PARIS – When she wasn’t running her own restaurant, she was eating out. And when she wasn’t giggling, she was sending everyone around her into gales of laughter.
For more than three decades, Viviane Bouculat was the owner, impresario, cook and bottle washer at l’Annexe, a bistro in the Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine.
Anyone could eat, drink and attend cabaret nights at her place, but over the years the restaurant became a haven for local artists, actors and musicians in the town regarded as the capital of French communism. “She welcomed everyone with arms open wide” Christian Guémy, the street artist known as C215, said of Bouculat.