Taste of Paris

We had already had several delicious tastes of Paris by 11 in the morning, but we had tickets to THE Taste of Paris at the Grand Palais. I always read about fun festivals in Paris, but it is always so darned inconvenient to fly over here to attend them! Fortunately I read about this one beforehand on one of my favorite blogs, parisbreakfast and the timing was right. I bought our tickets online for Sunday, the last day of the event. 

Good thing we decided to get there ahead of time, because the line was already long.

But that gave us time to look at the magnificent building in front of us. There is so much of a Paris that I have not discovered, and the Grand Palais is one of those grand monuments I have passed by many times near the Champs Élysées. 

It doesn't usually have a huge pink fork out in front, however. Now THAT I would notice! 

We waited outside of the huge glass domed interior until they opened the doors. As you can imagine, once the sun was shining, it was like a greenhouse in there. 

But oh, what a greenhouse! One filled with tempting treats and delectable morsels...our tickets came with tokens for tastes of food and drink, but not enough to go very far...fortunately there were lots of free samples, too. 

Like little cups of chantilly cream served by handsome men. 

Not free, but beautiful to look at. 

The whole idea is that chefs promote themselves and their famous restaurants, and for the public it is a chance to possibly see these chefs up close and in person, and sample their foods without going into their expensive restaurants. At least, that's how I see it.

We didn't have too many taste tokens, so we decided to team up and share bites of a few things. Of course I read later that for €10 more we could have had double the tokens... But we tried this lovely tarte first, from Pierre Sang Boyer

There were a lot of flavors and textures, but we found it a bit unusual that in a savory tarte, the pastry shell was sweet.

He's cute, though he might not approve of this action shot I took. Although we didn't know of many of the chefs beforehand, it was still fun to see them in person. 

And we saw Kei Kobayashi discussing ( and smelling) the Japanese knives. 

We also tasted his dumplings. Pretty good. 

I liked this tower of tomatoes, but did not sample the ketchup...

We loved the ice cream cab, especially the cute guy who popped out of the top to give us tastes of ice cream! This could be the next business venture. The ice cream wasn't bad either...

There were lots of chefs who's names I do know, like Joel Robuchon, Alain Ducasse and Guy Savoy, but we followed the longer lines ,figuring that those in the know knew the young chefs to try. 

This was one of our favorite samples - a bite of cheese and charcuterie, but the real star was the beer from Leffe- the ruby could be my second favorite after framboise. 

This was the last of our "paid" tastes that Rita found for us. Not sure which chef it was from, but it had interesting combinations of textures and thankfully, no foam! Foam seems to still be the rage and we saw plenty of it at the Taste, but neither of us are big fans. 

After a lot of walking and being on our feet for over 7 hours, we happily hopped on the metro back to the Marais, calling our first full day in Paris a big success!