The scruffy exteriors of the buildings along the Rue de Belleville haven’t changed, but something is definitely stirring in this bawdy working-class neighborhood tucked into the northeasternmost corner of Paris. Creative types who could afford to live elsewhere are pouring into the dense village perched on a series of hills straddling the 19th and 20th arrondissements, and while low rents are part of the draw, there’s something more going on—an act of resistance, perhaps, to the centrifugal forces of money and real estate that have gentrified so many other “gritty” and proudly populaire neighborhoods. Belleville is a great escape from the elegant, orderly Paris created by Baron Haussmann. Local girl Édith Giovanna Gassion, a.k.a. Édith Piaf, who launched her career as the tantalizing incarnation of the neighborhood’s rough-and-tumble side, would be proud. (A commemorative plaque at 72 Rue de Belleville informs passersby that she was born there in 1915, though she actually saw the light of day in a nearby hospital.)
Whether the gradual arrival of artists will doom the earthy, multiethnic character of Belleville remains to be seen, but for now the influx merely adds another layer of skepticism to a neighborhood that’s always been fiercely independent. Previously a rustic outpost, Belleville boomed during the 1860s, as new housing was built for the thousands of workers needed for the proliferating factories, stores, and rail lines; the liberal character of this freshly minted proletarian neighborhood made it a notorious center of opposition to the rule of Emperor Napoleon III. Belleville was, in fact, the last quartier to surrender during the Paris Commune of 1871, and by 1900 it had become a teeming and rather louche area known for its music halls, cabarets, and pulsing street life. Belleville was a magnet for immigrants—by the 1930s, it already had large communities of Armenians, Greeks, and Polish Jews—but it was the tumultuous unraveling of France’s colonial empire in North Africa, in the early 1960s, that changed the area completely. “North African Jews moved to France because they feared reprisals in the newly independent Arab countries,” explained my Franco-Greek friend Athanos, who was born in Tunis but grew up in Belleville. “But in Belleville, they were joined by Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, and repatriating French nationals. When we all ended up together in this run-down-but-friendly part of Paris, it was a great comfort, since we were all strangers in a strange land.” Recently, though, one of his favorite Tunisian-Jewish restaurants along the Boulevard de Belleville has closed, as Asian immigrants flock to the neighborhood.
I’ve never found a place that warms and intrigues with more human variety than does Belleville. I also prize its wonderful and generally inexpensive restaurants, but what I ultimately treasure is that this is a place where people still tell each other stories. And depending on what kind of stories I want to hear, I choose between two favorite cafés, La Vielleuse and Aux Folies.
I discovered La Vielleuse after a star-crossed love affair and continued to hang out there after the assignation had sputtered out. This café at the corner of the Rue de Belleville and the Boulevard de Belleville has delivered some remarkable people into my life, and I don’t know of another place in Paris that so reliably serves up so much guileless mystery for the price of a coffee. Ten years ago, ducking in out of the rain after a spat, I sat at a table here, ordered a coffee, and fitfully read an Italian novel a friend had just written. Very quickly I became more curious about the people around me, who must have been speaking at least a dozen languages. After I closed my book, the woman with the green eyes and the blouse of elaborate gold embroidery at the table next to me said, “Excusez-moi, Monsieur, vous venez d’où?” Connecticut didn’t seem to have any exotic resonance in that large room, but maybe because she’d changed countries so often during her own lifetime, Margaretta, a textile designer, was intrigued. “An American in Paris,” she chirped, in English, and then, “Didn’t Mark Twain live in Connecticut?” (He did, in Hartford.) Born into an Italian-Jewish family in Algiers, she’d lived in Turin, Israel, and Uruguay before settling in Belleville some 20 years ago. “Of all the places I’ve ever lived, this one is the kindest for people who’ve had disrupted lives,” she explained, filling me in on the shaggy details of her own—from her family’s expropriated textile factory in Algeria to her sour stint in Italy as a seamstress. “Et donc,” she said, “Belleville est chez moi [Belleville is my home].”
Margaretta also told me about a fabulous kosher couscous place, now gone, and about Lao Siam, one of the best-value Asian restaurants in Paris, which is how I first learned that this part of the city, generally ignored by food guides and the mainstream French press, actually is home to quite a bit of good food.
If I went on to glean the names of many of the best restaurants in the 19th and 20th arrondissements through conversations at La Vielleuse, more recently it’s the chatter at the unselfconsciously funky Aux Folies that has propelled me toward some seriously good dinners. Every night this compact café is packed with a churning crowd of folks who’ve ditched their easels and keyboards long enough to catch up with friends over a glass of red wine.
While the signboards along the Rue de Belleville still read as a uniquely alluring global menu—Cok Ming, Le Caire,L’Iliade, and Welcome Pizza, among others—two excellent restaurants tucked away in side streets, Le Baratin and Le Chapeau Melon, show how Belleville is changing. At Le Baratin, Argentinean-born chef Raquel Carena (see “Smooth Operator,” page 118) serves inventive contemporary bistro dishes with flavors inspired by Argentina, Morocco, India, Mexico, Spain, and many other countries. Her chalkboard menu changes almost daily, but dishes like cod ceviche, lentil soup with foie gras, salmon marinated with olive oil and lemongrass, and duck with citrus—along with homey desserts like a cloudlike panna cotta—offer up a delicious take on the way Parisian bistro cooking is being subtly reinvented by chefs whose outlook is reflexively cosmopolitan.
At the nearby Chapeau Melon (“The Bowler Hat”), chef Olivier Camus’s market menus reveal a similar talent for tweaking favorite bistro dishes with a touch of something foreign—a drizzle of mint-flavored oil to spike a cold asparagus soup with watercress quenelles, for example, or a touch of sumac in the vinaigrette that brightens griddle-seared slices of paleron (beef shoulder) served with a succulent garnish of baby vegetables. Not surprisingly, the dove-gray and barn-red dining room of his popular bistrot à vins is always jammed.
“Aside from a great meal, is there anything to see up there?” people ask when I suggest a day trip to Belleville. I always send them to the rather otherworldly Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a remarkable example of 19th-century urban and social engineering created from an old quarry during the 1860s by architect Jean-Charles Alphand. The park was intended to civilize the working classes of the area by offering them their own little bit of Eden. Whether that high-mindedness succeeded is debatable, but the park did become much loved for the deep breath of fresh air it provided and for its unfailing ability to inspire daydreams. In addition to open space, Alphand’s fantasyland features Greco-Roman follies, one of which stands proudly on a hilltop looking across to Sacré-Coeur; waterfalls that cascade out of a man-made cave; and a lake with an island reached by a suspension footbridge. In short, the place is enchanting, which is why the apartments that overlook this magical spot are very much in demand. This part of the 19th is visibly gentrifying, as is evidenced by the recent arrival of restaurants like La Pelouse, a stylish bistro, and Quedubon, one of the best wine bars to open in a long time.
Friends from Boston, for whom Paris has always meant the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain, were skeptical when I suggested they visit Belleville. But after their first afternoon there, they were hooked. They couldn’t get over the energy, which reminded them of New York’s Lower East Side, not to mention the Paris they’d known as students 20 years ago. “It was like discovering a whole new Paris,” they said. And the time to visit Belleville is now, before its delectable edginess, born of a vulnerable equilibrium between past and present, slips away.
19th/20th Arrondissements Address Book
Ateliers D’artistes De Belleville 32 R. de la Mare, 20th (01-46-36-44-09). Small gallery and occasional studio open houses.
Le Baratin 3 R. Jouye-Rouve, 20th (01-43-49-39-70)
La Boulangerie 15 R. des Panoyaux, 20th (01-43-58-45-45). Contemporary bistro cooking in a pretty former bakery.
La Boulangerie Par Véronique Mauclerc 83 R. de Crimée, 19th (01-42-40-64-55). Organic bread and pastries from a wood-burning stove.
Le Chapeau Melon 92 R. Rébeval, 19th (01-42-02-68-60)
Chez Ramona 17 R. Ramponeau, 20th (01-46-36-83-55). Tiny, funky Spanish restaurant that’s a neighborhood institution.
Cosmic Galerie 7–9 R. de l’Équerre, 19th (01-42-71-72-73). Edgy gallery in a small 1930s-vintage former garage.
Aux Folies 8 R. de Belleville, 20th (01-46-36-65-98)
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff 78 R. Julien-Lacroix, 20th (01-42-03-05-65). One of the best contemporary art galleries in the city.
Lao Siam 49 R. de Belleville, 19th (01-40-40-09-68)
Lou Pascalou 14 R. des Panoyaux, 20th (01-46-36-78-10). Lively café-bar that draws a local crowd.
Marché De Belleville Open-air market on the Boulevard de Belleville, Tuesday and Friday mornings.
Mon Oncle le Vigneron 2 R. Pradier, 19th (01-42-00-43-30). Friendly wine shop that serves light eats in the evening.
Mukura 82 R. Rébeval, 20th (01-42-49-34-05). Cheap Colombian place that pulls in arty types.
La Pelouse 86 R. Botzaris, 19th (01-42-08-45-13)
Quedubon 22 R. du Plateau, 19th (01-42-38-18-65)
La Vielleuse 2 R. de Belleville, 20th (01-43-58-06-38)