Memo from Paris: What’s Trending

In this food and wine capital, designer restaurants and bars never stop popping up. Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance worked a miracle, conferring a cool chic aura on Le Ciel de Paris, the rooftop bar of the Tour Montparnasse, previously only remarkable for a splendid panormic view which thankfully did not reflect its interiors. Duchaufour-Lawrance’s new look is a symphony in circles, with mirrored ceiling lights that reflect all the illuminated spectacle of the city of lights.

Philippe Starck has just redesigned his own rooftop restaurant, Kong, incorporating a mural by his daughter Ara, who is an artist. The renovation follows Starck’s Ma Cocotte, the first sophisticated bistro at the Clignancourt-Saint Ouen flea market, and a delirious explosion of Asian kitsch at Miss K.

India Mahdavi has just completed the makeover of the venerable Café Français at the Bastille; architects Bruno Borrione and Caroline Lory—after three-star chef Anne-Sophie Pic’s Paris outpost La Dame de Pic—have elegantly gentrified the lovely Chalet des Iles on its lake island in the Bois de Boulogne; and Joseph Dirand has turned an empty corner of the contemporary art chaos at the Palais de Tokyo into an oasis of calm.

For sweet things, chocolatier Patrick Roger’s new boutique and workshop by Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Desmazières of X-TU Architects opens an intriguing street window on Roger’s witty and sometimes monumental chocolate sculptures—and X-TU Architects’s own office is pretty sweet, too.