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After dark, insiders' worlds of night
Happening now, bistros, city lights & city bars, jazz-club guide, an African queen, festivities
- Restaurants for local palates
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.
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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.
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- Lights, bars and the atmosphere of night
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 - The lighting is more subtle now.
Discover the mysterious lights of an environmentally-conscious city, with stops for a taste of night-life. In the west it is elegant and and acessible if you can afford it. It contrasts with what comes next...
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the bars and cafés of the eastern city, where trends begin and that one must be a regular to penetrate. Our guide: an exceptionally sociable Franco-American, who lives in an eastern neigbhorhood and knows its night-life well.
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 - 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.
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 - 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.
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Immigrants inject a unique energy, which blends spontaneously with local roots – as jazz does. |
 - In an African bar
• One way to approach them: Let a Cameroonian chief's daughter take us under her wing.
• Another way: African musicians’ showcase (most Saturdays, 8-10 pm).
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.
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Europeans are welcome, but rarely know about this legendary place.
Free of charge, though you may wish to purchase a record.
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- Celebrations, public and private
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 - 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?
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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
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