A locale for every type of visitor
Like playing Cupid with your pals, Paris insiders can use their matchmaking skills to find the Parisian neighborhood that best corresponds to the traveler's profile. After all, one person’s blissful promenade around the undulating cobbled streets of Montmartre is potentially another’s tortuous traipse through a flood of crowds. In a sprawling city like Paris, how better to plan the perfect, personalized trip than to know the quartier that fits you like a glove?
Getting a grasp of the vivid variety of neighborhoods on a fleeting visit to the city can be overwhelming. When you are programmed by guidebooks to visit the city’s main attractions, it is easy to lose sight of the defining elements of each quartier. Paris can be anything from a city of romance to a city of sleaze, the capital of cabaret to the capital of the current clubbing craze, ‘techtonik.’ Discovering the pleasures of Paris becomes a question of finding the neighborhood you’re most compatible with and consequently reaping the rewards.
See our slideshow of Paris Neighborhoods A La Carte.
If eclecticism is the ingredient you most seek in your Parisian experience, a trip northeast to Belleville, straddling the 19th and 20th arrondissements, will fit your agenda. It is home to a colorful immigrant community, one of the city’s largest and prettiest parks, the Buttes Chaumont, and lastly but most poignantly, the legacy of Edith Piaf—Belleville’s most famous bohemian.
Here in Belleville, bars double up as art galleries, art galleries as homes, and soup bars as hip hangouts. Catherine Sanderson, author of "La Petite Anglaise" and devoted ambassador, is one boho to fall under Belleville’s spell: “I like nothing more than to sit at one of the collage-covered tables in front of Aux Folies, the café adjoining the music hall of the same name where Edith Piaf used to sing, sipping a two-euro beer while I watch the world go by.”
While the boho crowd prefers the melting pot of ethnicity and cultures on the Right Bank, the Left remains a firm favorite with the upper class urbanite. Despite being one of the most popular destinations on the tourist trail, the allure of the pristine narrow streets of Saint-Germain-Des-Pres remains as alive as it was in Serge Gainsbourg’s heyday. “It’s a small town within a big city,” says journalist and resident Rebecca Leffler, who was brought up in America but is by nature a 'Germanopratine,’ as the French call the quartier’s residents. “I love that I can recognize faces while I walk down the narrow streets,” she says. A glance at the terrace of La Palette, a lively meeting place for the well-heeled literati on the Rue de Seine, captures the essence of the St. Germain dweller.
While the Left Bank-Right Bank divide serves as a helpful guideline for typecasting certain character compatibilities, other personality matches are less than clear-cut. Gourmets could happily lay their hats in any of Paris’ precincts, so gastronomes' best matches will be defined by their budget. The older epicure’s mecca is easily the 7th, with its grandiose, chandeliered dining rooms full of timeless appeal and creative menus from the likes of Alain Passard, Helene Darroze and Christian Constant. Even the 7th’s most major landmark—the Eiffel Tower—is haute gastronomie territory, with this year’s re-opening of the Jules Verne under Michelin-starred Alain Ducasse, on the second floor of the Tower.
See our slideshow of Paris Neighborhoods A La Carte.
For the epicurious, it pays to venture into the shabbier parts of town, where neo-bistros like the Le Chateaubriand on the Avenue Parmentier in the 11th serve up innovative tasting menus without the price tag of the more staid arrondissements. Along the Rue Paul-Bert, also in the 11th, a bevy of modern bistros like Bistro Paul Bert, Argentinian steakhouse, Unico, and gourmet bookstore La Cocotte all confirm the area's gastronomic credentials.
Art, like food, can be found in all manner of forms in the City of Lights. It might be home to one of the most famous works of art in the world, but Paris’ art scene is hardly restricted to the Louvre. Neither is it constrained by the boundaries set by the periphérique with the mayor’s recent initiative to boost the banlieue (or "suburbs") by establishing galleries outside the inner ring, the first of which was the acclaimed MAC/VAL.
Admirers of heritage and antiquities need not venture far from the banks of the Seine to revel in the established cultural attractions of the 5th and 6th, but the contemporary art collector will find an edgier scene in the Haut Marais. At galleries like the Galerie Almine Rech on Rue de Saintonge—whose latest exhibitions include photographer Taryn Simon and Dior designer Hedi Slimane—design, art and fashion converge. Come Thursday evening, Champagne-sipping twenty- and thirty-somethings in skinny ties and Ray Ban Wayfarers will be toasting the gallery openings.
Over the last year, a surge of interest from the fashion set has transformed the streets south of Place de la Republique into a chic and bustling quartier, best experienced at La Perle, a seemingly run-of-the-mill 1970s-style bar, religiously frequented by the fashionistas. Vintage thrift stores along the once-shabby Rue de Saintonge and the Rue Charlot alternate with the pristinely designed facades of the up-and-coming designers—shops as cutting-edge as the adjacent galleries.
As the night falls, Paris’ inhabitants scurry to their preferred places. The romantics are to be found draped over the Pont des Arts, staring back at the Ile-St-Louis while the traditionalists enjoy a classic cocktail in the Plaza Athénée. Fashion-conscious bobos (bohemian bourgeois) find a space on the cobbled banks of the Canal St Martin or in the bars of Oberkampf; and at starched white tables to the west, the epicures anticipate their miniature amuse-bouche of foie gras mousse.
The mille-feuille of arrondisements that make up la belle Paris may be evolving as quickly as the President’s love affairs, but one thing remains certain—there will always be a Parisian quartier to tempt and seduce each and every one of us.