Eating And Walking In The 8th And 16th Arrondisements

We both wanted to walk a bit in the 7th or 8th--areas we don't get to much except with visitors--and both wanted to have a steak and frites repas, so I located a restaurant of interest and a path to the Trocadero, in the 16th, for its views of the Eiffel Tower. 

The restaurant was Le Relais de l'Entrecote; our plan was to get
there before opening and perhaps beat the lunch crowd

We were not the only ones with that idea; but at noon
the line started moving, quickly, and we got a table;
we later learned, via one of the Paris newsletters Vicki
subscribes to, that Le Relais de l'Entrecote was one of
the top ten restos trending that day on Tik Tok; big woof

Turns out it is a steak/frites only place: after you're seated, the serveuse
brings you a mixed green salad, then returns to ask how you want your
steak; a basket of baguette slices arrives, as well as the drink order; in due
course a plate arrives, filled with steak and frites; hangar steak, flavorful,
juicy, cooked just as ordered; the "secret sauce" was a green poivre sauce;
seconds are on the house; there's a pretty extensive dessert menu, but after
that much delicious steak, and pretty good frites, we had to say no; there are 
branches in St. Germain and in Montparnasse (also Geneva and Zurich)
so we'll definitely be going back...

Today's micro-niche store, with a killer location on
Rue George V, La Pistacherie 

What? Your town doesn't have a pistacherie?

Passing by the Museum of Fashion

We figured we were not appropriately attired

Arriving at the Trocadero

The celebrated view

One half of the Trocadero; it's a huge 1930s structure, far more
impressive from afar

Thus

Montparnasse Cemetery

The Montparnasse Cemetery is a distant second to Pere Lachaise, but it's only half a kilometer away, and it does have a share of historically interesting 19th and 20th century residents. 

It's a big cemetery, but there are map/guides like this
all around, and laminated copies to loan; plus, my big
discovery of the day was that, at least for the most
famous or popular persons, Google Maps does quite well,
especially among the denser, smaller plots

By far the most visited appeared to be the tomb of philosophers
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; I've read that 50,000
attended Sartre's memorial services; but most of the present-day
attention goes to Beauvoir, whom one suspects will be the more
historically significant of the pair; I'd wager more people have
read The Second Sex than Being and Nothingness

Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil; nice flowers;
major supporter of the likes of Poe, Wagner, Manet, to
name a few

Le Chat, sculpture in honor of an AIDS victim

Henri Longlais, historian of French cinema 

The Bird, in honor of Jean-Jacques Goetzmann, by Niki de Saint-
Phalle, who also did Le Chat

Alfred Dreyfus, of the Dreyfus affair (look it up)

Guy de Maupassant, father of the modern short story

The Baudelaire Cenotaph

Carlos Fuentes

Ameican philosopher Susan Sontag

Emile Durkeim, father of sociology

Man Ray, American, photographer, painter, Dadaist,
Surrealist, who spent most of his creative career in
Montparnasse

French sculptor Cesar Baldaccini, designed his own
tomb

Theater of the Absurd playwright Eugene Ionesco;
never did find Poincare, Larousse, a few others...
next time

La Fete Du Pain

Our next adventure, on a rainy Monday, was the annual Paris Fete du Pain, held in the forecourt of the cathedral, which, nowadays, unfortunately, is not very crowded. The Festival of Bread occurs in several tents, where you get to watch the judging, the making of bread items by master bakers and their students, and also buy some of the goodies. Having doubled or quadrupled our bread intake, particularly baguettes, since returning to Europe, we felt we needed to learn more, especially yours truly, who needs to better distinguish the €.45 cheapies from Franprix from Vicki's preferred €1.30 traditional artisanal type. Oh, I made a couple lengthy videos of the action, which will appear on my YouTube channel some day.

Front-end of the baking tent

Back-end; of the 30 or so people working there--elder bakers and
students from the various culinary/bakery schools about Paris--we
saw only two females; in most any boulangerie you walk into, the
front-end will be women, the back-end, maybe not

Making croissants; it's all in the wrist action

Love the T-shrt

Spare parts; but as we'll see, these get fed back into the rolling
machine and will come back out as a nice, huge, sheets of dough

Thus

Measure twice; use a cooling rack to make a cutting grid

Cut many times

Assemble and roll; ready for the oven

Having mastered pain au chocolate, we moved on to these guys,
who were making (we learned at great length) apple tartlets

Teacher and student; the student is cutting out the tartlet rounds

Of course there is an MC narrating it all; also cutting up bits of a baguette
for the audience to sample; the whole thing could have used a Noel Fielding, 
I thought

Satisfied customer

I think this is an oven

Huge dough-mixing machine; designed to resemble R2D2

Expert interview

Now the student is piping glops of apple sauce onto the tartlets-to-be

And cutting the (machine-pre-skinned/pre-cored/pre-halved)
apple halves into slices; the teacher also was doing this, his
slices half as thick and twice as quick

Next door, making Eiffel Tower cookies for the tourists

Thus assembled, ready for the oven...one of several trays

Back at the front-end

Of course we bought one; nice shot with the student
baker in the background

Now in the judging tent, where, I think, they are judging best baguette
in France; or possibly somewhere else; the best in Paris turned out to
be a young Indian immigrant in the 20th; our local baker, around the corner,
won 5th

Parthian shot

Takes his baguettes very seriously