How Paris’ ‘Chinese Chinatown’, Belleville – aka Rebelville – has a lot to offer tourists attracted by the 2024 Olympics
- Paris has a Chinatown, but a second one is rising in its Belleville neighbourhood, a cosmopolitan place of nightclubs, open-air art galleries and theatres
- It is the heart of the city’s Asian dining scene, with food from Sichuan, Wenzhou, Qingdao – even ‘Chinese burgers’ – served
Belleville is already bustling at 10 in the morning on this, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday, as noisy firecrackers explode outside the Ty Cake shop and crowds surround a lion dance troupe heralding the Year of the Dragon.
The 26-year-old owner of the cake shop, Shuying Gao, is one of many from Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, who have made their home here, in Paris’ foremost Chinatown (or Quartier Chinois), and feeding a red lai see envelope into the lion’s gaping mouth, she admits that, “like everyone else here we are wishing for prosperity”.
The young dancers of the Association Francaise de Danse du Lion are certainly going to end the day a lot wealthier, as “this is just our first dance and we will be performing non-stop outside Belleville’s Chinese restaurants and shops right through till midnight”, says one.
A few days later, and the centre of the broad Boulevard de Belleville is transformed into the monthly Food Market, normally a festival of global street food but, to honour the new lunar year, now filled with stalls run by Chinese restaurants from across the French capital.
Long queues form of people wanting to try everything from stir-fried beef noodles to spicy Sichuan grilled squid, festive glutinous rice zongzi (sticky rice dumpling) and nian gao (sweet rice cake) to something perhaps reassuring for the less-adventurous French, a juicy “burger chinois” (complete with Lao Gan Ma chilli sauce, Sichuan pepper and sweet-and-sour barbecue sauce).
Red lanterns bob above the stalls and halfway through the evening the lion dancers make a triumphant return, dazzling diners with their acrobatics.
