The New Bon Coin, the iconic counter, has closed its doors

Parmi les visiteurs, Laurent Burgoa ici avec Manu

L'Ami8 emblématique de Manu

Le trio familial, Françoise, Manu et Julien Diaz, tourne la page du New Bon Coin.

L’aventure s’achève après quinze années à animer les journées et soirées du quartier.

This Friday, December 20, very late, after the last customers and friends had left, Emmanuel and Julien Diaz finally lowered the curtain of their establishment, Le New Bon Coin, located at 67, rue de La Biche, in the La Croix-de-Fer district, the end of an adventure that would have stretched over fifteen years.

It all started in May 2009. Manu and Juju, as everyone calls them, remember it as if it were yesterday: “There were so many people at the inauguration that we did it in two stages. Laurent Burgoa and Franck Proust, at the time, deputy mayors, had done us the honor of being there.” And, for the closing, this same Laurent Burgoa, now a senator, and Julien Plantier, first deputy delegate for urban planning, had insisted on being there. By all accounts, it is an emblematic place in La Croix-de-Fer that is disappearing, “ a place where we remade the world sitting at the counter”. But it was above all a place of life, where friendships were born during the many musical evenings around jazz (notably with the Nîmes group Caïman Jazzy, faithful since the inauguration), the bingo evenings, the unmissable abrivados which marked the beginning of the Pentecost and Grape Harvest ferias, and the football matches broadcast on a giant screen for special occasions.

A place belonging to the family between 1950 and 1985

For thirty-five years, until 1985, this place, run by the parents of Françoise, Manu's wife, was called Le Bon Coin. Then, it changed its name, according to the new operators who succeeded one another until that famous month of May 2015. As a nod to his in-laws, the name New Bon Coin was like an obvious choice, a rebirth. Father and son worked hard for several weeks. “ We really started from scratch, without any knowledge in this profession, but with a strong desire to create a warm place. The ideas came little by little, I'm a bit of a handyman and Julien is a worker: between the two of us, we built this entire interior to our taste and with the future in mind”, confides Emmanuel Diaz, very moved. Like his parents-in-law, who stopped their activity at the birth of their grandson, Julien, it was at the birth of his grandson Léo that Manu stopped his, almost four decades apart.

More than 200 people came throughout this final day to show their attachment and sympathy to Emmanuel, Julien and Françoise, to the wild rhythms of the Maxi Fanfare. Today, after all this experience, all these meetings, Manu is thinking of writing a book, but that's another story…

Midi Libre correspondent: 06 60 64 81 95

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