Known for its nouvelle cuisine, this centre of gastronomy has its roots in a much homelier style of cooking. Anthea Gerrie tastes the best and discovers the mères who taught today’s masters
Salads of calves’ feet and pates, tête de veau and offal of every kind scream out at you from the rough and ready menus of Lyon’s working-class retaurants, the bouchons. Cheeks, marrow and sausages – there’s often nowhere else to look. From a culinary point of view, the city is paradoxical.
‘In Lyon, you can eat just about anything, notes author Bill Buford, who moved his family here in order to dive headfirst into the rich gastronomy. It’s also known as one of the finest destinations for food in the whole of France. City son and one of the godfathers of nouvelle cuisine, Paul Bocuse, is still revered by local chefs and countless more around the world.
So it is naturally with a former disciple that we start our pilgrimage high on the hill of Fourvière, where the showy Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière towers like a beacon above the dark canyons of Vieux Lyon. You have to wonder whether city planners deliberately routed the motorway, the ‘Autoroute du Soleil’, through the heart of their majestic metropolis – with the Rhône on one side and a raft of old buildings on the other – to tempt the curious away for a day or three. For many, it is a stop en route to the Côte d’Azur, but this Unesco-listed city has a lot more to offer.
It was a couple of decades ago, stuck in a traffic jam with time to reflect on the beauty of Lyon during our own hurtle south that we decided to break our journey there. We enjoyed exploring Vieux Lyon’s medieval passageways and hidden courtyards and the gutsy, bourgeois cooking, and have come back time and again for these delights to the eye and palate.
Today, we’re stood talking to Michelin-starred chef Christian Têtedoie, who won the title of Apprentice of the Year during his service with the master, Bocuse, before being summoned to the Elysée Palace to cook for the president.
‘For a state dinner, I was told several dozen lobsters had arrived from Brittany in the palace kitchen. Because they all had to be cooked that night, I combined them with a Lyonnais favourite, tête de veau, to make a highly unusual main course,’ he recalls. Now one of his most famous plates, he has had to reinvent the dish four times a year since 1964 to keep up with his diners’ desires.
Vieux Lyon doesn’t depend on a cache of famous restaurants for its appeal. In fact, few are located on its cobbled streets, and you are more likely to sample the spirit of the city in the authentic bouchons. Beware a few of the Johnny-come-lately tourist traps, and to be sure, seek out those certified by Les Bouchons Lyonnais, who rigorously preserve the ancient traditions. Those in Vieux Lyon include Daniel et Denise behind the cathedral, Le Laurencin on the main drag of Rue Saint-Jean, Les Fines Gueules tucked away on Rue Lainerie, and Les Lyonnais at the foot of Fourvière hill.
The bus or Metro will whisk you in moments to the Presqu’île district, where the best dining and food shopping are to be found. It’s also where the Mères – an affectionate term for the feisty women who first cooked for the people of Lyon – once had their establishments. They include Mère Brazier, who trained Bocuse himself, and Mère Léa who opened her restaurant in 1943 as war raged all around and then reopened it in the rubble two days after shelling had closed it down in 1945.
The almost exclusively male chefs who followed in their wake may not cut the same stoic figures as their foremothers, but Pierre Orsi, in his seventies and still at the stove of his Michelin-starred restaurant every night, really deserves a special shout out as a père. This grandfatherly chef still cooks like an angel, pouring love into every dish and is proud to let you know that he was one of Bocuse’s very first apprentices some 55 years ago. One of his stand-out dishes is a sublime Bresse chicken with morels.
Fabulous produce surrounds the city, from the sturdy-legged, flavoursome poultry of Bresse to Charolais cattle and rich cheese made from unpasteurised cow’s and goat’s milk. There’s no better place to try these than the city’s two main food markets: picturesque Quai Saint-Antoine, where food stalls line the riverbank; and the more serious Les Halles, which supplies the city’s top chefs (of course, it has been renamed Les Halles de Lyon-Paul Bocuse).
In Les Halles, we meet a few legendary names, including cheese expert Mère Richard, named as the affineur on menu after menu in Lyon. This is the place to buy the local St Marcellin, a tiny round cow’s cheese absolutely packed with flavour and offered by every restaurant; and cervelle de canut, fromage blanc mixed with herbs and rudely named after the brains of the silk workers who once drove the city’s economy. The Lyonnais love to eat either this savoury version or the more common quivering fromage blanc served with cream and a sugar shaker.
Just don’t leave a visit till Monday (the only day both markets are closed) and if visiting the riverside market on a Saturday, be sure to seek out Tiffany Bouhours, the lady tripière who is the most elegant woman you’ll ever see, Sébastien. She makes her own rillettes, fromage de tête, andouillette and calves’ feet salad, as well as selling the raw, unadulterated makings.
Other notable stores in Les Halles are the butcher Trolliet, who supplies Bresse chicken and meat to fine restaurants; the market café that cooks and serves up fresh frogs’ legs daily; and Sibilia, a legendary charcuterie, where you should try the salamis like rosette, and perhaps buy a pistachio-studded sausage to cook, as the Lyonnais do, in a sauce of Mâcon Blanc.
Mâcon Blanc is the white you’re most likely to be offered in Lyon – except at a Michelin-starred restaurant, when it will inevitably be the fragrant and rarefied Condrieu, the star viognier of the northern Rhône. The red will likely be an elegant Saint-Joseph, or its pricier but exquisite Rhône neighbour Côte-Rôtie. Over at the bouchons – of which Daniel et Denise, La Meunière, Le Café du Peintre and La Voûte Chez Léa – are among the finest examples, it will more likely be a decent, lightly-chilled Brouilly or another of the Beaujolais crus. A great place to learn about the superb wines that surround Lyon – Rhônes to the south, Burgundy, Mâconnais and Beaujolais to the north – is Antic Wine in Vieux Lyon, where ex-sommelier Georges Dos Santos keeps thousands of bottles and loves nothing better than to taste interesting vintages toegther with his customers.
The Romans scaled the hill of Fourvière, establishing great theatres that are still used for cultural performances today, as well as fortifications. A series of staircases – over 500 steps in total – lead to Vieux Lyon at the foot of the hill, the hub of the city in the Middle Ages. Then in the Renaissance, the city expanded across the banks of the Saône. But cross the Rhône and you’ll find a city that is still expanding, not only eastwards but in a southerly direction at the confluence of these two great rivers.
A funicular railway hauls you up the hill with no effort, and it’s well worth the trip. Lyon’s most-visited attraction is here – the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière is rich with mosaics, rivalling those of Palermo and Monreale in Sicily. Verdant public gardens sprawl all over the hill. The Villa Florentine provides five-star accommodation on Fourvière, with a Michelin-starred restaurant, Les Terrasses de Lyon, perfect for an alfresco lunch. Even here you can’t get away from Bocuse – there is a little gold model of the man in his gilded toque sitting between the salt and pepper on every table, a homage from chef Davy Tissot. Like Christian, Davy has introduced a more modern aesthetic into his menus; we particularly enjoy the little salty-sweet amuse-bouches in colourful cornets.
If anything is difficult in Lyon, it’s deviating from the restaurants to do some sightseeing. Some highlights can be caught on the hoof between meals – dipping into the fascinating Museum of Miniatures and Cinema, or perhaps seeing any of the 60 or so exquisite murals that take you by surprise when rounding corners all over the city.
Gilbert Coudène, whose Cité Création has painted many of these walls, also created a fabulous Rue des Grands Chefs at the entrance to Bocuse’s restaurant, the three-starred L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges, just outside the city. It pays homage to legendary figures in French cuisine, including the master’s own mentors, Mère Brazier and Fernand Point. Another place really worth the detour is Guy Lassausaie, whose fourth-generation family restaurant at Chasselay holds two stars. The chef honed his skills at the famed La Pyramide in the Rhône Valley before returning to his ancestral kitchen, where he delivers complex and delicate dishes like langoustines enveloped in angel hair pasta with vanilla butter, as well as improving regional classics like Bresse chicken with morels by stuffing the morels, together with diced sweetbreads for extra richness, into the boned-out bird before poaching in stock enriched with vin jaune.
Gastronomic pilgrimages may be a popular day’s pastime, but exploring new areas of the city centre is recommended too. The district where the Rhône and Saône meet is reminiscent of London’s Docklands or Paris’s La Défense – the futuristic architectural complex incorporating the drama of the two rivers proof that Lyon is not entirely a city stuck in a charming timewarp. But with such heritage behind the city’s concept of food, what does it say for the future of dining here?
Georges Dos Santos of Antic Wine ventures: ‘We allow our architects to innovate and we embrace new styles of wine, but when it comes to what we put in our mouths, the museau, andouillette and tête de veau we have been eating here for generations are never going to go out of fashion.’
Anthea Gerrie and Roger Stowell travelled courtesy of Atout France. For more details, visit atout-france.fr