Meet the local businesses bringing the residents of Paris’ 10th and 11th arrondissements together.

For all its grand history, elegance and import, Paris’ greatest luxury is still that it is a place where people treasure the simplicity of gathering for a good meal. Cafés, bars and bistros remain pillars of Parisian life: communal go-tos for discussion, consumption and distraction. When the terrorist attacks occurred last November, the shock stemmed not only from the indiscriminate carnage, but for meaningfully targeting such lively, dynamic quarters as the 10th and 11th arrondissements.

This northeasterly quadrant of the city is noted for its daily bustle, creative aesthetics and entrepreneurs focused on top-quality service. The area was largely considered a working-class neighbourhood up until five years ago, but has since emerged as a playground for young businesses. In the aftermath of the attacks, as the city healed, these local ventures faced varying degrees of growing pains.

On a bright spring day in May, one needs only to observe the local populace – lazing, biking, drinking, preening, beaming – for confirmation that the area is in splendid form once again. MR PORTER dropped in on five business owners serving up coffee, cocktails and croque-monsieurs to find out how community pride brought this neighbourhood back from the brink.

“I can live six months in the 10th without going outside it,” laughs Mr Thomas Lehoux. The coffee aficionado created Frog Fight in 2011, a barista competition in Paris, and then launched Ten Belles, the canal-side café, a year later, kick-starting the coffee shop trend in Paris. The canal-adjacent address was not as desirable back then as it is now.

Mr Lehoux sold his share of Ten Belles earlier this year to focus on his roastery, Belleville Brûlerie, which welcomes the public on Saturdays for tastings. He and his team have opened the annexe space in the 10th, a short walk from his former café, called La Fontaine de Belleville. Setting up a new business in this neighbourhood just six months after the attacks doesn’t worry him. “No,” he rebuts, “I was afraid when it happened, and we were shocked. But I’m not going to stop wanting what I’ve wanted for a long time because of that. It can happen anywhere, anytime; we’ve seen that in the last six months. I’m more likely to get killed on my bike than on my terrasse.” He adds wryly: “And I would prefer to be killed having a beer on my terrasse.”

Most coffee shops in Paris share an English or Australian bent, but “Belleville is a very French brand – the space is a Café-with-a-capital-C. Like the place you go for a coffee in the morning, a beer in the afternoon, and an aperitif in the evening.” The offerings will be French signatures: tartines, quatre-quart cakes, plus local craft brews on tap (Outland, Deck & Donohue) and Mediterranean-style aperitifs. Santé to that.

**Top tipple: **espresso or filter coffee

Meet and greet: neighbourhood locals, regulars from Ten Belles

10 rue Pradier, 75019 Belleville Brûlerie

Mr Franck Alexandre has the wonders of Instagram to thank for the success of his Folks And Sparrows café, which he opened in July 2014. Owing to his careful renovations and considered photography, he is part of the Paris “tourist coffee shop tour” beloved of social-media conscious visitors from Japan, Korea, the US and the UK. His French clientele is more selective. “I cannot survive with them,” he says. “It’s not in the culture to come get breakfast in the morning… The French breakfast is an espresso and a cigarette, then off to work. They don’t spend money in the morning, or at all – they’re always saving for weekends and vacations.”

Mr Alexandre’s business has been hit significantly post-attack. “Le Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo: we’re just right there,” he says of his location in the 11th. “Now [foreigners] look at this part of town and think they’re gonna maybe go somewhere else.”

Previously, Mr Alexandre spent 10 years in Brooklyn where he set up Bar Tabac in Cobble Hill, a traditional French bistro geared towards Americans. “Brooklyn was just starting,” he recalls. “I learnt how to work in that vibe.” In Paris he opened Folks And Sparrows in a space he spotted by chance while parking his car. During the renovations, he unearthed wooden beams behind the cheap plaster, which introduced an inviting, rustic Upstate New York feel to a neglected corner of the capital.

Dish of the day: warm pastrami sandwich with a Lomi coffee

Meet and greet: pilgrims from all four corners of the globe

**14 rue Saint-Sébastien, 75011 Folks And Sparrows **

Mr Nico Alary owns Holybelly with his partner Ms Sarah Mouchot. The pair lived in Melbourne before setting up shop in Paris three years ago. He worked as a photographer, and a series he shot for Kinfolk magazine about coffee professionals in Melbourne became pivotal for him. Upon returning to his native France, he noted: “There was really nowhere you could eat good food and have good coffee at the same time, whereas you can do that pretty much anywhere in Melbourne. We were missing it so much, we thought: ‘That’s what we should do.’ I’m a social creature, so I like the fact that when you’re a barista, you’re also interacting with a lot of people.”

The duo didn’t actively set their sights on the 10th. “When you go to a real-estate agent, you tell them what you need and how much money you’ve got, then they tell you where you can settle down. Three years ago, [the area] wasn’t what it is today; it was still emerging.” The venue they bought was a worn-out Lebanese restaurant with low ceilings, but it had an extractor for the kitchen and room for a skylight; nine months later, they opened.

After the attacks, Mr Alary’s business picked up relatively quickly. “I’m glad that, instead of just staying home and being scared, [customers] decided to go out and come here,” he says. “It’s a very self-sufficient arrondissement. You get this village vibe going on. Sometimes I don’t even feel like I’m in Paris – more en province.”

“French people are not really into breakfast,” he admits. “We get tourists for breakfast. Over time, I learnt that tourist doesn’t have to be a bad word. Even if people are speaking Spanish or Japanese next to you, it's still a neighbourly French café.”

Dish of the day: sweet or savoury pancakes

Meet and greet: tourists at breakfast; French at lunch; on Monday evenings, chefs, waiters and people from the industry

16 rue Lucien Sampaix, 75010 ****Holybelly

August is a quiet time in Paris. Everyone decamps to la côte or la campagne for the month, so Mr Michael Mas, pictured with Messrs Marc Longa (company president) and Frederick Boucher (chef), expected a gentle launch of Gravity Bar last summer. It was, in fact, full from day one. “As soon as you get the sun, everybody is here by the canal,” Mas notes. Opening in this area was about reconciling a personal and professional lifestyle. “I live five minutes from the bar,” says Mr Mas, who co-owns with friends. “We wanted something with a family spirit… We work a lot with neighbours, young parents. I wanted to make a ‘bar de quartier’. If you have a lot of people coming from the area, it means you have a good connection to the place.”

After the November attacks, the area was subdued. “I think people didn’t want to have fun and enjoy themselves,” he reflects. “People from the neighbourhood would come from 7.00pm to 9.00pm or 10.00pm. Then from 10.00pm to 2.00am it was really, really quiet.” The rhythm normalised, however, after Christmas.

Inspired by a loosely skater/surfer vibe, the bar’s interior was custom-built with a voluminous “wave” surging outwards from behind the bar. Four categories of cocktails – Disorientation, Exaltation, Weightlessness, Cold Sweat – offer “another vision of the way to drink”, he explains, one predicated on instinct, classified by how they hit the palate. “We work with easy techniques behind the bar, with syrups that are easy to make into original sensations and flavours,” says Mr Mas.

Top tipple: Capre ou Pas Cap: vodka distilled with two kinds of Sicilian capers, a touch of home-made grenadine, lemon juice and amontillado sherry

_**Meet and greet: **_30- and 40-year-old creative types local to the neighbourhood

44 rue des Vinaigriers, 75010 **Gravity Bar **

“It doesn’t look like Paris,” says Mr Pierre Sang Boyer, glancing out the front window of his second eponymous restaurant in Rue Gambey at his tiny urban garden of planters in the street. The Korea-born chef, adopted by a French family aged seven, grew up in the mountainous region of Haute-Loire in the heart of France.

“I put Korean touches to a French taste,” is how he qualifies his own approach. “I studied in France, I worked in a French restaurant, I use local French products.” Locavore culture has become a signature of his cooking and understanding his own ecological imprint is double-underlined.

“I love nature, and I love good products,” Mr Sang Boyer says. “You have a responsibility to people." Conscious of the 11th arrondissement’s location and the area’s working-class roots, he tries to keeps his prices reasonable to reflect this.

The restaurant is only 350m away from the Bataclan theatre, where 89 people died in November’s attacks. “What happened at Le Bataclan – those kinds of events should have us grow together, to share more,” Mr Sang Boyer says. Using the return of the high season as a metaphor for the return of foreign clientele post-attacks, he muses: “Now that it’s spring, we’re starting to have more flowers.”

Dish of the day: Korean mandu with frogs legs

Meet and greet: locals, as well as Mr Sang Boyer’s international following

6 rue Gambey and 55 rue Oberkampf, 75011 **Pierre Sang Boyer **