Paris Day Trips: Lyon (Part Play)

Yesterday I described the work Matt and I did during a day trip to Lyon. Today, I focus on the other focus of our trip: food.

Knowing that we'd need sustenance to keep focused during this long day of research, I solicited restaurant recommendations from several Lyon natives. What came back was a suggestion that we try any restaurant run by Paul Bocuse, perhaps the 20th century's most famous chef. His three-star restaurant, L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges, is both outside the city and outside our price range. But there are also four Bocuse brasseries in the city, each serving food from a different culinary tradition. Named after cardinal directions, Le Nord offers "traditional" cuisine, Le Sud Mediterranean cuisine, L'Est seafood, and L'Ouest "island" cuisine (as geographically disparate as Japan, the Antilles, and Majorca). With fixed-price menus around 22 euros, we couldn't help but try two, lunching at Le Nord and dining at Le Sud.


Le Nord was pretty great. We both got soup to start, the name of which escapes me. My salmon (bottom left) was perfectly cooked, and the cream-based sauce was delish. Matt's magret de canard (bottom center) was a little dry, but again the sauce and potatoes were excellent. I ordered the moelleux au chocolat for dessert, which was dramatically melty inside (as moelleux are wont to be).

I took a terrible picture of Matt's dessert, which he wanted to describe himself: "At Paul Bocuse's Brasserie le Nord, they were all out of one one [sic] of the prix-fixe desserts. So they offered us two a la carte desserts at no extra charge. I chose the Gaufres [waffles] with a hazelnut sauce. They were crispy and buttery." As you can see, the waffles also came with separate pots of molten dark chocolate and whipped cream. Yeah.


The most photogenic part of dinner at Brasserie du Sud was the tablesetting. We couldn't get as excited about dinner, in part because the 3-course menu offered many of the same things as at Brasserie du Nord, just cooked slightly differently (ie, there were salmon and duck dishes, and the desserts were almost exactly the same). But the food was still quite good, and if we hadn't been such gluttons and had just gone to "Le Sud" we would have been mighty satisfied.

Luckily there was the beauty of Lyon at night to appease us. It really is a great city, worthy of a visit much longer than a single day. Until next time, Lyon!