DAY 3: Toupary restaurant (La Tour Eiffel and Musee d'Orsay)

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DAY 3 of a week in Paris - Tuesday

La Tour Eiffel & Musee d'Orsay

It's taken a while, but we are waking up to our third full day in Paris. Well, to be honest, I want to skip the day for now and jump straight to evening. I can't wait to tell you about one of my favorite spots in the city. I'll tell you later about the other stops on our itinerary, ok? (I had problems with the HTML for my itinerary, strangely enough, so I am not posting it. I'll figure it out next post hopefully.)

The Toupary restaurant may not be the best reviewed or have as fine a cuisine as Taillevant, for instance (I'll tell you about that Michelin 3-star restaurant one of these posts), but it is one of my favorite spots to eat in Paris. As I've said before, I think my simple palate would be happy with a grilled sandwich at a gas station in France, so maybe you shouldn't trust me. But I do love me some good food. And I am willing to spend money on it if the experience warrants it.

That said, the food I've eaten in my four or five meals there has been superb and the service terrific. But the main reason I chose it in 1997, alone for lunch in the second week with my sister Nancy after we learned in the first week we liked spending our time and money differently, was for the view. It is on the fifth floor of the Samaritaine Department store - which has since closed (is there anything else in the building now, I wonder?).

You can see the Pont Neuf from my table in the top photo, my favorite bridge in the city. It's rather a cliché to love this bridge, as there have been countless movies about it. But that's OK, there are reasons for it. It is at the point of the island for one thing, and it's just so darn picturesque.

When I excused myself to myself (you must be polite to yourself when you go out alone) to go to the ladies room, I was tickled to find this gorgeous view there too. Of course I had to take my camera with me as there was no one to guard it at the table, and wasn't it handy to photograph myself in the mirror that stood in front of this marvelous sight? I nabbed the orange card for my scrapbook.



Again when Don and I went to Paris for our 25th anniversary in 2003, I wanted to eat there to celebrate. Do you see our water glasses reflected in the window?



But below are the glasses we wanted to steal. I don't think I've ever been tempted to steal before this (and later I did steal a Guinness glass from the Guinness factory in Dublin), but this was just too sweet! Because they knew it was our big 25th anniversary, they brought our champagne in this special glass set. We asked if we could purchase one, but they didn't have them to sell. So, we seriously contemplated hiding them under Don's sportcoat. Ha. But we didn't do it, although it might have been fun to meet Inspector Clouseau.



We asked the waitress (rare female in this male dominated profession in Paris) to snap our pic, but this is the result. It's probably not her fault, since the light was behind us.

a tale of two hotels: part II - Hotel du Vieux Marais

DAY 2 of a week in Paris - Monday

La Louvre et Champs-Elysées

• BREAKFAST: la patisserie below the apartment
• La Louvre
• LUNCH: Angelina tea salon. 226 Rue de Rivoli (between Rues d'Alger and de Castiglione)
• Tuilleries
• Madeleine Church & Place de la Concorde
• Place Vendome
• Arc de Triomphe - view Paris (daily 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.)
• Champs-Elysées
• DINNER: La Boutique à Sandwiches. 12 Rue du Colisée (between Rue de Ponethieu and Ave des Champs-Elysées)
• Buddha Bar (8 rue Boissy d'Anglais, near Place de la Concorde)

After spending our first of two weeks in the Hotel Saint-Roch, the shabby not-so-chic hotel I'd found online for us (last post) until Nancy's friend's apartment was available, we threw our things into our suitcases, hopped into a taxi and headed for rue du Platre in the Marais. There is a lot of history and buzz around Le Marais district of Paris, and it's a highly desirable area of residence. My sister's friend who owns the apartment is an opera singer in NYC, and she was lucky to get a prized apartment in this building that also houses the Hotel du Vieux Marais.

As I mentioned in the last post, there are always certain things you expect that don't happen on a trip like this, and things you don't expect that do. When those unexpected things turn out to be life-long loves, they are good indeed.

One of the unexpected things that wasn't so lovely was that this apartment in the Marais was a 4th floor walk-up. We had spared nothing packing our suitcases for two weeks in Paris. We must have been pretending we were Ms. & Ms. Gotrocks, taking dresses and as many shoes as we wanted. So we had BIG suitcases. But since we weren't Ms. and Ms. Gotrocks, we had to carry those suitcases up four flights by ourselves. But once we were up there, it was great, complete with floor length balcony windows (ours is the top floor in the photo above, just hidden under the hotel card, my sister in her own room and me on a futon in the living room with those tall windows.

So I'm getting to my life-long love discovery. Our first morning waking up in the apartment we decided to try out the patisserie in the ground floor of the apartment building. I went for a café crème and a Danish-looking pastry. We sat outside under an umbrella in the spring sun, watching local residents hurry by on their way to work. This is not a tourist district.



We met pretty Ellen, another American from Boston, who was staying in the hotel. We invited her up for some wine and cheese later in the week, another nice reason to stay in an apartment if you can - they cost no more than a hotel per night, and you have a kitchen, washing machine and lots of room. In the photo above I'm not talking to myself, I'm talking to Ellen. In the photo below, Ellen and Nancy are there looking pretty at our table.



All right, I won't keep you in suspense any longer. My life-long discovery. That Danish-looking pastry was called pain aux raisins (bread with raisins). Although I tried to find its equal at many patisseries in Paris, I never found one as phenomenally delicious as at this little patisserie in the Marais. The secret is that within the spiral of dough and raisins is custard. Yes custard. The delicate brioche dough, combined with custard, is the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. The little woman who bakes them is not terribly friendly and doesn't seem to know a word of English, but the woman knows how to bake.



The afternoon before we left Paris after our two week stay, I ordered 18 of these to pick up in the morning, on our way to the airport. I had brought Ziploc bags for who knows what reason. I packaged up my treasures, snuggled them into the suitcase, and took them - a little flatter - to the office two days after arriving home. I shared them with my colleagues, and they declared that even two-three days old, these were the best tasting things they'd ever eaten.

Now, when I return to Paris, I always try to find an apartment in the Marais - not only for the desirable neighborhood, but for this little patisserie and its pain aux raisins.



I found this photo online at a Flickr page. Hope they don't mind.

Tour d'Argent restaurant

I have never eaten at this restaurant. I love how it looks. It is one of the finest restaurants in Paris, sits on the Seine, and from its windows on an upper floor you can look at the sun setting behind the Notre Dame. Enter its web site, and you will experience the extravagance shown in the movie Marie Antoinette that I saw last week. I have been fortunate enough to eat at some fine restaurants in Paris, a once in a lifetime experience for most of us. If you ask me, almost anywhere you eat in Paris is wonderful, even the humblest café. The food is better than anywhere I've been. I have a theory that the omelettes are better in Paris because they do not refrigerate the eggs as we do in the U.S.

Miel & Cheval: Honey & Horse

1. On rue St-Antoine, a block from where I'm staying, there is a natural honey store, Miel et Nature, right next to a butcher that sells horsemeat, Au Cheval du Marais. I wonder how the natural honey-buyers feel shopping next to this boucherie? I was a bit disturbed just walking by, even though I eat (other) meat.

Frenchmen began eating horsemeat, ”they say, during the Battle of Eylau in 1807, when the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Grand Army, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, advised the starving troops to eat the flesh of dead battlefield horses. The cavalry used breastplates as cooking pans and gunpowder as seasoning, and thus founded a tradition.” (from this article)

Ok, stay with me.

Doorway into the courtyard of the Picasso Museum

2. At the Picasso museum in Paris, also in this neighborhood, there is a visiting photographic exhibit of Picasso’s mistress and friend, Dora Maar, with her photographs of him and his work, including the photographic series she took while he painted Guernica. Guernica (below) is Picasso’s anti-war painting against the April 27th, 1937 atrocities perpetrated on behalf of Franco against the civilian population of a little Basque village in northern Spain. By May 1 of 1937, a million protestors against this horrific act flooded the streets of Paris, where Picasso was living and painting. He had been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937. Previously avoiding politics (though disturbed by the turmoil in his home country, Spain), in response to the terrible massacre at Guernica he painted this painting for the Spanish Pavilion. Imagine!

“The central figure in Guernica is a horse run through with a javelin, wrenched in agony. Some interpreted the horse as Franco's Nationalism, with Picasso predicting its downfall. But other, opposite meanings make more sense in the overall context. The portrayal of the people as a helpless animal dying a senseless death, without the light of hope, is certainly a disturbing idea.” (from this article)

It was not until after Picasso's death (1973), and after the death of Franco (1975), who had instigated the massacre in Spain, that Picasso's painting Guernica was sent to Spain, because Picasso wanted it to belong to the Spanish people, but not while Spain was ruled by a dictator. It is now housed in the Reina Sofía, Spain's national museum of modern art.

Bear with me just a little bit more.

3. I also found out today about ATD Fourth World, a non-governmental humanitarian organization based in France that believes everybody, especially society's poorest members, needs culture as well as bread (fundamentally the ability to read and write, but also the arts).

This article in Mondialogo says "That is the basic tenet of ATD (Aid in Total Distress), which was founded in 1957 in a camp for homeless families in the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Grand by Father Joseph Wresinski. First the priest invited actors to perform Sophocles’ Antigone in the muddy, ramshackle settlement. Then he laid on an exhibition of original works by Picasso, Braque, Miro and Léger. 'Culture is a fundamental right,' said Father Wresinski, 'but the shame the poorest people have to endure cuts them off from that right.' He wanted culture 'to cease to be a privilege' and to help people outside mainstream society 'believe in their own culture and in their intelligence.'"

This is just me responding to a day in Paris when honey, dead horses and Picasso were seen in more than one place.