Paris keeps adding good reasons to return, and a handful of new openings from the past year prove the point. A legendary nightclub turned boutique hotel, a book-lined barge on the Seine and an Indonesian-inflected bakery near the Louvre are all on the list — here's what's worth pencilling in.
Start with Pigalle, where the old Bus Palladium club — open from 1965 to 2022 and once frequented by Salvador Dalí, Gloria Gaynor and Patti Smith — has been reborn as Hôtel Bus Palladium. The 35 rooms lean hard into Sixties and Seventies style: dusty-pink carpets, cork walls, ribbed glass and ochre or cobalt tiles, plus speakers from cult audio brand Ojas. If you want a bed with a backstory in one of Paris's most atmospheric neighbourhoods, this is it.
Bookworms should head straight to Nanna, a new péniche moored on the Seine in the shadow of Notre-Dame. Roughly 5,000 books line its red shelves, including a solid English-language section, and around 20 events a month bring in authors and critics. Think of it as a listening bar stocked with novels instead of vinyl — ideally with a smoky 'smoke garden' cocktail in hand (mezcal, pineapple, beetroot, lemon, honey).
For lunch, Our House near the Palais-Royal seats just a dozen people around a U-shaped wooden counter and only opens Tuesday to Saturday, midday. The deal is Japanese: one daily-changing donburi or a set teishoku tray built around dishes like chicken karaage or miso-glazed salmon, with rice, tofu-filled miso soup, pickles and salad alongside. Solo diners get an easy welcome here.
Sweeten things up at La Petite Manise on Rue Saint-Honoré, between the Louvre and the Bourse de Commerce. Baker Kevin Krisna Pratama, who trained in Bali and Nice, turns out Franco-Indonesian pastries you won't find elsewhere in Paris — kaastengel cheese sticks, and salt bread reworked with pandan-kaya or seaweed and honey. The croissants are good too, but skip them for the specialties.
Culture hunters should make for the 15th arrondissement, where 11 arches beneath the disused Petite Ceinture railway have become Underline, a 2,000sq m arts space with vaulted ceilings up to 8m high. The galleries span painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, stained glass, even featherwork and embroidery — and there's a quiet terrace café for afterwards. One more to watch: La Main Jaune in the 17th, the underground disco and roller rink immortalised in the 1980 film La Boum, is slated to reopen in early 2027 with dance classes by day and concerts and roller discos by night.
Together these openings cover the full Paris day: breakfast at the bakery, lunch at a tiny Japanese counter, an afternoon in a railway-arch gallery, cocktails on a barge and a night's sleep in a former rock 'n' roll haunt. Anyone who thinks they've done Paris should think again.
