|
After dark, insiders' worlds of night
Bistros, here it's happening now, jazz-clubs, an African queen, festivities
- Restaurants for local palates
|
 |
 - A hidden-away restaurant on the Left Bank...
Restaurant reviews swamp the media. Many are superficial, bestowing noblesse on places that are undeserving. Establishments that are deserving often don't want reviews in magazines that tourists see: They know that a brief flurry of foreign visitors will drive their regulars away and in the long run be bad for business.
|
|
 - It is excellent, inexpensive... and frogs are a speciality.
There are restaurants, however, for which Parisians secretly hoard the addresses. They don't want too many outsiders "spoiling" them.
We point our small and select membership to restaurants whose celebrity is justified or to places that are discreet and cherished.
|
|
|
|
- Cafés and music in trend-setting eastern Paris
|
|
 - Low-income architecture and new energy coincide.
It's east of Bastille that "things are happening" now. As in Montmartre and Montparnasse once, rents in these working-class neighborhoods are relatively modest – so youth and artists gravitate there : Please CLICK.
|
|
Our guide is an unconventional and exceptionally sociable English teacher, lwho ives in Belleville (one of these eastern neighborhoods). She loves night life, thinks of certain patrons, habitués and musicians as her family and lets us glimpse their ever-changing world as only an initiate can.
|
An evening that is even more memorable begins with a cruise...
|
|
|
|
|
 - Latin Quarter, 1954
Paris was the first European city to welcome black American musicians. Its prestigious intelligentsia recognized the intellectual and rigorous aspect of a music conventionally deemed too gripping to be serious.
It remains the capital through which most jazz musicians sooner or later pass.
One hears excellent jazz in a great hotel, or a jazz club, a café or a neighborhood joint where the patron loves music.
|
|
 - Our guide at a celebrated Paris jazz club
The maze is so complex and changing that only a person who belongs to that world will know where it's best to go, for what kind of music, on that night.
Musician, composer and president of a major jazz-artists' association, our guide discusses with visitors the list of jazz possibilities Paris hosts each night. He brings his trumpet and may jam with the musicians, whom he usually knows – please CLICK.
|
|
|
|
Immigrants inject a unique energy, which blends spontaneously with local roots – as jazz does. |
|
|
 - In an African bar
• Another way: African musicians’ showcase (most Saturdays, 20:00-22:00)
Radio, television and festival producers come to meet the evening’s performer in a Cameroonian record-store, a landmark to Africans for 40 years. They join the 20 or so onlookers for dancing and refreshments. Hosts: the store-owner’s charming family.
|
|
Europeans are welcome, but rarely know about this legendary place.
Free of charge, though you may wish to purchase a record.
|
|
|
|
- Celebrations, public and private
|
|
 - Bastille-day firemen's ball
•Where dance on Bastille-Day eve?
•Where hear the best music during the Fête de la musique?
•What is a convivial bistro for Beaujolais nouveau?
|
|
|
|
|
|
We make suggestions for public festivities and sometimes obtain invitations for private ones.
Credits: restaurant / Gilbert Cordier; jazzman 1954 / Robert Desnay (the site where our guide is playing is the same as that where our guide took the visitors); all other photos / Claude Abron
•Top of page
|
