Quartier Collaborative

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B L A C K B O O K THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

QUARTIER COLLABORATIVE

Attracted by a gastronomically inspired entrepreneur, an ensemble of leading designers and top restaurateurs is coming together to reshape Paris’s northern Marais, as Jeffrey T Iverson discovered

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aris has often been accused of lagging behind New York and London as capitals of design and innovation (and, frankly, creative entrepreneurship in general). But today, a profound urban transformation occurring in a hitherto somnolent Paris neighbourhood might be proof that’s changing. Two dozen internationally renowned designers have gathered around an unprecedented project – creating an entire new quartier dedicated to ecology, gastronomy and design, dubbed La Jeune Rue. Philippe Martin, as French environment minister, lauded it as “a bridge between virtuous agriculture and the capital”, but this is no government initiative. La Jeune Rue is the vision of a fortysomething entrepreneur whom the French media are calling a modern-day Gatsby – Cédric Naudon. Several years ago, Naudon was living contentedly with his wife and daughter in the United States, where he’d made his fortune in finance. Then one night he found himself steeped in nostalgia at 3am watching the French gastronomic travel show, Carte postale gourmande. Food and family were the ingredients of his happiest childhood memories in France – cooking and sharing meals, searching for exquisite regional produce on holidays together, visiting the restaurants of iconic chefs like Meneau or Robuchon. (He’d dreamed of becoming a chef himself, he says, but “went into finance to please my parents”.) That night, Naudon decided to return home. “It was food that brought me back,” he smiles. Back in Paris, Naudon’s passion finally became his business. In 2012, he relaunched the Ile-SaintLouis restaurant Le Sergent Recruteur with chef Antonin Bonnet – a Michel Bras protégé – and the

ILLUSTRATION BARTOSZ KOSOWSKI

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B L A C K B O O K THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

QUARTIER COLLABORATIVE

Attracted by a gastronomically inspired entrepreneur, an ensemble of leading designers and top restaurateurs is coming together to reshape Paris’s northern Marais, as Jeffrey T Iverson discovered

46

CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM

aris has often been accused of lagging behind New York and London as capitals of design and innovation (and, frankly, creative entrepreneurship in general). But today, a profound urban transformation occurring in a hitherto somnolent Paris neighbourhood might be proof that’s changing. Two dozen internationally renowned designers have gathered around an unprecedented project – creating an entire new quartier dedicated to ecology, gastronomy and design, dubbed La Jeune Rue. Philippe Martin, as French environment minister, lauded it as “a bridge between virtuous agriculture and the capital”, but this is no government initiative. La Jeune Rue is the vision of a fortysomething entrepreneur whom the French media are calling a modern-day Gatsby – Cédric Naudon. Several years ago, Naudon was living contentedly with his wife and daughter in the United States, where he’d made his fortune in finance. Then one night he found himself steeped in nostalgia at 3am watching the French gastronomic travel show, Carte postale gourmande. Food and family were the ingredients of his happiest childhood memories in France – cooking and sharing meals, searching for exquisite regional produce on holidays together, visiting the restaurants of iconic chefs like Meneau or Robuchon. (He’d dreamed of becoming a chef himself, he says, but “went into finance to please my parents”.) That night, Naudon decided to return home. “It was food that brought me back,” he smiles. Back in Paris, Naudon’s passion finally became his business. In 2012, he relaunched the Ile-SaintLouis restaurant Le Sergent Recruteur with chef Antonin Bonnet – a Michel Bras protégé – and the

ILLUSTRATION BARTOSZ KOSOWSKI

P


B L A C K B O O K THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

acclaimed Spanish designer Jaime Hayón. The latter’s breathtakingly contemporary restaurant design was unlike anything in Paris, and Bonnet’s elegant cuisine drew on splendid, ethically sourced ingredients for which he and Naudon himself had scoured France. “As has been done so often in New York or London,” Naudon says, “I wanted to show that in Paris, too, we could create places that had been well conceived from A to Z.” Within months, the restaurant received a Michelin star and a Wallpaper magazine design award. Emboldened by success, Naudon dreamed bigger. When his move to purchase a restaurant space on Rue du Vertbois in Paris’s northern Marais – an area then littered with vacant storefronts – triggered a flood of other offers, Naudon saw the chance to give the neighbourhood not just a new venue, but

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L O C AT I N G

a new raison d’être. Thus began La Jeune Rue – 36 new addresses celebrating gastronomy and design, while representing a different vision of consumerism. A self-sustaining whole, food is seasonal and direct from small-scale, organic French producers; meat and produce shops supply the restaurants and bars, and middlemen are cut out to keep prices fair and farmers well paid. It was this chance to promote “virtuous agriculture”, says Naudon, which allowed him to convince the crème of the

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international design world to forgo more grandiose projects and come create a grocery, bakery or fishmonger in Paris. La Jeune Rue came alive this autumn with its first openings, including Italian designer Michele De Lucchi’s butcher shop on the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth and Rue Volta, the Korean street food restaurant on Rue du Vertbois by the Milanbased architect Paola Navone, and French interior designer Maud Bury’s Argentine eatery, Anahi, on Rue Volta. Dozens more openings continue into 2015: an oyster

bar by Belgian Ramy Fischler, a grocery by Brit Tom Dixon, a fish restaurant by the Campana brothers, a cheese shop by Eugeni Quitllet, an art gallery, a cinema ... it’s a concentration of creativity, humanity and sustenance certainly potent enough to revolutionise an entire neighbourhood – and, maybe, change how the world sees the City of Light. lajeunerue.com

*From left to right: Ramy Fischler (designer); Christian Aguerre (pig farmer); Paul-Henry Bizon (writer); Fanny Leenhardt (nutritionist); Charles Hervé Gruyer (farmer); Jacques Abbatucci (beef farmer); Johann Berger (the project’s technical director); Jacques Dereux (consultant); Arnaud Cooren (designer); Julie Boukobza (curator); Maud Bury (designer); José Lévy (designer); Aki Cooren (designer); Marc Ange (designer); Rob McHardy (mixologist); Cédric Naudon; Roland Feuillas (miller and baker); Jaime Hayon (designer); Mickael Jammes (professor of hospitality); Alain Canet (agroforester); Vincent Darré (designer); Arnaud Daguin (chef); Antonin Bonnet (chef); Eugeni Quitllet (designer); Jean-François Gaillard (environmental activist)

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PHOTO YANNICK LABROUSSE; ILLUSTRATION BARTOSZ KOSOWSKI

The faces of La Jeune Rue: *see who’s who below


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