Doing the Right Thing in Paris

Guidebooks to Paris tout the Left Bank as where it’s at--the south side of the River Seine, with the city’s most fashionable boutiques, hippest cafes and most charming dining spots. After all, this is the part of the French capital where the Lost Generation came to find itself, the place with the in-crowd following.

Maybe yesterday, mon ami. Not anymore.

Parisian trendsetters have packed their Prada bowling bags and moved to the other side of the Seine.

I got my first inkling of the Right Bank’s cachet about five years ago, when I was living on the Left Bank. A French artist friend called me, proposing dinner. My suggestion was La Closerie des Lilas, the most celebrated of the Left Bank drinking spots that Ernest Hemingway patronized. It’s now a white-tablecloth restaurant and “bar Americain”; a brass plaque marks the spot where the writer often sat.

My friend, Luc Michel, responded as Parisians often do to ideas they consider passe. He said nothing. And so that evening found us on the Right Bank, hunched over heaping plates of andouillette and sauerkraut steamed in champagne at Le Passage, an inviting restaurant in an alley in the Bastille neighborhood. Afterward we pushed our way through the youthful crowd thronging Rue de la Roquette to the hip Iguana for an after-dinner glass of framboise liqueur. By that time, it seemed a shame not to make a night of it, so we ventured to a basement club where a jazz trio from Havana was headlining.

Thus did I become a Right Bank devotee.

Like New York’s Central Park, the Seine has long served as an unspoken line of social division, with American and European travelers and tres hip French favoring the cafes and clubs on the Left Bank, and the Parisian working classes relegated to the less-exalted haunts on the Right. (Popular tourist sights on the Right Bank, such as the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, have remained outside the battle of the banks.)

Just as the Right Bank has begun to glisten, the Left Bank has lost some of its sheen. In an earlier era, the cafes and jazz haunts of Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter, mainstay neighborhoods of the Left Bank, were made legendary in Hemingway’s prose and Man Ray’s photographs. This is the Paris where novelist James Baldwin bar-hopped, Miles Davis carried on with Juliet Greco, and Gertrude Stein held forth in her parlor.

These days, though still favored by nostalgia seekers and an elite class of Parisians, the Left Bank no longer attracts the avant-garde.

Menilmontant, in the east-side 11th arrondissement, is the latest of the Right Bank neighborhoods to capture attention. Fans of American rock trek there to visit the final resting place of Jim Morrison, the Doors vocalist who is buried in the company of such luminaries as Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Shoppers flock to the vast open-air Belleville market, with block after block of stands offering fresh cheeses, fruits and bric-a-brac. And during the past three years, nights have taken on a life of their own, with glitzy dining spots and bars featuring such trendy diversions as tapas and billiards.

Besides Menilmontant, stardom has struck four other Right Bank neighborhoods. A few highlights:

Bastille

You can date the ascent of the Right Bank from the 1989 opening of the Opera de la Bastille, on the place of that name where the 4th arrondissement meets the 11th. Around that time, artists began trading their pricey Left Bank studios for loft spaces in warehouses surrounding the modernistic opera building with the glass facade. The opening of new galleries and restaurants followed naturally.

I recently made a return visit--I had a home in Paris for 20 years-- and found that Bastille has begun to look and sound like New York’s SoHo with a French accent.

My afternoon stroll started on Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, at Jean Paul Gaultier’s fashion gallery. Growing weary of his wacky designs, I moved around the corner to Rue de Charonne and the shop of Isabel Marant, a French designer whose eye for novel hues and textures has brought a growing following.

This is Bastille by day: galleries showing offbeat art, designer shops offering fashions straight off the runways, cafes with a youthful, polished clientele.

On Rue Daumesnil, a few blocks behind the opera house, a strip of abandoned elevated railroad tracks has been transformed into an art park of sorts. On top is the Promenade Plantee, a long walkway planted with gardens. Below is the Viaduc des Arts, where designer shops and artisans’ workshops are tucked into the viaduct’s arched base. You could lose yourself--and half your vacation savings--in just one afternoon of shopping here.

But these streets really come to life after sundown, particularly on weekends. Among the options:

* The Barrio Latino, new this year, is already the Latin dining place of the season. Stretched over four floors in a building designed by the same fellow who brought us the Eiffel Tower, it has Latin pizazz: potent cocktails, a menu featuring dishes from Cuba, Mexico and Argentina, and Latin music so strong it could keep up all of Havana for half the night.

* The basement of the China Club is a comfortable place to wind down an evening. The downstairs mood is mellow, enhanced by low-key live music and soft lights, and it’s open until 3 a.m.

* For those looking for a hot club where they can click their heels, La Fabrique is the spot. On a Saturday night, the deejays were spinning the best in house music and the crowd stayed on the floor until the wee hours.

* Le Balajo, a club that opened in the 1930s featuring the inimitable Piaf, is Paris’ answer to New York’s Apollo Club. It features all sorts of danceable music, from boogie-woogie to rock.

8th Arrondissement

The over-the-top make-overs of two landmark Paris hotels kicked off a revival of this section of the city, around Avenue des Champs-Elysees.

First came the multimillion-dollar redo of the Ho^tel George V, a French classic now owned by a Saudi prince and managed by Four Seasons. Then came the two-year sprucing up of the Meurice, which has no qualms about calling itself the “pied-a-terre of the privileged.”

I stopped in at the George V to get a whiff of the elegance for which this district is known. The 18th century tapestries, crystal vases overflowing with white roses and other accouterments in the lobby made me wish my pockets were deep enough for the $400-plus the guest rooms go for.

But I had come in search of the more youthful, flashier side grafted onto the 8th in the past few years.

Man Ray, a hot bar and restaurant on Rue Marbeuf, was opened by actor Sean Penn and pals, apparently to give the privileged somewhere to sip cosmopolitans. I dropped in at the bar to do just that but passed on the pan-Asian cuisine served in the restaurant. Instead, a friend and I scooted to Lo^ Sushi, a trendy place where a daunting array of raw fish dishes circles around on a conveyor belt. Although it sounds a bit like a cafeteria, the spartan-chic decor elevates it to a haute level.

Montmartre

On the Left Bank of an earlier generation, you could dine heartily in a bistro and enjoy a cabaret for no more than $35. Today, in the hilly Montmartre area of the Right Bank, it’s possible to have a similar, quietly entertaining evening at relatively little expense.

The biggest reason is that tourists often overlook this part of the city. Except by day, when tourists swarm over the Sacre-Coeur basilica and nearby Place du Tertre marketplace, Montmartre is mostly left to the locals. “This is one neighborhood that Parisians love to love,” said Yvette Pelissier, president of the Montmartre Residents Assn. “We like to think that we’ve retained the best of the traditional spirit of the city. And for that reason, it’s becoming a more popular section for Parisians to live and hang out in.”

A friend and I discovered what Pelissier meant. We started out at Le Restaurant, a friendly place with a loyal neighborhood following, where the chef prepared a delightful rabbit in mustard sauce and later came to the table to ask how we liked it. Afterward we sallied along Avenue Junot, where ivy-covered mansions and oak-lined sidewalks made for a perfect after-dinner stroll. The high point of the evening came at Au Lapin Agile, a cozy tavern that has operated as a cabaret since the 1880s. A singer crooned ballads, a storyteller spun tales, and we sipped a rich Bordeaux till midnight.

Menilmontant

Midnight had long since passed along Rue Oberkampf, and the crowds were still flowing in and out of the bars like foam in beer mugs, but that’s no surprise in this city where Saturday night never really starts until sometime Sunday morning. What was striking about this particular scene of revelry was not the hour but the venue. Not long ago Menilmontant was known among Parisians as not much more than a stronghold of laborers and North African immigrants in a far corner of the city.

My first night in Menilmontant started at Le Charbon. So did my second and third.

Le Charbon is the kind of neighborhood hangout that makes you wish you were a regular. It’s full of wonderful antique mirrors and fashionable young Parisians admiring their reflections, where you sit mindlessly sipping pastis until a heaping plate of coq au vin and sauteed leeks arrives at your table, leaving you torn between whether to dig in deep or just continue drinking and observing.

On my first night at Le Charbon, I did both for the longest time, until the flow of the crowd carried me across the street to La Cithea, where a Brazilian band was kicking up a storm.

The charm of newly popular quarters like Menilmontant is on a human level, rather than architectural or historic. Like Adams-Morgan in Washington or Greenwich Village in New York, it’s a hodgepodge of unlikely venues, of trendy restaurants offering American-style “Southern fried chicken” squeezed between couscous joints and Brazilian bars advertising caipirinhas for two for $4.25.

But the biggest appeal of the area is that it is fresh territory in one of the world’s most heavily touristed cities. Although already known to Parisians for its hot night life, Menilmontant is too new to have boutiques or T-shirt shops.

When I sat down for a dinner of tuna tartare and lemon tart at La Boulangerie, a small restaurant on a side street of the neighborhood, the young French waiter engaged me in conversation, asking first where I was from.

“Imagine that, an American in Menilmontant,” he said with a smile. “Pretty soon they’ll be writing novels about us.”

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GUIDEBOOK

Making the Scene on the Other Bank

Getting there: Nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Paris are available on American, United, Air France and AOM. Restricted round-trip fares start at $638.

Where to stay: In Bastille, the quaint 31-room Hotel Belle Epoque charges $110 for a double; 66 Rue de Charenton, telephone 011-331-4344-0666, fax 011-331-4344-1025, Internet https://www.hotelbelleepoque.com.

In the 8th arrondissement, doubles start at about $170 in the 30-room Hotel Le Lavoisier, 21 Rue Lavoisier, tel. 011-331-5330-0606, fax 011-331-5330-2300, https://www.hotellavoisier.com.

In Montmartre, the Ermitage, 24 Rue Lamarck, tel. 011-331-4264-7922, fax 011-331-4264-1033, is a quiet, 12-room guest house just down the street from the Sacre-Coeur church. A room for two runs about $68 and includes a hearty breakfast.

Where to eat: In the 8th arrondissement, Lo^ Sushi, 8 Rue de Berri, local tel. 01-4562-0100.

In Bastille, Le Passage, 18 Passage de la Bonne-Graine, tel. 01-4700-7330.

In Montmartre, Le Restaurant, 32 Rue de Veron, tel. 01-4223-0622.

Where to party: In Menilmontant, La Cithea, 114 Rue Oberkampf, local tel. 01-4021-7095, dancing to live music of all kinds, from acid jazz to jungle.

Le Charbon, 109 Rue Oberkampf, tel. 01-4357-5513.

In Bastille, Le Balajo, 9 Rue de Lappe, tel. 01-4700-0787, has a smorgasbord of music; check ahead to see if the night’s offering suits your taste.

Barrio Latino, 46 Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, tel. 01-5578-8475.

La Fabrique, 53 Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, tel. 01-4307-6707, a retro pub where a deejay runs the show.

China Club, 50 Rue de Charenton, tel. 01-43-43-8202.

In the 8th arrondissement, Man Ray, 34 Rue Marbeuf, tel. 01-5688-3636.

In Montmartre: Au Lapin Agile, 22 Rue des Saules, tel. 01-4606-8587, for cabaret fare.

For more information: French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills, CA 90212-2967; tel. (310) 271-6665 or (410) 286-8311 (France-on-Call hotline), Internet https://www.francetourism.com or https://www.franceguide.com.

Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, tel. 011-33-1-49-52-53-54, Internet https://www.paris-touristoffice.com.