Gotta Share an Eclair! - Act 2: From Gilded Eclairs to the Golden Arches

This blog entry is in honor of the new little one in the family, Madeline! (for those not in the know, my cousin had a baby early last week.)

On Saturday, J. & I metroed over to Place de la Madeleine to review the Fouchon eclair weekend. See previous blog entry Gotta Share an Eclair. In summary the eclairs' taste and presentation lived up to its promise but the in-house dining experience was disappointing. Fouchon's is an upscale gourmet shop where all the food is displayed like art and treated the same.


After a week of dreaming about the aromas of fresh baked eclairs like in an American donut shop when the donuts are fresh out of the fryer, it was disappointing to enter through the pink tinted sliding glass doors and smell something akin to the humidity of museum air. The pink tinted sliding glass doors was like looking through rose colored glasses. So what the shop lacked in aromas, they made up for in the presentation. The eclairs sat as art protected behind a clear plexi-glass counter-top like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre behind her bullet proof shield. This eclair art was priced like art too and cost as much as our bottle of Head & Shoulder's at $7/piece.



For breakfast we ordered a coconut ganache eclair, chocolate mousse eclair and gilded eclair! I don't believe I have ever had the opportunity to eat gold. We decided to eat in the outdoor street - side cafe with pink tables and chairs. The eclairs were laid out on a pink plastic tray and we were given two silver plastic forks. It just didn't seem right to be eating an eclair frosted with gold upon a plastic tray and with plastic forks. It just didn't do justice to the beautiful regal eclair. That's all the gold did for the eclair too. The gold did not add a metal crunch nor add any flavor. The fork easily cut through like a lightly frosted cake. The taste of the eclairs was good but not out of this world.

For lunch we ordered a chicken curry and smoked salmon with peas to go. Each eclair was crated like a piece of art into their own special pink boxes and wrapped in pretty packages.

Afterwards, we walked around Place de la Madeleine. It's a square with a big church in the center surrounded by upscale gourmet food shops. The front steps of the church are flowers. All around the square are upscale shops of mostly gourmet foods from mustard shops to truffle shops. You can find 5000 Euro phones and truffles for 490 an ounce. There was a wedding at the church and we watched the bride and groom arrive in a white old fashioned Rolls with a green striped Lotus and red Ferrari close behind. From the steps of the church you can look down the Boulevard to the gold topped Egyptian obelisk on Place de la Concorde and further along the road to Invalid's gold dome. The sun really made them shine!

In the morning it was gilded eclairs and gold domes and in the afternoon it was back home to the golden arches of the Denfert -Rochereau Metro stop. Behind the pointed golden arches of the metro sign is the rounded golden arches of McDonald's. Here you can order via the kiosks shown below, log on to the free wifi or choose between beer or Pierier as your beverage. You can order the American, Canadian, British or Australia burgers, regular fries or thick fries, ketchup or pommes-frites sauce which is a sweet mayonnaise. Among the desert options are chocolate mouse and citron topped pies. The burgers come with a spicy sauce as opposed to plain ketchup. J. said he just read an article in the NYTimes that said almost everything in the French MickeyD's is made in France. This might explain why the price tag of eating at McDonald's is like $25 for two meal deals. In perspective of of the eclair breakfast which did not include a beverage or a side dish only fancy boxes, this felt like quite a deal.













This is only one weekend's food adventures in Paris. It only gets better from here! So more to come on the food adventures in Paris this summer.