Athena's Blog: Lyon, day one.

Yesterday was our first full day in Lyon, and it was pretty non-stop from the time we arrived until the time we finally crashed into our beds. We arrived in the morning, after several flight transfers and a bus ride, dropped off our bags, and ran to lunch.

We ate at a little bistro a block or two away from our hotel. They served very traditional Lyonnaise cuisine.

The salad Lyonnaise is fresh mixed greens with lardons, (a kind of un-smoked bacon cut into little batons) croutons, and a poached egg. I love poached eggs, with a runny yolk and barely set white. Breaking the egg open dresses the greens in happy, fatty yolk, marrying the flavors together.

Our plat principeaux was chicken fricassee with gratinee potatoes, very warm and filling. The potatoes were quite satisfying.

The dessert may have been the best part of the meal here. There was a pear sorbet, a flourless chocolate cake, and a pistachio parfait (kind of like a semifreddo) and some poached fruit. The pear sorbet was intensely fruity, and very balanced without too much acidity, I would have been happy with just a scoop of that!

Lyon is beautiful, stately. It's been so rushed that I really haven't gotten a feel for it yet, though. The history centers around silk and food, and involves Roman and Celtic influences. The cathedral above has an older structure to the right, a cloister, and part of the cloister walls were built with marble from a Roman temple. Being back in Europe really puts history into perspective; seeing more Italian elements is making me feel a bit nostalgic for my time there. The parallels are really interesting, and the contrasts even more so.

I'm still trying to write through a haze of jet lag and exhaustion, so this is a bit excruciating at the moment, but if I don't keep up (with a one-day delay for reflection) then I fear I'll fall to far behind.

We had dinner at another typical Bouchon, this one named after the city's traboules, a unique feature of Lyon. They're a little hard to describe, walkways from the main streets that are closed off by normal-looking doors, that lead to apartments that were built in the courtyard of the larger buildings when the city's population started to expand. When we took our walking tour we got to slip through some of the lesser known traboules, which were very cool. During the French resistance during the Nazi invasion, the traboules were used for covert meeting places because there were many exits, and they were very unassuming from street level.

But I digress. We started with a communal cup of pork cracklings (fried pig skin) which seems a merry way to start any meal. This is a good sign.

One of my room mates had this great dish of poached eggs in a red wine sauce with caramelized onions, lardons, and toasted bread. This may be my new "comfort food" when I get back home, it was a really nice dish.

I had awesome, fresh goat cheese (chevre) on crusty bread with fresh greens. The cheese had a beautiful nutty flavor to it, and a more complex compilation of flavors than most domestic goat cheeses. I really enjoyed this as well, sometimes you need nothing more than a great cheese on crusty bread...

The above dish was a regional specialty, and caused a bit of a stir at the dinner table. I had read about this before I came, and knew full well what I was getting into, but our chef described it as a "pork sausage" to the rest of the table, which is only a partial truth...

Andoilette is made of pork, yes, but this includes the chitterlings, or intestines. There's a special process of washing and drying the chitterlings, and it's a much loved treat for locals, but the bane of unsuspecting tourists. There was a bit of... miscommunication as to the nature of the dish, and pretty much everyone other than myself and the chef was a bit surprised by what they got.

The flavor can best be described as... barn with a hint of pork. It's most assuredly an acquired taste, and it did have some merits. I tend to enjoy farm-y flavors, and I've had prior experience with organ meats so I knew what to expect. I ordered it out of a sense of adventure and the innate need to try the local dish. I'm glad I did, and I really, really liked the strong mustard that came with it, it was a nice, spicy counterpoint to the intense earthiness of the sausage. There's many things I enjoy more, but I am happy that I tried it (and enjoyed it far better than its unsuspecting victims).

My room mate had this absurdly moist and tender white fish with crayfish sauce. The fish was so fresh, and the sauce had a really great balance of acidity and herbiness.