What to Eat in Lyon?

And Other Urgent Questions
by Bill Buford

In a dining establishment in Ly on, you can eat pig fat fried in pig fat, a pig’s brain dressed in vinegar, a salad made with pig lard, a chicken boiled in a pig’s bladder, a pig’s digestive tract filled up like a custard with pig’s blood, cold lentils with cold nuggets of a pig’s belly, and a piggy intestine stuffed to bursting with a thick handful of piggy intestines—imagine an old-fashioned telephone cable, packed to bursting with multicolored telephone wires, split open incomprehensibly by a repairman who somehow knows where everything goes.

For these and other reasons, Lyon, for the past 76 years, has been known as the gastronomical capital of both France and the world.
The world is a big place. Two years ago, I persuaded my wife, Jessica Green, and our three-year-old twin toddlers to leave New York City with me and move to Lyon to see what was so good about the good food there. We arrived just as the city became very cold and a couple months before the Bocuse d’Or. We intended to stay six months. To our astonishment, we are still here. And we have no plans to leave.

These are some of our discoveries.

Best Lyonnais meal: Lunch. Small price, big bang: simple, never fancy, like the food you wish your mother had cooked, and so cheap that, even with wine—even with quite a lot of wine, even with a ridiculous amount of wine—you will stare at l’addition convinced that someone has made a mistake. (After a brief internal debate, you will slink off like a shoplifter.) Best version? Anywhere; everywhere. There will be only one expensive item: the espresso, which is unfortunate because it will taste like mud.

Worst Lyonnais meal: Breakfast. Tip: If staying the night, consider packing a cup of coffee in your carry-on.

Best-value killer meal according to the classic diner’s formula (quality divided by price): Saison. This is the name of the inexplicably elegant (just how do they do it, exactly?) establishment on the ground floor of a 19th-century silk maker’s preposterous folly (towers, turrets, there must have been a moat), otherwise known as L’Institut Paul Bocuse, in Ecully, four miles from Lyon. The kitchen is run by Alain Le Cossec, 1991 Meilleur Ouvrier de France, chef, and Zen master of culinary perfection. You don’t go there to be a big-hearted soul and support students making a mess of haute cuisine. No, a meal is not a good deed. (Besides, who would want to eat such a thing—and, what, pay for it too?) The secret: No student is allowed close enough to the food to damage it. (How do I know? I was a student.)

Best bouchon on a Saturday night: Café des Fédérations. Drunken, alarmingly uninhibited, sometimes just plain alarming. What is a bouchon? Go, here, for dinner. You’ll understand everything.

Best bouchon on a Sunday night: Le Bouchon des Filles, run by two sisters and former waitresses of Café des Fédérations. They describe their place as a bouchon run by women for people who think a normal bouchon is too heavy. Me? I describe it as good.

Best bouchon anytime, anywhere: Daniel et Denise—except it’s not a bouchon. It calls itself a bouchon, but it’s a restaurant— and a good one that just happens to serve all the classic Lyonnais dishes, but done so expertly that you don’t recognize they are classic Lyonnais dishes. The chef, who is neither a Daniel, nor a Denise, but a Joseph, is another MOF (by the way, Meilleur Ouvrier de France is French for “I’m kick-*ss, you’re not; get out of my way”). Chef Joseph became a MOF in 2006, the same year that he bought Daniel et Denise from both Daniel and Denise and quit his chef’s job at the once justly famous restaurant Lyon de Lyon, where (surprise, surprise) you could eat classic Lyonnais dishes done so expertly that only a Michelin inspector could recognize them. Since Chef’ Joseph’s departure, Lyon de Lyon has been, well, downgraded.

Best small restaurant you still haven’t heard of, even though it’s kick-ass, brilliant, and you probably won’t get a reservation: Au 14 Février, in Vieux Lyon. You don’t know it. You should.

Best old-fashioned quenelle: Café Comptoir Abel. Café Comptoir Abel is neither a café nor a comptoir, but a bouchon with an excess of atmosphere so precious that even Daniel Boulud has been caught on tape coveting the place and admitting to a scheme to steal it. (The heist, since abandoned, involved a task force of nocturnal engineers charged with loosening Abel from its foundations, packing it up into a crate, and shipping it to Manhattan, whereupon New Yorkers would go wild, having discovered that French food is actually Italian food but better.) Abel’s chef, the heroic but unheralded Alain Vigneron, is the only person still standing behind a stove who knows how to make a quenelle as it was done 76 years ago. A quenelle is less a recipe than a clever invention that, in Alain Vigneron’s preparation, renders a bony, virtually inedible, giant Rhône Valley lake fish into a creamy soufflé-like poem irritatingly evocative of sex. In fact, it’s not Alain Vigneron’s preparation—he “borrowed” it from Eugenie Brazier, a.k.a. Mère Brazier, the first woman chef to have gotten three Michelin stars in 1933, and a local legend. Today you still see scattered around town (on the wall of restaurants where she never worked, at the tabac, on a bus) not only her picture, but the picture: the now iconic image taken in 1935 by Blanc and Demilly—Théo Blanc and Antoine Demilly, the Lyonnais celebrity photo team (between the wars, all of haute Lyon passed before their lens)—that depicts a tough, rotund, no-nonsense woman in too-tight chef’s garb stirring a steamy, unexplained pot with such demonic intensity that you don’t want to know what’s inside. It is worth noting that the unheralded Alain Vigneron also makes the best salad Lyonnaise. I should know: I’ve eaten it 55 times.

Best postmodern quenelle: The exquisite confection lighter than the sea, marginally heavier than air, and with the texture of a cloud that was introduced to the world at 11:45 a.m. On April 3, 2010, at La Mère Brazier—the restaurant, not the person who died in 1977, by which time the place had been run for more than a decade by her son anyway, the parent and progeny having developed such a loathing for each other that she abandoned her kitchen and got out of town, opening another establishment in the countryside, thereby becoming the world’s first six-star chef. When the son died, his daughter, Jacqueline, took over: a gentle, good woman, who, unlike her father and grandmother, was well-balanced, sensible, and not a maniac, and so, in time, ended up selling the place to Mathieu Viannay, who reopened it the month my wife, the twins, and I arrived in Lyon. Viannay, a self-proclaimed neoclassicist, has since been reinventing most of Mère Brazier’s greatest recipes. Even so, it took him 18 months to come up with a postmodern quenelle (it’s that special). Viannay became a MOF in 2004 and wears a multicolored collar, like all the other MOFs, one that commands you to stand at attention and salute him when he passes, which is what his cooks do, waiting until Viannay can’t see them to stare openly and longingly at his MOF neckwear and admit, under their breath, that one day, they, too, will grow up to be a MOF. (Source? Me. I worked there.)

Best boulanger: Bob’s, on the Quai Saint-Vincent. Oldfashioned, prerevolutionary bread made in an old-fashioned, prerevolutionary way. Go there. Eat. You will understand why the French once put away three kilos of the stuff a day—and why a queen once said, “Let them eat Bob’s pain!” Best place to be at dawn on a Sunday morning: The Roman amphitheater. You have no idea.

Best place to be at midnight: the Amphitheater of the Three Gauls, ancient meeting and drinking place. Early Christians were skinned alive here. Sometimes, in the early hours, you can hear them.

Two best restos of the low- to mid-price range: Le Bistrot du Potager and Le Fleurie. Le Potager is run by Franck Delhoume from Marseille, and you will find Marseille in the food. Le Fleurie is run by Olivier Paget, who is not from Fleurie. He liked the name.

Best market: Quai Saint-Antoine on a Sunday morning. The famous Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse is a shopping mall of high-end products, incomprehensible to a non-Lyonnais unless you are also a social anthropologist studying the Lyonnais psyche as manifest in its irrational habits of food consumption, particularly “brands.” But for dinner? The Quai.

Best place to drink in Vieux Lyon: Georges V, run by the wine impresario Georges dos Santos (his store Antic Wine supplies the good restaurants). You will find Georges at the bar. Ask him a question: like, is the food of Lyon any good? Note the time. If three hours later you’re able to leave, the next bottle is on me.

Bill Buford is the author of Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook , Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. He lives in Lyon and is completing a book about learning how to be a French cook, provisionally titled Dirt. A film about his research, Fat Man in a White Hat, was recently broadcast on the BBC.