Dexter opens the Belleville Café

Dexter opens the Belleville Café after a period of personal and professional upheaval, making a new livelihood out of an idea Emma first suggested in Paris. The café’s opening is not an instant triumph: it begins in a former video-rental shop, with a long refurbishment, uncertain finances, and customers who initially leave as soon as they enter. Its eventual local success gives Dexter a modest business of his own and a source of pride, while Emma’s practical and financial involvement makes the venture an expression of their renewed partnership as well as his individual recovery.

The idea and its setting

The café begins as Emma’s proposal during the summer she and Dexter spend in Paris, a period in which, as the narrative puts it, they had dismantled his life and then put it back together. Sitting outside a café near the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, she suggests that Dexter turn his knowledge of food and wine into a small shop selling good coffee, imported cheeses, and other desirable provisions. Her vision is deliberately modest: a pleasant place with outdoor tables in summer, neither pretentious nor chi-chi. Dexter initially resists the word shop, because he struggles to see himself as a shopkeeper or grocer. Calling himself an imported-food specialist, or imagining the business as a café or restaurant that also sells food, makes the prospect easier for him to accept.

The proposal gives Dexter a practical alternative to his former television career. He wants to understand himself as an entrepreneur, even though the business is small enough that the word business initially seems too grand for it. The eventual premises stand on a residential street between Highgate and Archway. They are a former video-rental shop whose dusty VHS shelves have become an anachronism; when the shop finally closes, Dexter takes the property on a twelve-month lease after Emma pushes him to act.

Preparing the premises and finding support

In late September, Dexter and Emma return from Paris together by train. Their tans and new clothes, their linked arms, and their sense of arriving in London with plans and ambitions mark the journey as a beginning. They tell their friends about the proposed business and approach Dexter’s father, Stephen Mayhew, in the hope that he might help finance it. After Alison Mayhew’s death, there had been a private understanding that some money might go to Dexter at an appropriate time. Stephen remains privately doubtful that the business will succeed, but he prefers the risk of losing money to the prospect of his son appearing on television again. Emma’s presence also helps restore Stephen’s regard for Dexter.

The refurbishment makes the risk tangible. Through a wet January, Dexter and Emma remove the metal shelving and give the remaining Steven Seagal videos to local charity shops. They strip and paint the walls buttery white, install dark wooden panelling, and search failed restaurants and cafés for an industrial coffee machine, chill cabinets, and glass-fronted refrigerators. These discarded fixtures are useful equipment, but they also remind Dexter how readily small businesses can fail. The premises do not arrive as a ready-made opportunity: he and Emma have to make a café out of the remnants of a business that has already collapsed.

The location shapes the imagined clientele. Estate agents describe the area as up-and-coming, with young professionals who value the word artisan and are willing to pay for irregular bread or a small piece of goat’s cheese. The café is envisioned as somewhere customers might conspicuously write novels. That image connects the shop’s commercial identity to a particular urban taste: imported food and good coffee are to feel distinctive without becoming openly pretentious.

Naming, investment, and opening

On the first day of spring, Dexter and Emma sit in the sun outside the partly refurbished shop and try out names assembled from French words for shop, wine, and bread. They settle on Belleville Café, a name meant to bring something of Paris’s 19th arrondissement to a spot just south of the A1. The choice carries their Paris experience back into the London venture, but the café remains rooted in its local street and its practical work.

Dexter forms a limited company, his second after Mayhem TV plc. Emma becomes company secretary and, more significantly, a co-investor. Her ability to contribute has changed: the first two Big Julie Criscoll books are bringing in money, an animated television series has been commissioned for a second season, and merchandising is being discussed. Emma is now well off enough to offer Dexter financial help. She finds it disconcerting to occupy that position; he accepts after his own hesitation. Their investment in the café is therefore also a reversal of dependence, with Emma able to support a project that began with her encouragement.

They open in April. For the first six weeks, Dexter stands behind the dark wooden counter and watches customers enter, look around, and leave again. The early response tests the gap between the carefully imagined shop and the business as it actually operates. Then word spreads, trade improves, and he is able to hire staff. Regular customers arrive, and the work begins to give him enjoyment as well as income.

A modest success and a changed life

By the time the café has become fashionable, Dexter’s public identity has contracted from television fame to local recognition, including among customers who like his herbal-tea selection. The scale is smaller, but it suits the achievement: the enterprise is almost a success by the standards of his former life, and, for the first time in many years, he is privately proud of himself. On a radiant summer morning, opening the shutters and unlocking the door becomes an everyday act that confirms the change. The business is no longer merely Emma’s idea or Dexter’s aspiration; it has acquired staff, regulars, and a place in the neighbourhood.

The account does not erase the venture’s fragility. Dexter knows there are long, wet Tuesdays when he wants to close the shutters and drink all the red wine. Nor does the café solve every uncertainty in his life. Its significance lies in offering a workable present after the disruption of his earlier life: he has work he can claim as his own, a partner he loves and regards as his best friend, and a business in which Emma has stood beside him from the original suggestion through the financing and opening. The café’s progress from an empty video shop to a popular local establishment gives that partnership a concrete form, while Dexter’s pride marks a shift from performing success on television to finding satisfaction in work that is smaller, more demanding, and his own.