everything on that planque was spot on. There was a massive slab of smoked pork belly, crispy where it should be, meaty where it should be, wobbly where it should be – if only I could say the same about myself – knockout beef ribs, garlic bread stuffed with cheese, smoked baked potatoes with sour cream, a very creditable coleslaw.

The staff work like trojans and the chap behind the counter, who seemed to be on his own, was even more industrious, serving a whole room of happy diners with impressive energy in what must have been a very hot kitchen. They even apologised for keeping us waiting for our mains, which says to me that they are used to customers eating in a hurry. That’s a shame, because it was food worth taking time over.

At the end, when we paid, I said that we’d not been for a few years and asked how they were doing. The chef, moonlighting as a cashier, told me they had had a really tough year last year, but they seemed to be bouncing back. It made me think, as I often do about restaurants, that if you miss out on a place in one visit it might not be there for the next. I’m glad they are still around: I’ll return, and fingers crossed this persuades someone, out there in the ether, to try them too.

Le Couperet
3 rue des Tessiers
https://www.le-couperet-smokehouse-restaurant.fr/en/

9. Hop Smash Burger

Burgers are as popular in Montpellier as they are in the U.K., and the old city offers a number of options. Other places on this list, like Broc’Cafe and La Barbote, do their own versions. But I visited Hop Smash, a little spot just down the way from the church of Saint Roch, in both 2022 and 2024 and both times I had a magnificent burger. At the time, I think it was possibly the best smashed burger I’d ever had, and even now I’m not sure it’s yet been surpassed.

I do think they have shrunk them from two patties to one, and when I strolled past this year I couldn’t see any option on their menu to double up, but even so they have spot on caramelisation and crinkled, crispy edges and are an excellent quick, casual option for drinks before a night out or lunch on the run. Their fries with feta and Cajun spices are also surprisingly good and the beers – brewed especially for the restaurant, if I remember rightly – are much better than they need to be.

Hop Smash Burger
9 Rue du Puits du Temple
https://hop-smashburger.fr

10. Bravo Babette

Bravo Babette, a self-styled “sandwich social club” near the botanical gardens, is part of a new generation of Montpellier hospitality businesses I’ve seen cropping up in the last year or two. Like Deli Corner, a sandwich joint near the church of Saint Roch, it has irreverent branding and concentrates on doing a few things really well. One of them is comms in general and social media in particular. Another, it turns out, is sandwiches.

Everything is made in house – which you should be able to guarantee but can’t always, with sandwiches – and the attention to detail is quite something. My sandwich, the Domi, crammed panko-crumbed chicken breast, tonkatsu sauce and pickled red cabbage into a sturdy brioche from nearby Maison Bonnaire. But the star of the show was a kaffir lime mayo that took this combination from familiar to exceptional. Zoê’s choice, stracciatella with prosciutto cotto and pesto, was more conventional but no less worthy.

Add in the fact that you can get a side of roasted new potatoes slathered in chimichurri and a home made lemonade in a very decent meal deal and you have a winner on your hands. Bravo indeed.

Bravo Babette
31 rue Jean Jacques Rousseau
https://www.instagram.com/bravobabette/

11. Les Glaces MPL

When it comes to ice cream, I know some people rate Padova, the gelateria in the old city. I’ve been, and it’s quite nice, but it has one significant problem, which is that it isn’t Les Glaces MPL.

Les Glaces MPL is in one of the indoor food markets of Montpellier, and it does some of the best ice cream I’ve had. I like to make multiple visits on a trip, so I can try the conventional stuff at least once but also give the leftfield flavours a go. So the salted caramel and the milk chocolate are as good as any – and better than Padova’s – and if you love ice cream as I do Les Glaces MPL is a must-visit for that.

But I also have a soft spot for some of the curveballs. On my visit last year I adored the clever heat of a chocolate ice cream laced with piment d’espelette, and previously I’ve loved their strawberry, mint and basil sorbet. This time, I tried an orange zest confection that was part ice cream, part marmalade, all wonderful, and a rosemary ice cream which I mostly tried so I could say I’d eaten rosemary ice cream. When I go back, because I will go back, I will hope they have their black sesame ice cream back on, because it’s one of my favourite things to eat in the whole of Montpellier.

Les Glaces MPL
Place Alexandre Laissac
https://www.lesglacesmpl.fr

12. Des Reves Et Du Pain

This bakery is just down from the Arc de Triomphe, and on nearly every visit I have ever paid it there’s been a queue out onto rue Eugène Lisbonne. Bizarrely, on this visit I had no such trouble both times I went to Des Rèves Et Du Pain. I have no idea why, but I wasn’t complaining. It certainly wasn’t because of a drop-off in quality: their pain au chocolat is the equal of anything I’ve had in Paris, which means it’s the equal of anything I’ve had anywhere.

I can’t vouch for their patisserie, and my intel suggests there are better places in the city for that, but they also do the most incredible savoury stuff. On our final day, we went there to try and find something for a light lunch on our roof terrace before the sad taxi trundle to the airport. We were rewarded with utterly gorgeous focaccia, filled with a pea pesto, feta and walnuts, which was somehow like the Mediterranean and sunshine in sandwich form.

“Stuff from Pret is going to seem pretty shit after this, isn’t it?” I said. Zoë nodded sagely, although we both knew it was as close to a rhetorical question as you were going to get.

Des Rêves Et Du Pain
10 rue Eugène Lisbonne
https://desrevesetdupain.com

Where to drink

1. Broc’Café

I have always loved Broc’Café, a grand spot right opposite the Jardin des Plantes where you can sit on the pavement and watch the trams go by. But I think it was only on this trip that I really fully appreciated how good it was.

It is always busy and bustling, but always seems to have space. It has an exceptionally good beer list for somewhere that isn’t a craft beer spot per se, with beers on tap by Brasserie Le Detour and Prizm, who are probably my favourite local brewery. Hopstand, a 6% IPA by the former, is increasingly a regular at many places, making it Montpellier’s answer to Parka or Steady Rolling Man. On one visit there I had a beautiful cider with pineapple, again by a local producer and a wonderful surprise package.

The food looks excellent, too, and seeing burgers arrive at other tables had me rubbernecking like a motherfucker. But on one occasion, having missed out on a proper lunch and wanting a mid-afternoon snack, we went for a little slate of charcuterie, cheese, houmous, cornichons and excellent bread and it was just the perfect thing at the perfect time. I think it cost about fifteen Euros too, which made it a steal.

Two other noteworthy things about Broc’Café: one is that the staff, who work their socks off, are without exception lovely, friendly, helpful and a credit to the place. The second is that although you order through them, you can pay at the end using the QR code on your table – and tip, for that matter – before being on your way without an eternal delay waiting to flag someone down. I saw this as a couple of places in Montpellier, but I don’t remember seeing it in the U.K. It’s almost as if there are some trust issues, I’d say.

Broc’Café
2 boulevard Henri IV
https://broccafemontpellier.fr

2. La Barbote

La Barbote, just round the corner from the station, is the eminence grise of Montpellier’s craft beer scene, the trailblazer that was there before the proliferation of beer across the city. It is a brewpub, and with the exception of some bottles from the likes of wild fermentation specialists Sacrilege, everything they sell on site is brewed on site.

Their beer is really lovely, and in a virtuosic array of styles. I’ve had IPAs there, DIPAs, sours and imperial stouts, and loved them all. And that doesn’t do them justice, because those are just the styles I’ll drink: on my visit this month they also had a kolsch, a triple, an altbier, a witbier with fennel, an Earl Grey pale ale and something only referred to as a “wild strong ale” (I’ll take their word for it that it was both).

La Barbote is a big space and the demographic there could teach some U.K. craft spots a thing or too – a huge range of ages, properly diverse in every way and about as far from your Brexitty “pubman” saving cask one warm flat pint at a time as is possible to imagine.

Did I mention the food? The food is great too. I always have the karaage chicken there, and if it wasn’t quite as amazing as on previous visits it was still up there with most karaage I’ve had in the U.K. – plenty of it, too, although maybe in bigger, less gnarled pieces than I’m used to. I’ve always looked enviously at the burgers arriving at other tables but been heading on somewhere else, but on this visit it was our spot for the evening so I enjoyed their classic smashed burger. It wasn’t quite at the standard of Hop Smash, but it wasn’t far off.

When I wrote up La Barbote last I finished with Zoë’s verdict that it was how Zero Degrees would be if it wasn’t shit. To give another frame of reference, and be more topical, Siren RG1 can only wish it was as good as La Barbote.

La Barbote
1 Rue des deux Ponts
https://www.facebook.com/labarbote/

3. Le Discopathe

Le Discopathe is opposite Les Freres Poulards, I have been going there for three years now and I love it very much. It specialises in craft beer and vinyl, it has upgraded its tables to rid itself of the trestle and benches so beloved by every tap yard and street food vendor and those tables catch the sun from lunchtime onwards. And, unlike most of Montpellier’s great beer places which open at 5pm, Le Discopathe is open from noon so it’s perfect for a quality beer in the sun.

On this most recent trip I visited more than once and became even more attached to sitting outside with a beer on the go, watching the world go by and occasionally getting into random conversations with people at neighbouring tables. It is one of my favourite Montpellier people-watching spots, and it would get into this guide for that alone. But the beer is really good too – usually about half a dozen options on keg, all local, although on this visit I couldn’t stray far from Brasserie Le Detour’s excellent, mega-reliable Hopstand.

It is great in the afternoon, great in the early evening, great after sundown when those tables pack with bobo types. It’s just great, I can’t stress this highly enough. The only sad thing about the tables inside is that it’s too loud to hear yourself think, although every time Zoë went inside – without exception – she heard something she really wanted to Shazam. Fortunately, you can get the same experience by keeping tabs on Le Discopathe’s excellent Instagram account, where they post banger après banger, après banger.

Le Discopathe
28 rue du Faubourg du Courreau
https://lediscopathe.com

4. Hopulus Brewpub

Hopulus, like La Barbote, is a brewpub and, like La Barbote, it exclusively serves its own beer, but the resemblances largely end there. Hopulus, in the heart of the old city, must be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever drunk craft beer, all vaulted ceilings, sturdy wooden furniture and honey-coloured stone. It’s an outstanding place, and it really helps that their beers – again, ever-changing and in an array of styles – are extremely good.

What I also love about Hopulus though is the way it challenges the link, a link that sometimes has a feeling of inevitability, between craft beer and pizza/burgers/fried chicken/other street food tropes. Because at Hopulus beer is paired, as is equally valid, with cheese and charcuterie, to triumphant effect. Sitting down with a gorgeous IPA, great bread, a salami, a nutty Comte and an entire Brillat Savarin was a transcendent experience. And that’s before you get on to their cailette, a beautiful pork faggot brought to the table just asking to be sliced thickly and enjoyed slowly.

Partway through this embarrassment of riches I wasn’t sure whether I was having one of the best meals of my trip or creating an exquisite still life. From the look of the photo above, I’m by no means convinced that they’re mutually exclusive.

Hopulus Brewpub
8 rue Collot
https://www.facebook.com/hopulus/

5. Couleurs de Bieres Nord

There are two branches of Couleurs de Bières. The bigger one in the south is in Port Marianne, a sort of modern district which feels a little like Montpellier’s answer to Kennet Island: I’ve been to Port Marianne, but only during the day. Its northern sibling, though, is a cracking little bar. It’s opposite the exotically named Stade Philippidès, and there’s something about watching people running round the track that really puts you in the mood for a cold, crisp beer.

It’s a good example of how Montpellier’s beer scene has evolved even in the time I’ve been going there. When I first visited in 2022 the beers felt more Belgian, with only a couple of beers by local ZooBrew. But returning last year, the list of beers on keg – 8 in total – was much more French, with local breweries really well showcased. It also pairs very nicely with Drapeau Rouge, the next place on this list, if you’re planning a crawl.

Couleurs de Bières Nord
48 rue du Faubourg Saint-Jaumes
https://www.couleursdebieres.fr/front-page/cdb/nord

6. Drapeau Rouge

I’d seen Drapeau Rouge on my summer 2022 visit to Montpellier, but it wasn’t until last year that I managed to pay it a visit. It’s a gorgeous brewpub in Boutonnet, a district a short walk from the old city, with eleven taps, including beers from many of Montpellier’s breweries and a couple brewed by the venue itself. It’s not the comfiest venue in the world, with many of those trestle benches beloved by anyone who’s been to a tap room or a street food market, but I loved sitting outside with a sour and feeling like I was in a part of Montpellier the tourists would never see.

I didn’t get to it this year, which means it is on the note on my phone entitled “Montpellier: next time”. I still want to give their food a go, if only because their website charmingly states that they aim to provide what they call “pub food” de qualité. I bet they do a better job of it than a bloody Wetherspoons microwave and by the looks of the menu, I’ll be on the frites loaded with smoked, spiced pulled pork, or topped with Belgian beef stew..

Drapeau Rouge
53 rue du Faubourg Boutonnet
https://drapeau-rouge.fr

7. Plein Sud

Montpellier is awash with wine and wine bars, and as we’ve established has more than its fair share of places where you can drink good and interesting beer. Is there space, too, for natural wine? The owners of Plein Sud seem to think so, and on the showing of my two visits there I very much agree with them. And the service there is so good, and so winning, that I think they could convince even the most hardened cynic.

It’s another of those beautiful spaces, all stone and wood, not far from Hopulus, with a few tables in the square outside. But really the rooms are so gorgeous – and were nicely cool on a warm spring evening – that I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. Places like Plein Sud remind me very much of Bristol, to the point where I wonder if the owners of, say, Native Vine or Marmo have been to their ilk to pick up tips. Little things like the decor, the prints on the wall and the personalised wine glasses make me think they may well have done.

Plein Sud has half a dozen natural wines by the glass – a mix of white, red, orange and pet nat – along with a couple of mixed fermentation beers from Sacrilege, cannily spotting the overlap in the Venn diagram between these two genres of booze. A lot of natural wine still gets a bad name in this country (good luck finding any in Reading, for instance) but I really enjoyed everything I had. I especially enjoyed the pet nat, a little number called Tohu-Bohu that was hard enough to order sober, let alone after a few glasses.

Plein Sud also has a lovely compact menu of stuff to eat while you explore the wine list. More compact than at Hopulus, for example, but still just big enough that you have choices and those choices aren’t straightforward. I loved the coarse rilletes, served with good bread and a handful of cornichons, and a Beaufort cheese with almost toffee notes to harmonise with the grit.

But the more imaginative stuff was if anything even better. Carpaccio of blue meat radish, carpeted with feta and bathed in really good extra virgin olive oil was a revelation, and I loved the puck of goats cheese with oil, smoked salt and spring onions. But Zoë’s favourite, as it had been on our previous visit, was something called the ‘Dome Plein Sud’, a tower of fromage blanc and goats cheese sandwiching a layer of excellent pesto, crowned with sundried tomatoes and toasted nuts. We left convinced we could recreate it at home, and irked that no U.K. supermarket was interested in saving us the trouble.

Plein Sud
16 rue de la Monnaie
https://www.instagram.com/pleinsud.montpellier/

8. Les Enfants Rouges

Wine bar Les Enfant Rouges was recommended by Pierre, the owner of our B&B, and like all his other recommendations it was utterly reliable. It spans both sides of a busy street in the old city and we only paid it a flying visit in 2024, there for a little while before dinner elsewhere. But the selection of wines by the glass was so good, the staff so accommodating and welcoming and the small plates menu so tempting that I regret not fitting it in during my trip this year.

I fear that my guide does a better job catering for beer and coffee lovers than it does for wine lovers, something I will have to rectify next time around. For what it’s worth, if you do want to do any research of your own when you visit Montpellier, my to do list of wine bars includes the following: Hotel Pinard; GlouGlou; Chez Pinot; and Les Canons.

Les Enfants Rouges
3 Plan Duché
https://www.lesenfantsrouges.fr

9. Cafe BUN

I think that previous versions of this guide had more coffee places in them, and there are more coffee places in Montpellier than I seemed to remember on this month’s visit. But really, for me, it’s simple: I went to Cafe BUN on rue des Étuves, just down from Place de la Comédie. A lot. And I highly recommend you do too. They have some space outside, the service is excellent and the coffee is exceptional. They roast their own, and once you’ve had it you don’t really look elsewhere.

Do you still want another suggestion? Okay, here goes: if you don’t fancy that go to the second branch of Café BUN, on Boulevard du Jeu de Paume. It has more seats outside, they catch the sun splendidly and you can watch the trams go past. All around that street are concept stores and little boutiques selling things you’ll want to bring home with you. The inside is much more spacious and bustling, and it has a better loo. Oh, and you can buy beans there to take home. I have a couple of unopened bags in my kitchen as I write this, and I know when they’re opened that a little bit of me – a very grateful bit – will be transported back to the city, even if only momentarily.

Café BUN
5 rue des Étuves/32 Boulevard du Jeu de Paume
https://cafebun.fr

10. Coldrip

The only other place I’d recommend for coffee is Coldrip, a sort of Australian-style brunch cafe in a very attractive square not far from the Musée Fabre. Their coffee is really not half bad, and Zoë has a real weakness for their mocha, which comes with a little pot of Chantilly cream. But really, I recommend Coldrip for the brunches. On previous visits I’ve had their crispy chicken burger, which was downright terrific, and pancakes stacked high with bacon where they leave a big old jug of maple syrup at the table for you to dispense with extreme prejudice. Again, this quality, this lack of stinginess, can come as a surprise after visiting enough cafés in the U.K.

On this occasion, though, I chose the avocado toast, to live up to my stereotypical role as a sybarite who is not yet on the housing ladder. Again, it was a beaut of a dish: great bread, which to be fair you start to take for granted in France, plenty of avocado, feta, pink pickled onions, quite a lot of top notch streaky bacon, a very well-poached egg and a cornucopia of seeds scattered with abandon. This dish made me realise that, with the exception of The Switch, nowhere back home does this dish half so well.

Coldrip is justly very successful, and has opened a second branch in Port Marianne: I tried to go there but Coldrip was closed, adding further weight to my theory that it was the Kennet Island of Montpellier.

But the original branch was busy when I went, and to be honest it always seems to be: we queued to get a table at lunchtime, and as we enjoyed our meal there were still people waiting to be seated. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was like that until mid to late afternoon every day, and it’s richly deserved. Other people may be very excited about our one or two extra branches of Café Yolk in the offing, but I would trade both of them, without hesitation, for a single Coldrip.

Coldrip
4 rue Glaize
https://coldrip-food-and-coffee.business.site

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