Butte-aux-Cailles
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Butte aux Cailles

Between boulevard Auguste-Blanqui and rue Bobillot is the Butte-aux-Cailles, whose name can be translated picturesquely as the hill (butte) of the quails (cailles), although there is talk of a more prosaic Monsieur Cailles.

It's a pleasantly animated quarter, the main rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles cobbled and furnished with attractive lampposts, as well as one of the green Art Nouveau municipal drinking fountains donated to the city by the nineteenth-century British art collector Sir Richard Wallace. Alongside the old establishments – the bar La Folie en Tête at no. 33 and the restaurant Le Temps des Cerises at nos. 18–20 – are plenty of new and trendy places to eat and drink, most of which stay open till the small hours.

South of rue de Tolbiac, small houses with fancy brickwork, decorative tiles and timbers, crazy-paving walls and near-vertical roofs have remained intact: especially between rues Boussingault and Brillat-Savarin, near place de Rungis, and on place de l'Abbé-G-Henocque, rue Dieulafoy and rue Henri-Pape.