Welcome to Paris’s Delicious, Wine-Soaked, Never-Ending Block Party

Sometime in the past five years, the Paris nightlife scene began to change. A good evening out in the City of Light used to mean submitting to the mercy of a relentlessly choreographed Michelin-starred temple of haute cuisine, or stopping by the local brasserie for homey beef entrecôte or duck à l'orange, before hitting the same handful of smoky clubs. But now young hospitalité whizzes are bringing a new energy to the city. Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quiet stretch of the narrow Rue des Petites Écuries, which runs for three short blocks from the western edge of Paris's Tenth Arrondissement. It's an unlikely port of call for the city's stylish creative class. But almost every night of the week they flock to one of the street's graffitied corners, where the four main ingredients for an unforgettable hang, the kind where anything could happen, are squeezed into a few adjacent storefronts: a 22-seat restaurant, a natural-wine bar, a Neapolitan pizzeria, and a bite-size discotheque.

Similar joints exist across Paris, but what sets Savoir Vivre's apart is that all four of its venues—Vivant, Déviant, Da Graziella, and Hôtel Bourbon—are owned by 30-year-old Arnaud Lacombe, who, by a mixture of luck and an intuitive sense of how young people like to party, did the opposite of what most restaurateurs do. Rather than expand his empire across a city, he and his crew of youthful hedonistic aesthetes concentrated it into one block.

Arnaud's food-and-libation kingdom is called Savoir Vivre, which literally translates to “knowing how to live.” Though he didn't plan to create one of the city's most raucous nightlife destinations, Arnaud was determined to design an experience around something he thought was too hard to find in Paris: pure pleasure. It started in 2015, when he was trying to figure out a new angle for his restaurant Bronco and its unused basement. That's also when he met Guillaume Le Donche, a Paris-club impresario who now creative-directs Hôtel Bourbon. “Arnaud understood that the ‘coolness’ of Paris's once defining neighborhoods was being swiftly redesigned under the impulse of gentrification and new cultures,” Guillaume says.

So Arnaud bought two sleepy restaurants on the same block and decided to do something drastically un-French: turn one of them, originally a Belle Époque bird shop, into a Neapolitan pizza joint. Arnaud called it Da Graziella, after his Italian girlfriend (now wife), Graziella Buontempo, who runs the place and helps source the simplest, most authentic ingredients from her native Naples. In a city where good pizza is hard to find, Da Graziella was a revelation.

Shortly thereafter, Arnaud met a hungry 23-year-old chef named Pierre Touitou, whom he installed in the cramped kitchen of the other restaurant, which he opened as Vivant in 2016. Pierre's father is A.P.C. founder Jean Touitou, so it's somewhat fitting that Pierre, whose cuisine integrates his Tunisian heritage with his obsession for all things Japan, likes to send out small plates in a style he calls sur-mesure: Tell him what you like and he'll tailor a menu for you on the fly. Tending bar is sommelier Clément Jeannin, who sources vin from small-scale natural-wine producers across Europe. Needless to say, wine is kind of Savoir Vivre's thing.

As is a good all-night rager at Hôtel Bourbon, Arnaud's third property, which inhabits the basement of the old Bronco space. The club is the beating heart of the Savoir Vivre experience. It was originally a synagogue, then a hotel for the first half of the 20th century; Arnaud and Guillaume kept the original mosaics and woodwork and added thrifted artworks, custom-made furniture, and rare midcentury pieces. Since hosting its first party, in October 2017, Hôtel Bourbon has become a clubhouse for the French fashion elite and celebs like Kid Cudi and Emily Ratajkowski, but Guillaume and Arnaud make sure the 200 guests who make it past the velvet rope represent Paris's socio-cultural flavor.

The final member of the Savoir Vivre family is Déviant, which uncorked its first bottle earlier this year. It's where you'll find Clément's extensive wine selects and tapas-like small bites at a standing-room-only late-night bar that opens directly onto the street. And there you have the ultimate Paris party game plan, a road map for how to enjoy life in style. But do any Parisians really spend a whole day on Rue des Petites Écuries, eating pizza Margherita at Da Graziella for lunch, having a glass of Vincent Charlot at Déviant, tucking into whatever Pierre is braising and torching for dinner at Vivant, and then hitting Hôtel Bourbon till the sun comes up? “A lot of friends do it almost every day,” says Arnaud. “You can ask their accountants.”

Art

Prolific L.A. painter Henry Taylor has been compulsively knocking out colorful depictions of friends, family, and intriguing passersby for decades, without much concern for his art-world status or his market. So why are both now suddenly skyrocketing?