Fashionistas and tourists flock to Paris bar - Seattle Times

PARIS "This is the Mecca of the neighborhood!" exclaimed Joey Jalleo, a New York publicist, on the first night of his first-ever visit to Paris. "I just had to come here!"

It was closing in on midnight on a Friday, and Jalleo was jammed in a dense crowd of 100 or so drinking, smoking, people-watching customers on the sidewalk outside La Perle, a nondescript yet exceptionally popular cafe-and-bar on a street corner in the Marais. "I had heard this was the place to go because of the chic kids and artists who come here," he continued. "But after what happened with Galliano, this place was a must."

On any weekend night, young crowds nursing their drinks cram the sidewalks outside La Perle, to meet, mingle and try out pick-up lines. Famous French actors like Carole Bouquet and Romain Duris are said to come here from time to time. And the fashion folk.

But the cafe's reputation was tarnished with a different kind of celebrity in February just before the Paris fashion shows when John Galliano, the celebrated designer and a regular customer who lives up the street, went on a drunken anti-Semitic tirade against a couple in the bar. As stunned customers looked on, he was taken away by the police.

The episode started a chain of events that led to Galliano's humiliating downfall: A video of an earlier anti-Semitic outburst also at La Perle posted on the Internet; an abrupt firing as the star designer of the house of Dior; a trial before a Paris tribunal that documented a third anti-Semitic outburst at the same bar; a confession of drug and alcohol abuse, an apology and a sojourn in rehabilitation; a guilty verdict for hate crimes.

Now, as a new Paris Fashion Week gets under way, sidewalk-mingling crowds at La Perle are swelling. Though the A-listers will head for more upscale hangouts like the bars at L'Hotel Montana or the Ritz, La Perle is likely to again be a popular postshow hangout for the lesser and aspiring members of the visiting fashion set, many of whom may be staying in the Marais. And now the place has its share of curiosity seekers as well.

"It's changed since the Galliano story," said Nassim Derbikh, 22, a publicist in the French fashion industry, dressed in slim, ironed jeans, a navy cardigan over a white T-shirt and white tie shoes. "People are younger. They think this is a fashion place, that they'll find a piece of luxury here. They think they'll find a Karl Lagerfeld here. Well, Karl Lagerfeld doesn't come here."

The ready association with Galliano has been painful for La Perle's staff. "I was torn apart after what happened," Jean-Philippe Nighoghossian, who has owned and run La Perle since 2003, said in an interview at the bar last week. "We were put into the same water as Galliano. We got so many angry, insulting calls and messages people accusing us of being a 'Fascist' place. I have people of all origins working here, and we were all really shaken up."

Nighoghossian, who was raised in a working-class family in Marseille, said it was especially painful because of his family origins: he is half-Jewish and half-Armenian. "Both the Jews and the Armenians were persecuted peoples," he said, "and that made the slurs against me, my staff and my establishment even more painful."

Nighoghossian has never tried to cater to the fashion crowd. In fact, he has sought to give La Perle multiple identities. The cafe is open seven days a week from 6:30 a.m. until 2 a.m. The earliest customers are the blue-collar workers, followed by mothers who drop their children off at a preschool nearby and then office workers. The neighborhood working crowd comes for lunch.

"This used to be an old-style 'cafe du quartier,' very square, that also attracted some tourists ordering croques monsieurs because it's a block away from the Picasso Museum," said Frederic Martel, an author and radio host who lives in the neighborhood. "Then it went from square to cool. Unlike the neighborhood, La Perle is neither gay nor Jewish. It's more that it's cool for the very young and beautiful sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. That's why I don't go there anymore."

Now curious foreigners and tourists mingle with the regular upscale crowd at La Perle. "You know a bar is good when there are people on the street," said Siena DeLisser, an American junior-year-abroad student from Brown University. "I love this place. It's like SoHo a la francaise."

Michael Kendall, an American studying electrical engineering at Oxford, said he had gone to La Perle because he had heard it was "kind of a hipster hot spot." But he expressed suspicion about whether it was as fashionable as its reputation. "Now that it's called a trendy hot spot on so many Internet blogs, the trendy hot spot has gone somewhere else," Kendall said.

( But it is unlikely that Galliano, who has not gone back to La Perle since his arrest, will ever be welcome back. During his trial, three different episodes at the bar were documented in excruciating detail: an incident last October when he called a patron an "ugly Jewish" woman; a drunken explosion in December during which he said "I love Hitler" and "your mothers and ancestors" would all be "gassed" to two women in the bar; and the final outburst in February, when he told a woman she had a "dirty Jewish face" while she was having a drink with a male friend.

"I look at him differently now," Nighoghossian said. "Talent does not excuse bad behavior."