I sadly did start to miss the weekly Thursday gathering of the masses outside of half of Dryden Road so I decided to find a Mecca of my own for the drip-sweating, red-faced, wide-eyed twenty-somethings here in Paris. After a simple process of elimination (too expensive, too many girls, too old, too unfriendly, too far, etc.), I finally stumbled upon Le Violin Dingue, located at the top of a hill in between the Pantheon and the Seine in the 5th Arrondissment.
One night my friends and I joined one of their French family friends for a late night drink. A little caught off guard by the American flag-embossed awning (we were a little sick of the American ‘hotspots’), we stumbled in and took our seats at the booth. As I was sipping my drink I couldn’t help but notice that the décor highly resembled the cozy, dark lit booths of Ruloffs! The air was a little damp and sweaty and beer was running off the taps like water. The energy was high and I sort of had to raise my voice to get any type of comprehensible sentence out but I was nonetheless enjoying myself.
As we were about to call it a night, the bartenders came around and told our table to go downstairs aka the small wooden spiral staircase in the front of the bar. I immediately thought that this was one of those situations that Liam Neeson and his idiotic tourist daughter taught me not to get myself into. I soon realized that we were not that cool and every other table was being told to go downstairs as well. Woops! Turns out that after 1 a.m., the upstairs pub closes and the downstairs turns into a nightclub! We followed the frenchies down a couple flights of stairs and found ourselves in a huge cave-bar!
There were slight remnants of the comfortable and warm upstairs like the table-booths and the brick embellishments but other than that it was as if we had time-warped into another bar. With its black-lit dance floor, DJ booth, two bars, and white décor, the downstairs of Violin Dingue came to serve as the perfect spot to enter our weekend debauchery. We found it very easy to meet friends, as by that time of night the locals had warmed up a little bit and the music was also exactly the right blend of American hip-hop/pop and Euro house.
We danced the night away and made sure to make a mental note to come back to the little pub/nightclub that was our own home away from home (again and again and again).
Le Violin Dingue is located on 46 Rue Montagne Ste Geneviève in Paris.
Kelly Gordon is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She may be reached at [email protected]. Notes from Abroad: Review appears on Mondays.
Original Author: Kelly Gordon