Up until a couple of years ago, this was a bar called Le Refuge. It was just above the Metro Station at Lamarck, site of so many artsy photos. That area is a marker point at the edge of two zones in the 18th arrondissement. On one side you go down Rue Duhesme, past social housing and burger bars that have wine lists, to little streets where the ruff-n-tuff residents of Porte de Clignancourt mix with the Jules Joffrin crowd and their Wes Anderson moustaches.
The other way, up Rue Caulaincourt, is the land of Macron voters. The roadsides are cleaner and the vegetable shops are more expensive. The people here have enough money to live in the 16th arrondissement but are too cool to want to. They are the perfect distance from tourists, right wingers and poor people, and they very much like it that way. Le Refuge is the midway point, your last stop before travelling either up or down a social class.
I loved that place. As soon as you went through the door you walked right into a big semi-circular bar and to get to any of the awkwardly positioned, uncomfortable booths on the right you had to push past everyone sipping coffees or little beers au comptoir. The place was decked out in this wood that somehow imposed on you. The layout was so unforgiving that I was shocked to see how big it actually was after the new owner had gutted the place out. But in gaining that extra space, the bar lost everything else.
To make cognac, you must age it in oak barrels. Some of the barrels I’ve seen in use today are hundreds of years old. That wood has soaked up so many generations of youthful harvest, absorbed them into itself, and then passed them on to the freshest young batch of eau-de-vie, mixing layers of past with the present to create the future. Even the air in the Chai is heavy with the Angel’s Share, a mist that has been present in some form since the stone was laid.
It’s sad when these cultural refuges meet their maker. Time should be measured not in years but in how regularly they disappear. The only solace is knowing that you were there and took something away from it. You became the barrel: old, full of memories and possibly, stinking of brandy.