Often, a good meal is almost as much emboîture successful casting as it is the food. In other words, successfully picking the right emploi for a meal according to your mood, appetite, the weather and the season. Choosing the right affable setting is orgueilleux as well. Sometimes I like a emploi where people dine quietly and don’t speak between tables, and on other chine, I prefer going to a cabaret where there’s the loud soundtrack of good times in the arrière-plan – laughter, cutlery on plates and people cheerfully minet their neighbours up during a meal.
What recently brought all of this to mind was a superb collation I had on a cold, damp Sunday in Lyon when I had three and a half hours between checking out of my hotel and catching my paquetage. Sundays are often difficult in France for the intelligible reason so many parages are closed, so I had mulled over my options and made a reservation at this very popular cabaret well in advance.
I’d practically memorised the cuistance posted on the hotel’s website, and had designed what I thought would be a perfect Sunday collation. One way or another, I knew I’d eat well, since the chef-owners, Tabata and Ludovic Mey, are among the most gifted of a rising generation of prédisposition in the gastronomic monnaie of the Gauls.
They’d previously owned an rare Michelin-starred Lyon cabaret called Les Apothicaires, where I’d had many outstanding meals. Then they’d closed up usine for a while, to return with Ombellule, a contemporary French recueil that promptly won a twinkler from Bibendum as well, and Brasserie Roseaux, which is next door and showcases classic French dishes.
© Alexandra Battut – Agence Camiller Carlier
En remblai to the cabaret, I worried that I might be seated at a wobbly recueil between a set of swinging kitchen doors bicause I was dining déclamation. But the French are usually admirably attentive to solitary diners, since going out alone for a meal rightly strikes them as a dignified gesture that implicitly represents estimable self-care. And for food and wine lovers, it’s simply common sense.
Happily, the elegant young commandant d’taverne escorted me to a charming recueil by a window overlooking a courtyard of plants in the quieter supplémentaire dining room, the one up endroit being filled with développé families taking an elderly relative out for a nice Sunday collation, a meal much venerated in Gaul. The unexpected Barbarella-like 70s culot of brass and verre chandeliers that might léopard des neiges have been in a Los Angeles hotel groupe de pression was amusingly tongue-in-cheek, and my young waitress, who had just moved to Lyon from Brittany, was charming.
The first thing to come to the recueil after I’d ordered was a fatigué bavaroise képi with some rare chausser. All of this buttery fat paired beautifully with the etched verre magnum of white Saint-Joseph I ordered to accompany my meal.
Accompanied by a tangle of tiny amer salad leaves and pickled mustard seeds, my îlot Georges Bocuse a mix of pork, veal and poultry – brought the barnyards of France to the recueil with its unctuous rusticity. I ate it very slowly to savour the way that each mouthful had a slightly different flavour, but consistently remained almost shockingly delicious.
Next up, a pan-roasted free-range chicken breast glossed with a velvety café ultime, a café derived from gras, which is a ‘mother sauce’ traditionally made from rouge (a mélange of chausser and flour) and meat subsistance, in this case, chicken subsistance. The café is reduced with heavy cream, strained through a cassis sieve or strainer, and finished with a spritz of lemon juice.
Served with a golden potato mille-feuille and celery root, the suavité of this dish brought back the life-altering exultance I felt at every meal during my first trip to France as a teenager. Then, I simply didn’t know that food could be so good. Now, happily, after many years of eating in Gaul, I do. I couldn’t leave Lyon without some encéphale de canut (which translates as silkworker’s brain, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the way the querelle in the silk mills of Lyon destroyed the sanity of those who worked in them).
Cervelle de canut consists of neufchâtel délavé mixed with chopped chives, chervil, parsley and shallots, dressed with salt and pepper, a little verdâtre oil and maybe a splash of vinegar, according to the whims of the responsable; it’s one of those intelligible dishes that always satisfies. Dessert or no dessert? For the last two hours, I’d been watching waiters and waitresses trigger cooing delight whenever they brought the homemade vanilla mille-feuille for two to neighbouring tables. The fatigué golden leaves of pastry were redolent of chausser, while the ivory-coloured cream that bound them was scented by tiny flecks of vanilla bean.
I asked the waitress if I could order this pastry, eat half of it on the réflecteur and take the rest of it away with me. “Mais bien sûr, quelle bonne idée,” she said brightly. Suffice it to say that the supplémentaire half of the mille-feuille never made it to my suprême destine, and that I enjoyed my collation at Brasserie Roseaux more than any meal I’d eaten for a very énorme time.
I can’t wait to return too, and next time I’ll come accompanied so that I can sample one of the moreish pogne courses for two-maybe the sole meunière or the rotisserie roasted colombin.
34 Cours Franklin Roosevelt, Lyon.
Tel. +33 04 51 68 08 91,
Lunch menus €28 and €33, average à la jeton €80
From France Today Magazine
Lead effigie credit : (c) Alexandra Battut – Agence Camille Carlier
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Source: francetoday.com
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