Visiting Lyon (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Lyon, France’s geographical position has made it a
commercial hub between Italy and northern Europe for centuries.
Charles VII (1403 – 1461) used this geographical position to
his advantage by instituting the first of several international fairs that made
Lyon a sales capital in 1419. Later in
1450, Charles VII gave Lyon the monopoly on the sale and manufacture of silk in
France.
Men in Lyon still wear beautiful silk ties in diamond
patterns with red, blue, and yellow backgrounds. You can find these ties in luxury stores and
exclusive hotel shops. The silk industry
also gave Lyon its famous guignol marionette.
An unemployed silk worker named Laurent Mourguet created the
guignol character around 1808. Guignol
is a citizen of Lyon, who works very hard, but never seems to have good
luck. There is a museum devoted to
guignol and marionettes from around the world at the Château Gadagne in Lyon.
Lyon is world famous for this museum as well as its food,
which I happily sampled at the Brasserie Georges. The Brasserie Georges makes fun of itself for
being an Alsatian brasserie and choucroute landmark, but it has been an
institution in Lyon since 1836 when it was founded by Jean-Georges
Hoffherr. (Traditional dining establishments
in Lyon are called bouchons.)
Brasserie Georges is located by the Perrarche SNCF train
station. Its location allows businessmen
to arrive on morning trains, carry out business over a leisurely lunch, and
return home without having to stay in a hotel.
One of the first things I noticed about Lyon was that diners concentrate
on their food and do not spend as much time inspecting other diners’ clothing
and jewelry as they do in other cities.
Lyon is considered to be the capital of French food and maybe this
attitude towards eating is responsible for it.
The first lunch I ate at Brasserie Georges reminded me of
what someone from Paris would eat as they headed south in France: roast saddle
of lamb with a endives au gratin. The
endives au gratin were not bitter at all and tasted sweet a crust of browned
cheese. The gratin stayed deliciously warm in its own heat dish. For dessert, I ate crème brulée which had a
sugary, warm crust on it – perfection.
The next day was a Saturday and the clientèle changed from
the weekday businessmen’s lunches. More
multigenerational families were there.
My husband Laurent and I had to wait a short while for a table and
watched as waiters carried baked Alaska desserts around the dining room hall
with sparklers on top of them for birthdays to the tunes of a hole-punched, card-fed music box.
I ordered a traditional Lyon-style menu this time starting
with a terrine made of chicken livers.
Following this course was a course of sausages meant for cooking that
Lyon specializes in. They had been
flavored with pistachios, but can also be found with pepper corns and truffles
in their more elaborate forms. Mashed
potatoes accompanied the sausage.
We drank a Beaujolais from Brouilly with our meal. We
laughed at the old Lyon joke:
-What are the three rivers that run through Lyon?
- The Rhône, the Saône, and the …
- And, the Beaujolais!!!
To finish the meal I had a “cervelle de Canut” cheese, which
literally means a silk worker’s brains cheese. This is a specialty of Lyon made
from soft, white cheese with chopped herbs (chives in the Brasserie Georges
version), shallots, salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar.
This meal marked the end to our visit to Lyon. After three trips to this beautiful city, I
still feel as if I have just scratched the surface of what Lyon has to offer.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
