Who we are, and who we are not
About this archive
This is an independent archive about Cafe Gitane. It is not the restaurant, and it is not connected to the restaurant.
What this site is
Cafe Gitane opened at 242 Mott Street in June 1994 and closed, without announcement, in December 2025. When it closed, the official website went offline. Thirty years of photographs, menus and detail stopped being reachable, and the search results filled with automated business listings that mostly still insist the place is open.
This site exists to do two things. First, to answer the question most people arrive with: is Cafe Gitane still open, and what happened. Second, to keep a proper record of the cafe — its history, its food, the neighbourhood it helped create, and the two locations that are still trading.
What this site is not
We want to be completely unambiguous about this, because a site with this much detail can easily be mistaken for an official one:
- This is not the official Cafe Gitane website.
- We have no affiliation with Cafe Gitane, with Luc Lévy, or with any current or former owner, operator or employee.
- We cannot take reservations, process orders, arrange deliveries, handle private events, or pass messages to the business.
- We cannot confirm today's opening hours for any location. Please contact the Brooklyn or Tokyo cafes directly.
- Nothing here should be read as a statement by or on behalf of the business.
Photographs
The photographs on this site are the restaurant's own images, preserved from the site that went offline. They are reproduced here for reference and commentary as part of a historical record, with captions describing what they show. Copyright in them remains with the original photographers and with Cafe Gitane.
If you hold rights in any image here and would like it credited differently or removed, write to us via the contact page and we will act on it promptly. The same goes for the business itself: if the owner would prefer this archive not to exist, we will take it down.
How we source things
Everything factual here is drawn from published reporting and from the cafe's own archived material. Where the record is thin or contested — exact opening hours, whether avocado toast was genuinely first served here — we say so rather than smoothing it over. Where reporting conflicts, we describe the conflict.
The main published sources behind these pages are Gothamist and WNYC's coverage of the 30th-anniversary book, Time Out New York and Eater on the closure, The Infatuation's reviews, Brownstoner on the Brooklyn opening, and McNally Editions' material for Cafe Gitane: 30 Years by Isobel Lola Brown.
Corrections
If you were a regular, worked there, or simply know something we have got wrong, please tell us. Oral history is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost when a place closes quietly, and corrections from people who were actually in the room are more valuable than anything we can reconstruct from press clippings.
Advertising
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