A Guide to Belleville, Paris’s Chinatown Turned Fashion-Favorite Neighborhood

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.”

Belleville was already a destination for people in the know thanks to top-notch Asian restaurants like Lao Siam, a Thai and Laotian restaurant that has held reign on the rue Belleville since the ‘80s, and husband-and-wife-run Le Baratin, the first natural wine-focused bistro to move into the neighborhood more than 30 years ago. “For 10 years, nothing was moving or changing in the Paris restaurant scene, but over the past few years, the area around Belleville has exploded, and what’s different from the néo-bistros we’ve seen since Septime opened in 2011 is the acceptance of food that’s not traditional French—the multicultural side was already here, but now people are craving it,” says Paris-based Wendy Lyn, a restaurant and hospitality consultant, executive producer, author, and journalist who leads private, Bourdain-style food tours. “When Le Baratin opened, nobody wanted to come here, and now everything is moving up to Belleville.”

Here, find Vogue’s guide to this buzzy Parisian neighborhood—and why now is the time to visit.

Where to Eat and DrinkPhoto: Viennaslide / Alamy

Pre-pandemic, Belleville had a few spots that pulled people away from the hip, natural wine-heavy 11th arrondissement, like Le Grand Bain, whose panisse (chickpea fries, a staple from le sud) and lard-filled gougères developed cult followings, and Experimental Cocktail Club alum Margot Lecarpentier’s female-led Combat, one of the city’s handful of serious craft cocktail bars. No-frills Chinese favorites Aux Mandarins de Belleville and Raviolis Nord Est—arguably the best dumplings in town—are now neighbors with bars like fresco-covered L’Orillon, from the same owner as Café du Coin and Recoin, and Beirut transplant Kissproof, a divey, neon-lit cocktail bar that, despite being the size of a hallway, serves an impressive cheeseburger royale.

Continue up rue Belleville and you’ll come across Georgian natural wine bar Supra and, around the corner, Paloma, where locals linger over by-the-glass wines and homestyle fare on the sun-drenched streetside terrace. When Au Passage alums Mathias Degn Ovesen, Harry Wilson, and Lucy Rosedale opened Cendrillon this past spring on a quiet side street leading to Parc de Belleville, it was an instant hit. One of the rare spots in Paris where wines are mostly sourced from outside France, the natural-leaning list is heavy on Austrian, German, Catalan, and Italian picks designed to pair with the spice and smoke of the Mexican- and Asian-influenced sharing menu—the highlights of which include hefty portions of barbecue, a pig sando, French caviar bumps and vodka shots, and a frozen mango Mezcalita.

Closer to the Jourdain stretch of the 19th arrondissement, ship-shaped La Cale pours natural wine alongside Mediterranean small plates like homemade tarama slathered on bread from Urban Bakery across the street. Nearby, neighborhood bistro Soces sits in a century-old restaurant building on rue de la Villette, a narrow cobblestone street known for its family-owned boutiques, ateliers, and artisan workshops. Founders Kevin Deulio, of Bar Vendôme at Ritz Paris, and Marius de Ponfilly, previously a chef at Septime’s seafood sister spot Clamato, wanted to create a place where people could “come for a glass of wine and rillettes or sit for a côte de veau,” says Deulio, adding they planned to operate as a more traditional restaurant but the concept evolved with the clientele—now it hosts pop-up events led by young chefs from and around Paris as a way to keep the community involved. “We didn’t want the restaurant to be in an area where everyone else—we wanted to be somewhere more residential. It’s like a village here—that’s what we all love about it.”

The decor was all sourced in France—the lighting is vintage, furniture handpicked at Les Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen (Paris flea market) or on Leboncoin (France’s version of Craigslist), and the terrace tables once filled the dining room of one of Lyon’s most famous brasseries, La Mère Brazier. The majority of the ingredients on the seasonal, seafood-heavy menu (you can’t miss the amuse-bouche, an oyster and spicy Cointreau margarita shot) hail from France, and the rest come from neighboring Italy and Spain.

Across the street, Le Cheval d’Or’s rouge Chinese facade and scraped walls haven’t changed, but the menu—inspired by French classics and dishes that may have been served when the Chinese eatery debuted back in 1987— has. Last fall, a superstar new team helmed by Verjus alum Hanz Gueco, former Clown Bar chef Luis Andrade, sommelier Crislaine Medina (who had a stint at Michelin-starred Le Rigmarole), and Nadim Smair (who trained under two-starred David Toutain) revived the restaurant and gave it their own spin. Now you’ll find dishes that reflect Belleville’s melting pot of flavors: a reimagined croque-madame (egg-topped grilled ham and cheese sandwich) with prawn mousse; a play on Peking duck, stuffed and served with crêpes and homemade hoisin sauce; and a boba-inspired île flottante swimming in black tea and tapioca pearls.

What to DoRue de Belleville.Photo: Getty Images

Rue des Cascades (or “waterfalls”) hints at the area’s roots as one of the city’s largest water reservoirs, and remnants of stone aqueducts still dot the neighborhood today. Eye the ever-changing street art until the winding road ends at Scandinavian-style corner café Candle Kids, a light-drenched coffee shop sprinkled with beeswax candlesticks (thus the name) that took over a former dry cleaner. Greet resident corgi Voltaire at the door before ordering a flat white and housemade cardamom bun à emporter (to go). Then, continue past a small stretch of vineyards (a tribute to the area’s wine-producing past) to the Belleville belvedère, a mosaic- and street art-covered panoramic terrace. Perched over the namesake park, the neighborhood’s high elevation serves up some of the best—and widest—vistas over Paris. On a clear day, you’ll have views of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, and Centre Pompidou.

From the top of the rue de Belleville, the main thoroughfare frames the Eiffel Tower between its sloping, street art-clad buildings. Glance up at 72 rue de Belleville to the plaque dedicated to Édith Piaf, who was born there and sang nearby at Aux Folies, a café-bar whose buzzy terrace spills onto the sidewalk—and is packed year-round.

Cabaret and circus Le Zèbre de Belleville hosts dinner shows with trapeze artists and tightrope walkers performing tricks overhead, while Café Chéri(e) transforms into a low-key discotheque with DJs and dancing on the weekend. For live music and concerts, head over to cultural center La Bellevilloise, whose boho-chic rooftop looks like it was plucked out of Saint-Tropez (think wooden decks, rattan 1960s-inspired chairs, and Mediterranean potted plants).

At La Cave de Belleville, join one of the monthly wine tastings or shop harder-to-find, natural-leaning bottles. Pick up sandwiches and sweets like tarte au citron at artisanal bakery Le Petit Grain before perfecting the art of apéro at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. On a sunny summer day, the 62-acre park’s grassy hills are lined with sunbathers lingering until sunset before migrating for Provençal rosé and beer at gay-friendly Rosa Bonheur, which transforms into a dance floor with DJ sets and drag shows.

Where to StayPhoto: Courtesy of Babel Belleville

Spilling onto a cobblestone square behind the Belleville métro station, three-year-old Babel takes a cue from neighboring, graffiti-clad rue Dénoyez (the hotel commissioned local artists for murals on its walls and glass elevator shaft) and mixes in rich fabrics, tons of tassels, and iron lanterns for a look that’s equal parts Bedouin camp and Turkish bazaar. Curated playlists stream throughout the glass-covered restaurant and across four floors housing 31 rooms with jewel-toned walls, antique mirrors, cushioned headboards, and sculpted wood shelves. Here, the terrace is buzzing all day as locals and visitors alike sip coffee roasted at nearby Belleville Brûlerie and craft beer from Les Bières de Belleville.

Across from the Paris Philharmonic, 1930s-era brasserie Au Bœuf Couronné—a neighborhood institution—sits near la Villette’s old abattoirs (slaughterhouses) and pays homage to its one-time role as a wholesale meat dealer, serving up a dozen cuts of top-notch beef matured in-house. The latest addition is a hotel component with 42 light-drenched rooms styled with a minimalist mix of textures: métro tile-lined walls, unfinished light wood shelves, marble sinks and slabs doubling as headboards, and hints of copper.

The original outpost of Mama Shelter was the first true design-driven boutique hotel to venture into the 20th arrondissement, betting that the sleepy Saint Blaise quarter near the Père-Lachaise cemetery—where tourists flock to the vine-shrouded graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Édith Piaf—would blossom into Paris’s next hip neighborhood. Built over a former parking lot, Mama Shelter Paris East’s 170 industrial-sleek rooms (originally conceived by design superstar Philippe Starck) range from compact, studio-sized spaces to expansive, dimly lit terrace suites. The playful, plant-filled rooftop, with its striped parasols, shabby-chic furniture, and crayon-colored string of lights, feels like a friend’s backyard, so it’s no surprise the sunset parties have become a neighborhood favorite.