Bouillon Chartier, Paris

Bouillon Chartier is a restaurant whose dining hall preserves the atmosphere created when the Chartier brothers opened it in 1896. The room occupies a former workshop where cartridges and shell casings were made from 1845 until the 1880s, giving this elegant dining space an unexpectedly industrial past. Look across the high ceiling, Corinthian columns, mirrors, and glass panels: together they create the impression of a market hall or winter garden.

A round electric clock marks the back wall, while trompe-l'œil paintings dated 1929 hang between the windows. Their Romanian painter, Nicolae Vermont, supposedly made them to settle a debt, so that detail belongs to the restaurant's documented story with a note of uncertainty. Near the entrance, numbered wooden drawers once held napkins for regular customers.

The Chartier family created around fifteen restaurants, but only four owners have managed this one since its opening, preserving its décor and its manners. Its cultural afterlife is unusually lively: Louis Aragon placed a young medical student here in a 1936 novel, and Fernandel later sang about bringing a girl to Chartier for a grilled pig's trotter. The song eventually became the restaurant's telephone hold music.