France vs. North Carolina, Round 2 - Lyon is France’s Lexington, with lots of pig, but better
During my trip to France last month, a cooking instructor and culinary tour guide in Paris warned me about bouchons.
“It’s just that they are a little...too much,” she said, scribbling down the names of other restaurants she liked in Lyon, a city about two hours (via high-speed train) southeast of Paris that is considered the culinary heart of France.
I respect her opinion enormously. I hemmed and hawed about where we were going to eat in Lyon when we were still in Paris. And then I ignored this dear lady’s advice.
And I’m glad we did.
I love bouchons. Slightly kitschy, time-worn and definitely a bit of a tourist attraction, they are small, casual restaurants unique to the Lyon region. With red and white-checked napkins, paper-covered tables and carafes of local young wines with a rubber wrapped around the neck to catch the drips, their dining rooms are simple and homey. Their menus are predictable and hearty and heavy on pig. It’s like Lexington, but with more porky choices, and often better ones.
Based on discussion on eGullet.com and other recommendations I’ve found hunting around on the web, we made reservations at Cafe des Federations for 8 p.m. on a Monday. When we showed up, the restaurant was nearly empty and we worried that perhaps we had made a mistake (echoing restaurants are never much fun).
We were so wrong.
By the end of the night (maybe 11 pm? a meal takes that long here, and I didn’t see a single table turn), Cafe des Federations’ two narrow dining rooms were happy and loud, crowded with families, friends and businessmen each on their third bottle of Beaujolais and trying to make a dent in the enormous platter of five cheeses that were on each table.
Meals are prix fixe here with a choice of typical Lyonnais fare for entrees - tablier de sapeur (breaded and fried tripe), chicken cooked in vinegar, sausage in wine. Sorry, vegetarians.
We choose pike quenelles, an oval-shaped dumpling beloved in Lyon, with creamy crayfish sauce, and my favorite, boudin aux pommes (blood sausage with apples - the sausage was crackly on the outside, almost creamy within, and a delicious foil to the fruit). They came served with a side of friendly attitude. At one point, a quiet teenage girl at a table across from ours timidly asked a waitress what was in the little pot set before her. The waitress sighed elaborately. Then she pushed her way onto the girl’s chair, sitting down and calling “carrot, potato, potato, carrot” as she pointed at each vegetable in turn. Each and every one. It’s the kind of behavior that would have had my eyes rolling in back of my head at a restaurant in America. Here, it was just part of the bouchon fun and the feistiness.
And oh, boy, did my middle and high school French miraculously come back here. No way was I not going to try to speak French with that waitress. I didn’t want a tongue-lashing. I also wanted that cheese. Thank you, Mlle. Stumpf of Carrington Middle School, circa 1992!
Entrees and desserts aside, the rest of the dinner prix fixe at Cafe des Federations is about the same for everyone, a parade of oeufs en meurette (poached eggs in beef broth and red wine), a salad of frisee, lardons (basically, thick bacon), soft-cooked eggs and craggy croutons; tiny green lentils spiked with Dijon mustard and shallots; cornichons, rosette (a local cured pork sausage), that cheese platter. It began with grattons (pork cracklings) and ended with chocolate mousse. We were groaning. We were in pain. In retrospective, I got too greedy with the lentils. I should have paced myself.
