A Lyonnaise Life – Episode 1 February
There are several words that, if not unique to the city, they are redolent of and in their repetition evoque Lyon. Canut, canaille, coquins, bouchons and gones. Gones technically is local slang for young kids but is appropriated to represent those who think of themselves as truly Lyonnais, the children of the city. We have become the adopted children of this great city, we explore with a childlike curiosity. Since we found our little part of the 3rd near Place Bir Hakeim 18 months ago we have spent more and more time here, discovering our way around, venturing further and further and developing the useful mental maps of where we find the things we need.
As someone said to me this week, Lyon fundamentally is a city of nosh, ‘une ville de bouffe’. That manifests itself in various ways. There are more restaurants with Michelin stars here than in Paris, this is where people come from around the globe to learn to cook. From the pilgrim like Bill Buford, the serious foodies, to the many Japanese who come to worship at the altar of Bocuse. France is famously great for French food, and generally sucks at all other cuisines. Lyon is the exception. Many of the global visitors, having learned their part in the brigade at one of the many cooking schools, stay for a while and present their version of their culinary tradition for a French audience. So Lyon has a ton of good Japanese restaurants, Korean, Thai, West African and even Mexican (not Tex-Mex). They are forced to tailor their offering to the local tastes, especially at lunchtime, the hot spice is turned down to 2, a basket of sliced bagette is provided and there are 3 courses, the main course has a starch and a protein.
The 3-course meal comes in around €20 as that is the average allowance that all workers get on their ‘carte resto’, the French equivalent of the old luncheon vouchers. It’s a great example of state intervention that works in France. The worker in a large company has a canteen where free or heavily subsidized food – again 3 courses and wine is available. When I visit a large client CMA-CGM in their gorgeous tower on the waterfront in Marseilles we go for lunch in their ‘canteen’; as much as it’s served buffet style the food is serious. For everyone else who does not have access to a company restaurant they receive a restaurant card, it looks like a standard credit card and functions like one for food and drink. Couple of rules: can only be used on a work day, no Sundays, no holidays; can be used anywhere you might buy lunch from supermarkets, snack bars, fast food or restaurants. Food or booze but up to a daily limit, Mme Britton’s card is €25 a day. Just think about that with an American legal mind set: a company provided card is used to buy alcohol?! The deal with the card is the employee pays a contribution, the restaurant gives a discount and the company pays the spread. The company gets a tax deduction, the employee gets a tax-free perk, the restaurant/retail business gets business for a discount; win:win:win.
It is winter in Lyon, or what passes in our post-truth days as winter, it’s mid-February and since the Fête de Chandeleur, February 2nd the temperature has been more spring like with warm showers and temperatures in 50’s and 60’s, 8-14 C. We missed the pancakes on Chandeluer and will do likewise tomorrow on Shrove Tuesday. Not that I have anything against them, we had an old recipe that was Rachel’s grandmother’s for Finnish Pancakes, which produced crêpes as close to what I remember as my Mum’s Pancake Day pancakes, but we cannot find it. I remember my Mum gamely running a Pancake Race with other mothers at my elementary school in Bradford on Avon, I am pretty sure that is a tradition that has been consigned to the Ladybird Book version of English History and not something you would catch a French housewife doing on Chandeleur.
In the real spirit of winter, especially as we are but an hour from the Alps, we went for Raclette on Saturday. The restaurant l’Altitude on Rue de Crequi is the best rated of the mountain style places in Lyon and is a very pine-plank walled ski-lodge of a spot. Raclette is a cheese and the deal with the eponymous dish is that the cheese is melted to the point of bubbling yummyness and then scraped over steamed potatoes to eat with various hams and dried meats with some nods at healthiness via sides of a green salad or haricot beans. It is meant to fill a starving stomach following hours of skiing in cold weather, so it is heavy and filling. Lazing around watching Fulham thump Bournemouth followed by England remarkably beating Wales in the 6 Nations is not the most exacting form of exercise as preparation for such a repast, but we did it justice. The Savoyard food or Mountain cuisine developed around what you can keep in semi-isolated mountain valleys during winter and pre-refrigeration. Cheese, air dried hams and sausages, potatoes and pickles are served in various forms; tartiflette, which is basically a complete baked cheese filled with potatoes and added cream to make it more runny; fondue, which is either melted cheese into which you dip stuff or Raclette, which is made from various hard mountain cheeses made from the milk of cows who have been grazing on the rich summer pastures like Comte, Beaufort or Raclette itself.
Most places have electric hot place devices to do the melting, but Altitude has charcoal fired table-top braziers that are awesome at heating the cheese together with the diners and just about look safe, in a way that you know would never be allowed in the US without a shit storm of lawsuits. By the time we had near consumed the 300g of cheese allocated per person, we were cheery-cheeked and down to t-shirts. They unsurprisingly do a good line in ice cream and sundaes to help you cool down. The ice cream was seriously good, house made and artisanal, including a Charteuse flavored one, which is a bit their thing as they have a bunch of cocktails using the green and yellow monk’s bane. To finish, I felt obligated to have a Chartreuse but chickened out and went with the 2cl rather than the 4cl option. They presented a special glass about the size of a thimble, into which a monstrous Jeroboam sized bottle of the green lightning poured by measure. I had forgotten how much of a punch it packs, and we agreed we should have a bottle at home, it’s a very Lyon thing.
Les bonnes address:
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 