Tour Montparnasse

Open : Winter: 9.30 a.m.-10.30 p.m. - Summer: 9.30 a.m.-11.30 p.m.

A fine example of twentieth century architecture. The 56th and 59th floors are open to the public. Superb view of Paris (209 metres). Architects; Beaudoin, Cassin, De Marien, Saubot (1973).

Montparnasse :

Quarter of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine River, centering on the intersection of the Boulevard de Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail. Its famous cafés (the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Coupole, and others) were long centers of the Parisian artistic and intellectual world. The quarter contains the Pasteur Institute, the ancient catacombs, and the Montparnasse cemetery, with the tombs of Saint-Saëns, Houdon, Baudelaire, Poincaré, César Franck, Maupassant, and Leconte de Lisle.

Facts

- The 56th and 59th floors are open to the public, and you can get one of the best panoramic views of Paris from there.
- Originally proposed in 1956, and completed 17 years later.
- Tallest building in Europe outside Russia from 1973 - 1990; surpassed by MesseTurm in Frankfurt. Tour Montparnasse is still the tallest building in France.
- Replaced a railway station on the site where it stands.
- The normative building height in the adjacent surrounding blocks is roughly 26 meters.

La Coupole, Montparnasse, Paris
(102 bd Montparnasse, Paris. Lunch and dinner every day !!!)

A few years ago I met my Van der Merwe in a restaurant in the New Forest. Late in the evening when the majority of the punters had finished eating, and Afrikaner strode across the dining room and told me to put out the cigarette I was smoking. This was an order rather than a courteous request (to which I would have acceded). I muttered something about not being his houseboy and got on with killing myself slowly; it is, no doubt, this sort of boorish individual who Messrs Hague and Townend are so anxious to exclude from these diseased dysfunctional islands.

Still, I should no, I guess, have been surprised. The League of Passive Smokers is a powerful self-righteous lobby with God – a former 40-a-day man who saw the light – on its side. It is self-evidently of American, specifically Californian origin, which is presumably why Rules, an ur-English restaurant and thus a magnet for transatlantic tourists, has banned smoking altogether. You wouldn't bet against other London restaurants following its example.

Until recently, however, I'd never considered the possibility that Paris might go the same proscriptive way. But that was before my last dinner at, of all places La Couple when the middle-aged middle-class Frenchman at the next table wondered whether I might desist. And I did – he was polite, charming, amused, and we fell into conversation in the way that you do in that city's restaurants but seldom do in London's where an invisible cordon segregates each table, Nonetheless…what's going on?

The French used to smoke with the same fanaticism as the Spanish, the current European champions. No longer; and the country's taste for native tobacco, the national odour, appears, too, to have declined. There are Marlboro Lights everywhere. And as if that were not bad enough, Seita, in an act of corporate vandalism that borders on aesthetic treason, has amended Ponty's 1938 design for the Gitanes packet. I recall that I was similarly indignant about the restoration to its original Twenties decorative scheme of La Coupole 12 years ago: it made it seem brand-new, a copy of its former self. The patina of half a century disappeared overnight. These 12 years have improved it no end. It once again looks lived-in. There have been times when the cooking was something you suffered in order to pass time in the world's most beguiling brasserie.

That is no longer the case. This dinner was the best I've eaten there in my 30 years patronage of the place. There was straightforwardly boiled crab – white meat, dark meat, red roe – of such size and consequently intense flavour that mayonnaise was redundant; presumably this beast was from the Atlantic. A tartar of salmon and scallops was bound with a finely judged, faintly citric emulsion which countered the extreme richness of the meat. Grey shrimps were served by themselves with a pig of lemon. Entrecote was better flavoured than Chateabriand. To drink: an acceptable Madiran and a Poire served in a glass set at 45 degrees in a bowl of ice. To watch: a serious and entertaining outbreak of waiter rage when two members of the brigade collided causing breakages and irate factionalism among their colleagues.