Chic Cafe

Stroll along cobblestone alleys and grand boulevards, discover chic restaurants and trendy shops, and bask in la vie Parisienne like a local: on foot!

Need music to chill out to? How about Chill House Session Volume I, an 80-track intense feeling of warmth and pleasure, for people of all sizes and depths

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

Stroll along cobblestone alleys and grand boulevards, discover chic restaurants and trendy shops, and bask in la vie Parisienne like a local: on foot!