Eating Up
Parisians seem to studiously ignore the Eiffel Tower. When it’s mentioned in conversation, it’s described rather disdainfully as “Un truc pour les touristes“. The most famous monument in the world is generally not worth the attention of local residents.
Although I’ve been to the base of the tower several times with visitors, I’ve never felt the urge to climb it. I prefer to avoid crowds where possible. At the Tower the tens of thousands of tourists, hawkers and armed paratroopers do not make for a pleasant atmosphere.
However, last night I swallowed my pride and we reserved a table in the restaurant on the first level of the tower. It was (surprisingly) good fun. You pay a premium for eating there (65EUR set menu), and you must reserve in advance. But the food is GOOD, with a decided slant towards seafood: I chose smoked salmon as an entrée and scallops as a main course.
I should point out that we ate at the “cheap” restaurant. If you want to eat higher up the tower, in the Restaurant Jules Verne, be prepared to fork out 200EUR for the set menu.
Climbing the tower gives you the chance to look down upon the crowds queueing to do exactly the same thing as you. I took the photo above at 9pm, with people casting long silhouettes in the setting sun.
A visit to the Tower helps you appreciate the amazing technical feat of building such a structure out of iron in 1889. It may be a tourist trap, but quite frankly it deserves to be famous. For 40 years it was the tallest building in the world (1889-1930). Today it is still the second-tallest structure in France after the equally impressive Viaduc de Millau.
But perhaps the best reason to go up the tower is precisely to see “Paris without the Tower”. Without the Tower, Paris spreads out in all directions, with small punctuation marks (the Left Bank domes of Les Invalides, the Institut de France and the Pantheon) piercing its uniform 7-storey roofline. The white and cream stone rolls all the way out to the suburbs beyond the périph where apartment blocks mark a barrier between the city and the rest of the country – a barrier that is just as effective as the old city walls.
From the Tower, you can sweep the northern horizon to see symbols of Paris past and future. On the Butte de Montmartre stands Sacré-Coeur, the bad-taste memorial to Paris’s own little civil war of 1871 which killed 20-30,000 citizens. And further to the west stands the business district of La Défense, a vast money refinery on the horizon that pumps a GDP the size of Greece back into the capital each year, funding its faded glory.
