Everything you need to know about Montreuil.

It’s unclear what food they are serving at Le Chinois on this hot evening in June, but a queue is forming outside with a barely restrained impatience. Eyes flick down at phones. One more cigarette, maybe? Music, half muffled, slips from the door, and young men in blue frayed denim bristle past a punk in tartan as cigarette smoke rises like clouds above the east side of the Place du Marché in Montreuil. Despite the name of this apparently popular spot, which translates as “The Chinese”, and despite its location in a row of eateries and with awnings pulled out in the manner of a brasserie, this is not a restaurant, but a nightclub. The coolest nightclub in the most interesting area in Paris, no less. At least, so say those in the know – the gallerists, artists and promoters who make up the city’s white-hot youth.

Paris, for all its myriad attractions, has often been considered a city that does not move with ready speed. It’s a place of finesse, sophistication, beauty and intellectual flexibility, certainly, but not always at the bleeding edge of dynamic change. Some might say, why bother to change when you have a city so well-formed? But that hasn’t always washed well with the city’s youth.

Part of the problem is that Paris has always been constrained, historically by its city walls and, more recently, by the Périphérique. Opened in 1973, along the site of the mid-19th-century Thiers wall, the road acted as a sort of administrative and psychological boundary. What was inside was Paris, what was outside was not.

But in 2008, something happened to change that. President Nicolas Sarkozy formalised a plan to create Grand Paris, as it was known, an attempt to turn the city into a metropolis that sprawled out like London, New York and Tokyo and create a unified transport system to cleave those outer boroughs to the inner ones. It was nominally to prepare for the 2024 Olympics, but the effect was much more profound. People began to look out. And where the young, the cool and the artistic began to look was Montreuil.

“In Paris, it is difficult to find something new, something exciting,” says Mr Dimitri Riviere, a stylist and well-known Parisian DJ. “But in Montreuil, it feels like something different. There is lots of cultural stuff going on. I remember the first time I went there about three years ago, it was a summer night and we sat outside and there were all the trees in bloom on the road and all the industrial buildings and I thought, this is like Brooklyn.”

Indeed, the area seems to be following that same trajectory, according to Mr Sina Araghi, who runs the Subtyl art collective in the city. “Belleville, Pigalle, they were the cool neighbourhoods five to 10 years ago,” he says. “Now I am seeing all the people who moved there move outwards, to the edges of the city. At first, the artists came and took over the warehouses. Four years ago, everyone was in them, but now you see a slow change. New apartment buildings are starting to appear. But it is still not too hype. I know my neighbours. I got up last Sunday and they were doing an event in the park teaching people to make pizza bases. It’s like a village. It just feels so different.” Mr Riviere agrees. “Unlike the centre of Paris, here you have rows of little houses,” he says. “They are everywhere. It was a workers’ area, so it is not classically beautiful, but everything looks different.”

What binds Montreuil together and makes it so worth a diversion from the grand boulevards of the central arrondissements is that it is so rich in culture. On the Place Jean-Jaurès is an all-out hymn to French film, the Cinéma Georges Méliès, which serves visitors and locals alike. “It is really well-known and respected,” says Mr Araghi. “They have a strong indie selection and they keep it cheap so everyone can go. They want it to be accessible.” Next to it is the jutting vision of the Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil, a beautiful concrete confection created by Mr Dominique Coulon, one of Paris’s best architects, and a centre dramatique national. Dance and drama are united in one exquisite edifice. It’s partly because of the history of the area, which was a socialist stronghold. Culture was and is for all here.

Alongside the big institutions are the smaller galleries and art collectives, which beat to a different cultural rhythm, and which were in the vanguard of early adopters, gobbling up warehouse spaces, taking an entrepreneurial make-do-and-mend approach to the gallery model. La Marbrerie has hosted everything from techno DJs to contemporary art. “It used to be a warehouse for marble,” says Mr Araghi. “A bunch of young guys bought it, really ambitious and crafty. They do zumba, they do electronic music, they host talks, they serve food. You can have a nice party without it getting out of control and it’s big enough that you don’t get bored. These guys are good at what they do.” In a similar vein is Les Chaudronneries, a huge warehouse that’s used for fashion shows and movies, but that also has a co-working space.

The art scene might be forward-looking, but the attraction of the bars is rather more nostalgic. An afternoon whiled away at Le Rendez-Vous Des Chauffeurs is an afternoon well spent, not just for its eclectic clientele, who traverse the gamut from Vetements-wearing espresso drinkers to old-age pensioners taking an afternoon Ricard, but because its interior has been unchanged since about 1965. You could imagine Mr François Truffaut at the bar out front smoking a Gauloise and having a row. If you want to eat rather than smoke, there is Levantine food at Restaurant Adonis, which speaks to the multicultural air of the town, while Alimentari is the hipsterish Italian on the town square beloved of carefully put-together design types and the plain greedy (portions are big).

Back at Le Chinois, the electronic music has risen a notch. As Mr Anatole Maggiar, the gallerist and founder of MAD artists and one half of Paris’s most stylish couple, with the actress Ms Anna Brewster, says, it is “the coolest place in Montreuil – outside it’s an abandoned Chinese restaurant, inside it’s a nightclub ”. The venue hosted part of the Red Bull Music Festival last September, which in Paris is an upmarket affair that features DJs and talks by people such as Ms Charlotte Gainsbourg and Ms Michèle Lamy.

According to Mr Araghi, its programme is as diverse as its clientele. “In Paris, clubs have become very well-marketed, but lost the link to their social utility,” he says. “But at Le Chinois, you have everyone – young LGBT people in their twenties, old West Indian guys, middle-aged punks. It is super mixed and intimate and there is no judgement. And they just play really, really good music.” What more can you ask? It’s unclear how Montreuil will develop in the coming year – like Brooklyn with ever increasing prices or along its own path inspired by its socialist roots. One thing is clear, though, it isn’t going to be boring.