The corner façade of Le Duc restaurant, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, evokes the hull of a ship. LÉO BOURDIN
This particular street corner is celebrated for two reasons. At the intersection of Rue Campagne-Première and Boulevard Raspail in Paris' 14th arrondissement, film lovers still picture Michel Poiccard, the hero of A Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960), collapsing at the end of his faltering escape. For food enthusiasts, the GPS coordinates lead to another legend: Le Duc, a landmark seafood restaurant in the French capital.
During the era of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, Le Duc's iconic blue and white façade, with its porthole-shaped windows, did not yet exist. The story began a few years later and was spearheaded by the Minchelli brothers, two visionary siblings from Marseille. After the Algerian War, the elder brother, Paul, left the military to try his luck in England, where he learned the restaurant trade before settling on the Île de Ré, off the west coast of France. In 1965, he opened an establishment he named Le Duc in honor of the first Duke of Buckingham, who led the siege of La Rochelle, and soon called on his brother Jean to join him.
Jean quickly set his sights higher. More ambitious and business-savvy, Jean Minchelli moved to Paris and decided to open a second Le Duc two years later. He chose Montparnasse and entrusted the interior design to Slavik, a star designer who had just created the look for the Drugstore Publicis on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Slavik envisioned a setting unlike the surrounding brasseries: deep wood paneling, burnished brass, sleek lines, somewhere between an English yacht and a refined university club.
