Potemkine bar, welcome in boboland

I am a St-Gilloise and I love that part of the city. I could not live anywhere else if you asked me. St-Gilles has many souls, it is at the same time beautiful and ugly, rich and poor dirty and immaculate clean. Above all St-Gilles is "bobo". 

What the heck is bobo you might wonder? In the words of David Brooks, the author of "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper-Class and how They got There": (...) if you take bourgeois and bohemian and you smash them together, you get the ugly phrase bobo. The New York Times commented that those are "two social castes no one ever expected to find mixed up together".

To me, Bobos are 30s something relatively well off people that are environmental friendly, shop in open air markets, goes where the cultural vibes brings them, believe they are alternative, love their cachemire scarf, pay attention to the decor of their house but buy in popular areas, rely extensively on technologies, generously reproduce themselves despite Malthusian theories and are fan of unconventional education for their kids - what my conservative mum would define "wild". As my boyfriend once put it, there would not have been bobo without the 70s hippies baba cool and the 80s yuppies. 

St-Gilles is more bohemian around the Parvis and more bourgeois as you get closer to Louise, and the Poteminke bar is the "bobohood". It opened back in June 2011 and it is another successful project of Frederick Nicolay - the guy behind Café Belga, Bar du Matin and Walvis. It is set just in front of Porte de Hal, in a grand room decorated with wood, 1950s furniture, a giant reproduction of a whale skeleton by artist Vincent Glowinski and a beautiful piano. On the backyard there is a small terrace and on the first floor a mini cinema sitting up to 20 people. You can have drinks, listen to one of the many concerts, have breakfast or brunch, watch some old movies for free, work on your computer or just read the papers. 


Or you can watch the customers ranging from artists, corporate lawyers, gay couples, young families with children or older St-Gilloises. Check out the article Le Soir published on the Potemkine to have another view.

Potemkine
Avenue de la Porte de Hal 2-4
1060 Brussels

Photo via Potemkine FB page