Home to one of Paris’s handful of Chinatowns, Belleville sprawls across four arrondissements on the eastern stretch of the city, the majority huddled around the unassuming 19th and 20th. The neighborhood—long a hotbed of creativity—counts residents like legendary French singer Édith Piaf and, more recently, fashion designer Isabel Marant and charcoal artist Lee Bae. It’s where communities of Armenian and Tunisian Jews, Greeks, and Chinese and Southeast Asian immigrants collide and set up mom-and-pop shops and family-run restaurants on the main drag, rue Belleville, which shows off sweeping Eiffel Tower views from the top of the hill—one of the highest natural points in the city.
Tattooed 20- and 30-somethings squeeze onto the small sidewalk terrace of La Cagnotte for pints from neighboring microbrewery Les Bières de Belleville or post up for cheap cocktails at former 18th-century cabaret Aux Folies. Street parties and pop-up events are practically a weekly affair, and evening entertainment includes everything from karaoke to drag shows. “Over the past five years, the attraction of Belleville has continued to intensify—in its own way, Belleville is like Brooklyn, its own brand, with its own coffee roaster, brewery, and restaurants that are attracting people from other parts of Paris,” says Alexandre Cammas, founder of French restaurant guide Le Fooding and music and culinary festival Bon Esprit de Clocher, whose last edition was Belleville themed.
Once a tiny winemaking village on the outskirts of Paris, Belleville’s sloping cobbled streets were lined with cabarets and cinemas. The background to the iconic, Oscar-winning 1950s film The Red Balloon, a majority of those scenes no longer exist today. The working-class neighborhood is like a cat with nine lives—it’s been demolished and rebuilt, reinvented and reinvigorated.
Belleville has shaken off its once-seedy reputation and is emerging as one of the most exciting areas in Paris, in no small part for its influx of culinary hotspots like Asian-influenced Le Cheval d’Or and laid-back French bistro Soces, where you’ll find everyone from the duo behind the Coperni fashion line to music producers and magazine editors. “Paris has become so expensive for young chefs and entrepreneurs to open a restaurant of their own,” says Cammas. “For a while, they’ve been going to the 10th or 11th arrondissements, but now they’re moving further east and north, where rents are affordable, the crowd is young, and people don’t have a country home they escape to on weekends—it’s not bourgeois there.”