Lafayette

Classified historic building in 1989, the restaurant has already known two centuries and is well prepared to get through this brand new one. It is both a prestigious actor of the restaurant business and a privileged witness of parisian life. In this wonderful place, favourable for sweet nostalgy, fifty billions bellies have been satisfied since its creation.
So the description below that would like to satisfy your curiosity will of course not replace a nice visit 7th, rue du faubourg Montmartre, in the ninth district, the best place to feel Paris.

It seems that you enter to work at Chartier as if you intend to enter in religion.
This principle is tacitly admited as only four different owners have ruled the place since its creation in 1896. As well the crew "makes" the place, daily honouring their engagement dressed in their traditional room clothes, le rondin (a black waistcoat with many pockets) and the long white apron.

Above all, and since the very first meal served, the same simple and beautiful ambition is guiding the owners. At the turn of the 19th century, the idea was to serve for a very small price a real hot meal to the blue collar and the people of the neighbourhood: the wellknown "bouillon", a mixture of meat and vegetables.
Today, only the diversity of the clients and the menu have changed.

But at Chartier, where discretion is a master word, a certain spirit remains, a behaviour that turns any client into a converted. Engagement and respect of the customers are not vain words. To whom who can observe, the restaurant is a proof itself. No silk, no cristal, no silverware, but the soul and the authenticity of a unique and timeless place.

You come in through a nice wooden entrance in this place that has "no history with History" quoting the arts person and owner Daniel Lemaire. Vast and clear, the room has glass ceilings and mouldings. Tall mirrors accentuate the perspective, a stair climbs you up to another room where you might find a free place left to sit. Little wooden chairs surrounding tables firmly anchored on the ground with their cast-iron feet. Glossed copper and wood everywhere warm the clients.

At Chartier you feel as if you were at home and elsewhere as well. With the sensation that you are a guest, not only a customer. The pleasure to be here, very tranquil at your place but also being part of the client's community.
And what about these famous wooden racks with numbered drawers laid out along the room? These symbols of Chartier, as old as the restaurant itself, when every customer had its own napkin and could store it in.

We know the customers make the restaurant. Sounds, tastes, smells, sight, everything converge so you will not miss a thing of this fabulous banquet of the senses. But the story of Chartier is the one you tell.

 Passage de Panorama

The Pont Alexandre bridge is one of the most attractive bridges in the French capital.  It crosses the Seine near the Grand Palais (i.e. the glass roofed building in the distance).

The structure was built between 1887 and 1889 as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle, a World's Fair marking the centennial celebration of the French Revolution. Three hundred workers joined together 18,038 pieces of puddled iron (a very pure form of structural iron), using two and a half million rivets, in a structural design by Maurice Koechlin. The co-architects of the Eiffel Tower were Emile Nouguier, Maurice Koechlin and Stephen Sauvestre.[11] The risk of accident was great as, unlike modern skyscrapers, the tower is an open frame without any intermediate floors except the two platforms. However, because Eiffel took safety precautions, including the use of movable stagings, guard-rails and screens, only one man died. The tower was inaugurated on 31 March 1889, and opened on 6 May.

The tower was much criticised by the public when it was built, with many calling it an eyesore. Newspapers of the day were filled with angry letters from the arts community of Paris. One is quoted extensively in William Watson's US Government Printing Office publication of 1892 Paris Universal Exposition: Civil Engineering, Public Works, and Architecture: “And during twenty years we shall see, stretching over the entire city, still thrilling with the genius of so many centuries, we shall see stretching out like a black blot the odious shadow of the odious column built up of riveted iron plates.”[12] Signers of this letter included Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Charles Gounod, Charles Garnier, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Alexandre Dumas.

Novelist Guy de Maupassant—who claimed to hate the tower[13]—supposedly ate lunch in the Tower's restaurant every day. When asked why, he answered that it was the one place in Paris where one could not see the structure. Today, the Tower is widely considered[by whom?] to be a striking piece of structural art.

One of the great Hollywood movie clichés is that the view from a Parisian window always includes the tower. In reality, since zoning restrictions limit the height of most buildings in Paris to 7 stories, only a very few of the taller buildings have a clear view of the tower.

Eiffel had a permit for the tower to stand for 20 years; it was to be dismantled in 1909, when its ownership would revert to the City of Paris. The City had planned to tear it down (part of the original contest rules for designing a tower was that it could be easily demolished) but as the tower proved valuable for communication purposes, it was allowed to remain after the expiry of the permit. The military used it to dispatch Parisian taxis to the front line during the First Battle of the Marne.

Paris from Eiffle Tower