“You can smell the cinnamon when you walk in,” says Natalie Magnusson at Bokbar, her Nordic café and bookshop in Paris’s rapidly gentrifying Belleville neighbourhood. Originally from Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden, Magnusson had been living in France for a decade when the pandemic began and she lost her job at a translation agency. “It was a blessing,” she says. “I could work on my bookshop.”

Bokbar opened its doors last September. Magnusson funded it with her savings and did most of the work on its interiors…