La Tour d’Argent (‘The Silver Tower’) is a historic restaurant in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, France. It is located at 15 Quai de la Tournelle. It has a rating of one star from the Guide Michelin.
The restaurant claims that it was founded in 1582, and that it was frequented by Henri IV, but offers no documentation to support these or other claims about its history. The Quai de la Tournelle, where the restaurant stands, was not paved until 1650, before which it was “a slope, often flooded and almost always made inaccessible by mud”. The restaurant today is at the corner of the Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, which did not exist until the end of the eighteenth century.
The restaurant does not appear in an 1824 list of “The principal restaurants, who are distinguished by the elegance of the decoration of their salons and by the number and the care taken with the dishes found there…”. In 1852, a metals dealer occupied number 15 Quai de la Tournelle, and a hairdresser and wood dealer number 17.
Baedeker‘s 1860 guide to Paris describes the establishment’s current location as “out of the way”, while mentioning a restaurant associated with a low-cost “Hotel of the Tour d’Argent”: “Between Notre Dame and the jardin des Plantes, on the Quai de la Tournelle, facing the bridge of this name, there is a little hotel and the restaurant Lecoq; Hôtel de la Tour d’argent, a bit out of the way, it is true, but well kept and cheap (room, 2 francs, beefsteak, 1 franc). Facing a swimming school, which has the advantage of not yet being encumbered and imprisoned by all the filth of Paris.”
The restaurant was owned in the 1890s and 1900s by Frédéric Delair, who began the tradition of presenting a numbered certificate to each person who ate the restaurant’s signature dish, pressed duck. A dinner was held there for the Wright Brothers in 1906. In 1912, the Terrail family bought the restaurant. It was operated first by André Terrail, then by his son Claude, who died in 2006 at the age of 88, and then by Claude’s son André.
Duck, especially the pressed duck, is the speciality (Canard à la presse, Caneton à la presse, Caneton Tour d’Argent, and recently renamed “Caneton de Frédéric Delair”). The restaurant raises its ducks on its own farm. Diners who order the duck receive a postcard with the bird’s serial number, now well over 1 million. (Serial number #112,151 went to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, #203,728 went to Marlene Dietrich, and #253,652 went to Charlie Chaplin).
The restaurant’s wine cellar, guarded around the clock, contains more than 450,000 bottles whose value was estimated in 2009 at 25 million euros (£22.5 million). Some 15,000 wines are offered to diners on a 400-page list. During a routine inventory control in 2024, wine worth more than €1.5m was found to be missing from the wine cellar.
The dining room has an excellent view of the river Seine and Notre Dame.
