Choice Southeast Asian Restaurants in the Belleville Quarter

The Belleville Quarter of Pars is home to dozens of Asian restaurants. Think they’re all of equal quality? Think again.

 

In the search for some of the best authentic Southeast Asian cuisine I asked Christian Tan, a private chef specializing in Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese cuisine, to join me on a series of lunchtime investigations in the quarter.

 

The three restaurants noted here—no more expensive and no less decoratively nondescript than most others in the neighborhood—are the fruits of those investigations. Chef Tan considers them good representations of their respective cuisines: Thai, Vietnamese, and Cantonese Chinese. And I thoroughly enjoyed the rare and confident pleasure of having a connoisseur order for me.

 

Belleville, at the juncture of the 11^th, 12, 19^th, and 20^th arrondissements, has long been a traditional landing point for immigrants and home to financial hardship. Bearing the memory of Edith Piaf, born in 1915 at 72 rue de Belleville, and of the immigration of Jews and Arabs from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, the crossroads of the quarter at the Belleville metro station have since the late 1980s been defined as Paris’s second major Asian quarter, after the city’s dominant Chinatown in the areas surrounding avenue de Choisy and avenue d’Ivry in the 13^th arrondissement. The enriching of the Paris’s eastern arrondissements has mapped the surrounding neighborhoods on the route to Parisian gentrification, yet Southeast Asia dominates at the crossroads and North Africa holds firm in some of the neighboring streets and boulevards.

 

The curious traveler can set out to discover all of these aspects of the area on a walk between, say, Père Lachaise Cemetery and Canal Saint-Martin… with lunch in one of these restaurants recommended by Chef Tan.

 

 

 

New Niouallaville serves mixed Southeast Asian fare but is included in here for its Cantonese offerings. More specifically, it’s included here because Christian’s mother was Vietnamese of Cantonese origin and his father was Cambodian of Cantonese origin, and having arrived in France from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1970 when Christian was five, they settled in Grenoble where they ran a Chinese restaurant, so Chef Tan has an ancestral appreciation for dim sum, canard laqué (Peking duck), and lightly spiced beef with celery and carrots, which is precisely what we ordered here. ,

 

The hefty, oversized pork dim sum were an unwise addition to our feast simply because they could have made for a meal in themselves. Otherwise this vast restaurant is a wonderful place to lounge around for a long, talky, shared meal despite the risk of the food getting cold (just ask for a heat-up). New Nioullaville, with its seating for 300 and its dim sum carts pushing by like tired traffic, can feel like a banquet hall on a crowded evening or like an empty diner after the lunchtime rush.

 

New Nioullaville, 32 rue de l’Orillon, 11^th arr. 100 yards south of metro Belleville.

Tel. 01.40.21.96.18. www.nioullaville.fr

 

 

“Smell that?” Christian said, taking a whiff of the steamy, spicy air as we entered Lao Siam. “That’s the real thing.”

 

The pleasure in this unassuming restaurant is indeed that mix of spices; they don’t attack the palate in crescendo but rather flow through in piquant (or less piquant) harmony. The harmony, of the piquant variety, played in our starter, a spicy rice noodle and mashed fish dish (the fact that it looks like runny spaghetti needn’t dissuade you) with a seminal taste of fleshy fish, moderate spices, coconut milk, and basil. It continued on a similar but less piquant theme with amok, a fish dish with light spice and coconut milk served in a steamed banana leaf.

 

Lao Siam, 49 rue de Belleville, 19^th arr. 300 yards east of metro Belleville. Tel. 01.40.40.09.68.

 

[Note to dress-up and business travelers: The gracious international chain restaurant L’Elephant Bleu offers a highly polished Thai cuisine near Place de la Bastille at 43/45 rue de la Roquette, 11^th arrondissement. Tel. 01.47.00.42.00. Site www.blueelephant.com.]

 

 

“One thing I like about this restaurant,” Christian said, “is that you’d never pick it out of the lot.”

 

Less fish and spice oriented than its Thai neighbors, the Vietnamese cuisine practiced in Paris is bobun territory, as I’ve written about in another article in this section, Friends and Phos: An Adventure in Vietnamese Cuisine in Paris. Bobun may be an anything-goes stew-soup but as Christian pointed out that it’s also a carefree balancing act of beef (bo), rice noodles (bun), mint, grilled shallots, crushed peanuts, soy sprouts and fish sauce, with, in our case, a few fried spring rolls (nems) thrown in for good measure. Consider fried shrimp for a starter here.

 

Hawaienne, 15 rue Louis Bonnet, 11^th arr. 100 yards south of metro Belleville. Tel. 01.43.57.15.64.

 

For more information about Christian Tan’s work as a private chef (dinner parties, special events, etc.) see www.siphutan.fr, siphu meaning chef in Chinese.

 

 

© 2007, Gary Lee Kraut