It all started with a charming little West Village restaurant on Bleecker Street. With its bay front window seat table, brick fireplace, and space-age sputnik lighting fixtures, Paris Commune was fun and funky, just like its neighbors who made the restaurant a local favorite. For over a 100 years, there was a restaurant in that site, since 1979, that restaurant had been Paris Commune.

Come 2004 and Bleecker Street was undergoing a revolution of its own. Overnight little antique stores and folksy restaurants closed their doors, only to reopen as chic boutiques. A new shopping district was born in New York and it was time for Paris Commune to find another home.

Fortunately, at that time, Nadine's restaurant at the corner of Bank Street and Greenwich Street was looking for new ownership. Two sides of floor to ceiling windows, a neighborhood feel, and a fabulous location made it a perfect place for Paris Commune to land. Construction began at the end of the summer of 2004 and in just two and half short months, the oldest new restaurant in the West Village was open for business.

Look carefully at the gorgeous wall of back-lit black and white framed photographs in the main dining room. Amidst the boulevards of the Marais and the clockface of the Musee D'Orsay, you'll find two photographs -- one of the original restaurant on a snowy winter's eve and another as it appeared 100 years ago. Just a subtle reminder of the past as Paris Commune explodes into an exciting new incarnation.