France 2014: Eating in Lyon

Although Lyon is known as the gastronomical capital of the world, we did not pack clothing fancy enough to try the really high-end restaurants.  We decided instead that we would try to experience an authentic Bouchon, which serves very traditional Lyonnaise style of cooking that is centuries old.

At our first restaurant, Café Comptoir Abel, we knocked several items off the list.  We ordered the Quenelle de brochet en gratin maison, which is a mixture of creamed pike combined with bread crumbs and a light egg binding, poached and then served with a creamy crayfish flavoured sauce.  While it was good, the flavours did not knock my socks off as I expected.  I think I liked the one that our friend Dave once cooked for us better.   We liked the second main course which we shared–filet of beef with morel mushrooms in a peppery cream sauce.

For appetizer, Rich ordered the Lyonnaise salad which consisted of greens, bacon, croutons and poached egg.  This was really good and I regretted not ordering one myself since Rich would only allow me so many tastes.  The bacon was appropriately crunchy while the croutons were freshly made, the egg was more like hard-boiled than soft poached (the way I like it) and there was a nice garlicky dressing.  But then, I did not do too badly myself with a huge piece of delicious fois gras on my artichoke salad that had greens, peas and tomato. 

Our next meal was at Les Paves de Saint-Jean in the Old Town and I was determined to get my own Lyonnaise salad this time.  Unfortunately it was not prepared quite the same way as the previous one and I did not like it as much.  The basic ingredients were all still there, but instead of crispy bacon, there were chunks of pork jowl, the egg was soft-poached and gooey, and the croutons seemed like they came out of a box from the store.  We did a bit better with our main courses, as they both came with Dauphinoise potatoes (scalloped potatoes with crème-fraiche) which are common in this area.  Rich had another local speciality, which was a Lyonnaise sausage covered in a baked brioche.

After several nights of eating meat (including the bacon in our "salad"), we decided to try the mussels at Bleu de Toi in the Presqu'île district near our hotel.  The mussels are prepared in an unusual fashion in Lyon, as many of them come with a thick cream sauce.  Rich got the Roquefort sauce and I got the "Blue de Toi special" which was a mushroom flavoured cream sauce with chunks of mushroom and onion.  Both were "lick-the-shell-clean" delicious.  The fries in this part of France are not to our liking as they are thick and not that crispy, while we like ours thinly cut and really crispy.  But dipping them in the sauces made up for this.  I was delighted to get an actual all vegetable salad with our meal that came with lettuce, cucumber, tomato and corn niblets.

On Sunday, we stumbled across our first local Farmer's Market (first of many to come as we travel through France). There was so much good looking food that it was too bad we were staying in a hotel without even a mini fridge to store perishables in.  Basically we could only buy what we could eat right there on the spot, which ruled out the roast chicken on a spit with roasted potatoes that Rich really wanted.  Now we are on a mission for the rest of the trip to find another roast chicken!

What we were did manage to consume were some crab and shrimp fried dumplings, a container of cherries, a cheese sausage and some very unusual flavours of macarons that included flavours like Roquefort and hazelnut, fois gras, tapenade and tomato confit.  We tried the first two flavours–they were strange but good.

Because we squeezed in two days of planned activities into one (see previous blog for details), we decided to leave Lyon one day early.  This would save us a night of hotel and allow us to arrive sooner in our home swap destination so that we could slow down the pace a bit.  The plan was always to visit Les Halles of Lyon, the massive covered food market that hosts over 60 vendors.  Despite indications on the internet that this market was open 7 days a week, we found out that only about 5 stalls were actually open on Monday mornings.  We did manage to pick up a couple of croissants for breakfast and a smoked Lyonnaise sausage to eat later, but our dreams of feasting ourselves and stocking up with groceries before heading to Bargemon were thoroughly thwarted.

We must come to Lyon again some other time so that we can try a higher end restaurant and visit Les Halles when the stalls are actually open.