Belleville Café

Belleville Café is Dexter Mayhew’s small delicatessen-café on a residential street between Highgate and Archway. Conceived in Paris by Emma Morley, built with her encouragement and investment, and eventually sustained by local customers, it becomes more than a new business: it gives Dexter a form of work whose modest scale contrasts with his former television celebrity and makes room for pride, routine, and family life.

Origins and setting

The idea took shape during the long summer in Paris when Emma and Dexter were dismantling and rebuilding his life. Sitting outside a café near Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Emma suggested a shop selling good coffee by the pound, imported cheeses, and other appealing foods, with outdoor tables in summer. Dexter initially resisted the idea of being a shopkeeper or grocer. Recasting the venture as a café or restaurant that also sold food, or as an imported-food specialist, allowed him to imagine it as entrepreneurship rather than a return to a status he found uncomfortable.

When the pair came back to London in late September, they arrived with plans and ambitions. The premises they eventually found had been a video rental shop, a business already made obsolete in the neighbourhood and left with dusty shelves and remaining Steven Seagal videos. Dexter took it on a twelve-month lease after Emma pushed him to act. The address placed the new venture on a residential street between Highgate and Archway, in an area estate agents described as up-and-coming and gradually filling with young professionals. The café’s situation, just south of the A1, also gave its name a deliberate geographic flourish: Belleville suggested the Parisian 19th arrondissement, transported to a north London street.

Building and opening the business

Through a long, wet January, Emma and Dexter stripped out the old metal shelving, distributed the remaining videos to local charity shops, painted the walls buttery white, and installed dark wooden panelling. Dexter sought an industrial coffee machine, chill cabinets, and glass-fronted refrigerators from bankrupt restaurants and cafés. Those failed businesses were a practical source of equipment, but also a reminder of the risk: other ventures had not survived, and his own might not either. Emma stayed beside him, encouraging him and helping him believe the project could work.

On the first day of spring, they sat in the sun outside the partly refurbished shop and tried out names, playing with combinations of French words before settling on Belleville Café. Dexter formed a limited company, his second after Mayhem TV plc. Emma became company secretary and, in a small but consequential way, a co-investor. Her ability to help financially followed the success of her first two Julie Criscoll books, the commission of a second animated television series, and discussion of possible merchandise. She had reached a position in which she could offer Dexter money; after some hesitation, he accepted. Financial support thus moved between them as their circumstances changed, while Emma’s involvement extended beyond the original suggestion to the legal and practical structure of the business.

Belleville Café opened in April. For its first six weeks, Dexter stood behind the dark wooden counter as customers came in, looked around, and left. The initial quiet made success far from assured. Then word spread, trade improved, and he was able to hire staff. He acquired regular customers and began to enjoy the work. The café’s change from an empty-looking venture to a functioning business is gradual: not a sudden rescue, but a routine built through returning customers and Dexter’s continued presence behind the counter.

Customers, work, and local success

The café’s clientele suited its changing neighbourhood. Its customers were young professionals willing to pay for artisan goods, including jars of duck confit, irregular loaves of bread, and small portions of goat’s cheese. It became the kind of place where people could ostentatiously write novels. Its image was fashionable, but on a more sedate and domestic scale than the public world Dexter had known. He was no longer famous nationally; locally, he was known for his selection of herbal teas and remained a mild heartthrob to expectant mothers stopping in for pastries after pram-exercise classes.

That modest, specific reputation matters to Dexter. On a radiant summer morning, he unlocks the heavy padlock securing the metal shutters, raises them, and opens the door. He feels happy and, for the first time in many years, proud of himself. The pride is attached not to public attention but to having made a small business work. Its success does not erase the possibility of relapse: on long, wet Tuesdays he still wants to close the shutters and drink all the red wine. The contrast makes his contentment conditional and recognizably hard-won rather than a permanent cure for his difficulties.

A continuing place in Dexter’s life

The café remains part of Dexter’s life as it changes. At one point it is running smoothly enough that he has employed Maddy, a sharp and reliable manager with whom he has good business relations and mild flirtation. He no longer needs to open in the mornings, a sign that the business has acquired routines and people beyond its founder. After an argument with Emma, he prepares to go to work late; even amid personal disorder, the café offers an established obligation waiting for him.

By Saturday, 15 July 2006, Dexter closes Belleville Café at six-fifteen, pulls down the metal shutters, and secures them with the heavy padlock. Maddy waits nearby, and they walk together toward the tube station. The shop’s closing ritual echoes the opening routine of unlocking it, but Dexter’s circumstances have shifted: he has moved to a three-bedroom maisonette in Gospel Oak, and Maddy is now close enough to share parts of his private life. The café still marks the boundary between work and the evening, yet its reliable presence does not dictate what he does after closing; on this particular night, he wants time alone. Across its slow establishment and later everyday use, Belleville Café gives Dexter a livelihood and a measure of stability without promising that either his happiness or his relationships will remain unchanged.