Paris 13e arrondissement · Asia and street art

Chinatown & Butte-aux-Cailles

Paris's Chinatown of tower blocks and excellent Southeast-Asian kitchens, the village-like Butte-aux-Cailles with its Art-Deco pool, and a riverfront of street-art murals and barge clubs.

Where to eat in the 13e (5)

• Chez Gladines (Butte-aux-Cailles)€ · Basque / Southwest FrenchVast Basque salads piled with potato, gizzards and Cantal, and hearty Southwest plates for big appetites, in the village streets of Butte-aux-Cailles.
• Les Tanneurs de la Butte€ · French bistroA bar-bistro on the cobbled spine of the Butte-aux-Cailles, dealing in the unembarrassed classics: tartare and fries, steak, saucisse with aligot. The room runs on regulars rather than passing trade.
• Pho Bida Viet Nam€ · VietnameseA two-room canteen between Olympiades and Porte d'Ivry that locals treat as a reliable phở stop. The special with beef balls is the order; the bánh cuốn — steamed rice rolls, four to a plate — is the cheap aside worth adding.
• Lao Lane Xang 2€€ · Lao / ThaiThe 13th's reference for Lao cooking alongside the Thai standards: crisp rice salad with fermented pork, lemongrass-heavy Laotian sausage, prawns with vermicelli in a ginger-garlic-chilli broth. Minimalist room, brisk service, a queue most nights.
• Sukhotha · ThaiA small carved-wood dining room on the Butte-aux-Cailles side of the 13th, turning out steady Thai cooking — green curry, fried fish, the occasional Chinese detour — at prices that belie its Michelin mention.

Where to stay in the 13e (6)

• Hôtel B55 Wine & Spa€€ · Boutique hotel & spaA four-star on a residential street between the Butte-aux-Cailles and Parc Montsouris, built around a wine-and-spa conceit: a tasting cellar below, treatment rooms attached, and a quiet quarter of low houses outside.
• Hôtel Henriette€€ · Budget-boutique hotelThirty-two individually styled mid-century rooms around a plant-filled courtyard, on a calm street near Rue Mouffetard. Photogenic without trying hard.
• ibis Styles Paris Place d'Italie€ · Design budget hotelThe chain's design arm let a street-art brief loose here: frescoes of Paris landmarks on every floor, Corvisart and its viaduct-arch métro three minutes down the hill. Breakfast is built into the rate.
• OFF Paris Seine€€€ · Floating hotelA barge built from two catamaran hulls and moored below Gare d'Austerlitz, with 58 rooms arranged around a glass-roofed plunge pool that opens to the river on one side. The only hotel here where the floor is technically the Seine.
• Résidence À la Butte aux Cailles€ · AparthotelFourteen rebuilt studios with kitchenettes on rue des Cinq Diamants, up in the Butte-aux-Cailles where the houses stop at two storeys and the lamps still follow the old gas plan. A restaurant sits directly downstairs.
• Urban Bivouac Hotel€€ · Budget boutique hotelA 32-room three-star in Tolbiac, six floors of compact, well-resolved rooms that make a virtue of small footprints. A few minutes from Olympiades on line 14, at prices that undercut most of the central 13th.

Underground & cool in the 13e (7)

• ★ Piscine de la Butte aux Cailles€ · Art-deco poolA 1924 red-brick Art-Deco municipal pool and listed monument — a vaulted indoor basin fed by an artesian well, plus heated open-air pools — in the village-like Butte-aux-Cailles.
• Boulevard Vincent Auriol street-art walk€ · Open-air mural circuitUnder the elevated viaduct of métro line 6, the Itinerrance gallery has commissioned some two dozen tower-block-scale murals — Shepard Fairey's tricolour Marianne, D*Face's 25-metre 'Turncoat', Inti's secular Madonna — turning a stretch of the 13th into a wall museum.
• Djoon€€ · House & disco clubOpen since 2003 under the elevated métro near the Seine, Djoon has spent two decades defending house, disco and soulful music on a 300-capacity floor built around one of the better soundsystems in the city.
• Les Frigos€ · Artists' studios in a cold-storeA 1920s refrigerated railway warehouse squatted by artists in the 1980s, now roughly 80 studios behind corridors layered in graffiti, over 7,000 m² along the Seine. The ground-floor L'Aiguillage gallery shows year-round.
• Manufacture des Gobelins workshop tour€ · Workshop tourA guided tour into the working royal tapestry manufactory, where weavers still knot Gobelins tapestries by hand on upright looms much as they did under Louis XIV.
• Parc Kellermann€ · ParkThe largest park in the 13th, terraced into the line of the old Thiers fortifications with 1930s level changes and a formal French garden up top. A working neighbourhood park — football pitch, tennis, an outdoor fitness circuit — rather than a tourist stop.
• Petit Bain€€ · Floating music venueA three-level barge moored under the Mitterrand library, Petit Bain stacks a 450-capacity concert hall, a restaurant and a planted rooftop terrace over the Seine, with programming from international metal to club nights and activist festivals.