Everyone’s Eating in Belleville

When friends and business partners Kevin Deulio and Marius de Ponfilly began their search for a restaurant space in Paris, the Belleville neighborhood, an area spanning Paris’s 19th and 20th arrondissements, ticked all the right boxes.

After eight years working as manager of the restaurant Bar Vendôme at the Ritz Paris, Deulio was eager to leave the stuffy world of luxury behind and open a neighborhood restaurant for locals. He envisioned a place where nearby business owners, residents, and artists could pop in and out for fresh oysters and spicy margarita shots; huddle around a raw milk cheese board after work; or settle in and tuck into one of chef de Ponfilly’s seafood dishes.

“What we also liked was that there was nothing pretentious about the neighborhood,” Deulio says. “Everyone is down to earth and there’s this real sense of community. That was important to us.”

De Ponfilly, formerly a chef at Clamato, a small plates seafood restaurant from the team behind Michelin-starred Septime, also knew he didn’t want a restaurant with starched white tablecloths and $100 bottles of wine. It was also 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic was still disrupting everyday life in France, and lockdowns were hitting restaurants hard; the duo thought relying on tourists to fill dining rooms was a surefire way to sink a business.

And so they opened Soces (Parisian slang for “buddies”), a low-key French bistro that has significantly increased foot traffic to this quiet corner of the city. Critics were particularly smitten by de Ponfilly’s fresh, inventive dishes like thinly sliced raw cuttlefish seasoned with kumquat pesto or mussels topped with Perugina sausage in chipotle beurre blanc.

It’s one of several newcomers to the Belleville area that have made the eastern end of the city Paris’s most dynamic food and drink destination.

“A lot of the best new restaurant openings in the past few years have actually been in the 19th or 20th,” confirms Christine Doublet, deputy director of the French restaurant guide Le Fooding. “A lot of super exciting things are happening there.” In the 2024 edition of Le Fooding’s list of the best bars and restaurants in France, released last November, three of the five award recipients in Paris, including Soces, were located in the 19th and 20th arrondissements.

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Unlike the manicured, bourgeois city center and ritzy arrondissements to the west, sidewalks in this working-class neighborhood are crowded with caddie-dragging elderly shoppers chattering in Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Arabic and young, fashionable Parisians popping into and out of the metro station. The area is home to sculptors, painters, photographers, and ceramists, as well as the studios, workshops, and galleries (and building facades) where they show.

Though today Belleville is commonly identified as one of several Chinatowns in Paris, the neighborhood was first settled by Armenian, Greek, and Polish Jews in the early 20th century. After the Second World War, when many Jews living in Belleville were deported, the area became home to Sephardic Jews from Tunisia and Algeria.

It wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that the first major wave of Chinese and Southeast Asian immigrants arrived. Today, many families in the area trace their roots to Wenzhou, a port city in southeastern China (several Belleville restaurants are named after the city).

Matt Masta/Lao Siam

The waves of immigration to the neighborhood are reflected in its diverse food scene. Tunisian and Algerian restaurants like Di-Napoli and Le Tais sell brik pastries, couscous, and fried bread fricassé sandwiches, alongside Chinese restaurants like Ravioli Nord Est, which specializes in pork jiaozi dumplings, or Best Tofu, which is known for fresh, soft tofu dishes. Taro roots, fresh mustard leaves, and bitter melon are laid out at sprawling Asian grocery stores, but there are also Latin American, African, and West Indian greengrocers, where plastic crates are laden with chayote, papayas, and salted cod.

But the neighborhood’s demographics are changing. Squeezed out by high rental and real estate prices in the city center, young middle-class families, urban professionals, and Paris’s creative class — collectively known as “bobos” (short for bourgeois-bohemian) — have been moving eastward, bringing with them restaurateurs and bar owners, who are also looking to move away from saturated neighborhoods and into new markets.

Belleville has historically been one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods; according to 2021 figures, nearly one in four residents lives in poverty in the 19th arrondissement, and the median incomes in both the 19th and 20th are thousands of euros short of the city overall.

Alexandre Souksavanh witnessed the impact of that economic disparity firsthand while growing up in Belleville in the ’90s. One of three children of the owners of Lao Siam, a Belleville institution since 1985 famous for its Thai and Laotian cuisine, Souksavanh says many Parisians associated the area with petty crime and drug use.

“I don’t think anyone wants to live in a neighborhood where you find syringes in sandboxes or can’t go out after dark,” he says. “No one wants to live in a neighborhood like that.”

As the area changes and new residents move in, though, rising housing prices and gentrification represent their own threat to the families who have long lived here. However, thanks in part to broad government funding for public housing, Belleville has been able to hang onto some of its existing communities even as it welcomes transplants, continuing the tradition of layering cultures that has long characterized the area.

“It’s not like the Marais, where locals have abandoned the neighborhood and it’s just tourists and Airbnbs,” Souksavanh says. “Here, there’s still a sense of community, where real Parisians live and work.”

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One of the earliest progenitors of this latest shift can be traced back to the opening of Combat in 2017. Though the bar helped turn Belleville into a serious cocktail destination for people from all over the city, it also attracts locals with its friendly, laid-back vibe. In a bright, open space where vegetation hangs from the ceiling, the predominantly female bartending team, led by mixologist Margot Lecarpentier, mixes and muddles surprising ingredient combinations, like green curry with gin, cilantro, lemon, raspberry, and egg whites, for a drink they call Musette.

It has also paved the way for bars like Kissproof Belleville, which opened in 2022 and was also among the Le Fooding recognitions this year. Lebanese entrepreneurs Micky Abou Merhy and Elie Nehme wanted to fill what they saw as a big gap in Paris’s drinking scene and open a space that reflected Belleville’s working-class roots. While there’s no shortage of sophisticated high-end bars in the city, Nehme says, they hoped to give Parisians a good old-fashioned dive bar, a gathering place focused on hospitality, music, and a spirit of irreverence.

A typical night at Kissproof starts at 6 p.m., when the after-work crowd might pop into the small, 380-square-foot bar for a Dia de los Muertos boilermaker: a take on the Mexican michelada made with beer, Clamato, lime, and Tajín seasoning, with a shot of mezcal on the side. By the end of the night, the crowd evolves to include chefs and bartenders who have clocked out for the night, who come to unwind with one of many absinthes.

“When we visited the spot, it was a gut feeling,” Nehme says of the neighborhood. Like their other bars in Beirut, Vyvyan’s, the Terrible Prince, and Kissproof Beirut, the location was in a neighborhood far from the tourist crowds.

“Belleville for me is magic,” says Luis Andrade, chef at Le Cheval d’Or, another recent darling of the 19th arrondissement, where Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and Parc de Belleville provide dramatic green spaces and panoramic views. “It’s on top of the hill, you can see the Eiffel Tower from afar. Even its name means beautiful,” he adds, referring to the word “belle.”

Belleville and its surrounding area has always been one of Andrade’s favorite hangouts. He, Cheval d’Or’s sommelier (and Andrade’s wife) Crislaine Medina, and their business partner Nadim Smair were regulars of Le Bar Fleuri in the 19th, which famously serves the city’s cheapest roast chicken and fries at 6.86 euros (less than $8), a price that hasn’t changed since 2002.

True to Cheval d’Or’s origins as a Chinese restaurant, its menu is a French Chinese mash-up that brings Asian twists to French classics — and vice versa. When the traditional croque-madame (a grilled ham and cheese sandwich topped with mornay sauce and a fried egg) meets Chinese prawn toast, it’s the best of both worlds: prawn mousse sandwiched between slices of brioche, topped with a fried egg, mayonnaise, and chile crisp. Chef Hanz Gueco also gives crispy Beijing duck a French point of view with crepes in place of traditional Chinese wheat pancakes and an orange sauce that parallels the classic French dish duck à l’orange.

Cheval d’Or isn’t the only newcomer to pay tribute to Belleville’s Asian heritage, according to Doublet, who also cites Bang Bang, which opened in 2022. There, Colombian chef Carlos Peñarredonda and Danish chef Mads Christensen serve up a creative and unapologetically spicy Asian-inspired menu in a colorful, casual setting. Dishes might include cheddar and kimchi croquettes with jalapeno-lime mayo sauce, claypot red curry chicken, or fish sauce-glazed barbecued octopus.

Alongside these modern homages, Souksavanh and his brothers Frédéric and Nicolas have made their own generational contribution. In 2019, they opened a sister location to Lao Siam just next door, Ama Siam, which offers some of the Thai comfort dishes that the siblings loved eating growing up, like khao man gai (chicken poached in broth, ginger, fermented black bean sauce, garlic, and coriander) and moo palo (five-spice pork belly with wild rice and soft-boiled egg).

When he was growing up, Souksavanh says he dreamed of leaving the neighborhood. In the last 15 years, he’s watched as Belleville has attempted its tricky balancing act, greeting new bakeries, bars, wine shops, cafes, and restaurants, even as it retains its signature cosmopolitan community and energy. Now Souksavanh is glad he never left.

“The neighborhood has changed,” he says, “and now I love living here.”

Vivian Song is a Korean Canadian journalist who moved from Toronto to Paris in 2010, where she produces everything from food and travel features to breaking and investigative, long form news stories, cultural criticism, and personal essays. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, BBC, Vice, Robb Report, Lonely Planet, and the Telegraph UK, among others.