Chinatown and Tolbiac

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Chinatown and Tolbiac

The area between rue de Tobiac, avenue de Choisy and boulevard Masséna is what is known as the Chinatown of Paris, despite the fact that it was founded by Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s, and is now home to several other East Asian communities. Avenues de Choisy and I’vry are full of Vietnamese. Thai, Cambodian and Laotian restaurants and food shops, as is Les Olympiades, a pedestrian area bizarrely suspended between giant tower blocks. One escalator leads up to it from 66 avenue d’Ivry, next door to the slip road leading down to an underground car park; halfway down this access road lurks a tiny Buddhist temple and community center, advertised by a pair of red Chinese lanterns dimly visible in the gloom. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons from around 2.30pm, there are informal concerts of Chinese music; the rest of the time elderly Chinese people play games and doze quietly in the rickety sofas. As you step out into avenue d’Ivry, you’ll find the huge Tang Freres Chinese supermarket, a former railway warehouse now stocked with an incredible variety of Asian good’s and foodstuffs.

On the north side of rue de Tolbiac, the parc de Choisy offers outdoor ping-pong tables with concrete and shady trees. There are some interesting modern buildings near here, including Christian de Portzamparc’s humanely scaled public housing estate on rue Hautes-Formes, with its curious little gantries (1979), and, at 106 rue du Château-des-Rentiers, a ten-storey block of public flats whose facade, on rue Jean-Colly, has a map of the quartier in colored tiles, with pipes to show the métro lines. Serious Le Corbusier fans could make the long slog down rue Cantagrel, where his colorful Cité de Refuge (1933), or Salvation Army building, stands at no.12.