A Cuisine Lesson

I grinned from ear to ear last weekend while packing my new rolling carry-on for my first mini-trip. That’s right, a short two weeks into my sojourn in Paris and I’ve already spent a weekend in another city (thanks of course to CUPA, who foot the bill each semester for a weekend excursion). This year featured Lyon, France’s third largest city (after Paris and Marseille, respectively) and, more importantly, the country’s gastro economic heart. Lyon is incredibly well-situated in France, as it is only a few hours in each direction to skiing, to the beach, and to Paris! However, what I most enjoyed about my visit was the local French flavor and the refreshing absence of so much English signage. It felt so much more authentic to ride a metro that didn’t translate its safety warnings and to read café menus that assumed I could understand basic French words for dishes.

That said, when we ate at a traditional restaurant Saturday night in Lyon, Le Café des Fédérations, most of us (me included) could not be torn from our English menu cheat-sheets. After following a tour guide through the beautiful Vieux Lyon for hours and becoming desperate to replace the historic, uneven cobble stones with paved, more feet-friendly roads, however, I was more than ready for the small feast ahead of us. We began the night in the restaurant’s wine cellar with a lovely cocktail hour. Our program directors showed us how to mix cassis (a sweet liqueur) with white wine to make Kir, a popular apéritif, while we gathered round authentically musty-smelling barrels and snacked on fatty, but salty pork rinds.

Once we went upstairs for dinner, where we had the entire restaurant to ourselves, we passed around plates of all their appetizers, family-style, which included sliced meats and a delicious salad, though I’ve already forgotten the rest of the entrées. *Cultural side note: Our appetizers are called entrées in France and other parts of Europe, while our entrée is referred to as le plat principal, or as we might say, “main course.”* And it is exactly at the main course where this dinner took a turn towards the bizarre. To my dear vegetarian friends with sensitive stomachs and hearts, you might want to skip a few paragraphs… Seriously, read the rest at your own peril.

So as I mentioned before, this restaurant specialized in the traditional foods of the region. Therefore, our main course choices ranged from a variety of tripes (intestines) to veal kidneys to chitterling sausage. Seeing as this dinner was arranged by CUPA and wanting to follow the whole “When in Rome” philosophy, I decided right away not to waste this opportunity on a chicken dish, and thought I’d strike a good middle ground by ordering the rabbit served in a mustard sauce. Only problem was, Bugs Bunny wasn’t on the menu that particular night. Still undeterred, and with all the chutzpah I could muster, I ordered the tête de veau. That’s right, I asked for baby cow’s head. I thought, hey, I’m a big meat-eater and I love veal, maybe this will be okay. Let’s just say I know in hindsight that my friends were right to toast my courage before our orders arrived because the dish placed in front of me resembled a gray, round, brainy-looking membrane that mocked my earlier confidence. A chuckling waitress leaned in and “reminded” me that the meat is actually inside this gray layer, and that you need to unfold the ball and cut pieces off of the gray, fatty skin to properly eat it. Then, much to my delight, Housing Coordinator Natalie, who was sitting across from me, informed the table that the gray stuff I was poking at was actually the skin of the calf’s face. Ugh.

So I unfolded the foreign matter in front of me and breathed a sigh of relief. Once you get past the scary outside, it did just look like any other meat. Sadly, it didn’t taste like anything I’d had before. The tête de veau came with a white caper sauce on the side that didn’t float my boat, and the meat itself was stringy like corn beef and tasted rather bland, as if it had only been stewed. Given the disappointing taste and my acute sensitivity to exactly what I was eating, you can imagine how I made it through the rest: with a lot of bread.

Thankfully, the next day vindicated Lyon’s foodie reputation. We were treated to lunch at Le Nord, Chef Paul Bocuse’s famous restaurant. Sadly, I had never before heard of Monsieur Bocuse, but believe-you-me, after this weekend, he’s my favorite person. As we were seated we snacked on olives and to-die-for bread before the meal really got underway. Soon thereafter, I was treated to saucisson pistaché, which was a sizeable chunk of sausage with pistachios cooked in a buttery bread that looked like a slice of cake. For the plat principal I ordered the filet of duck, which came with a cheesy potato gratin, both of which were DIVINE. But, the pièce de résistance proved to be the dessert: a chocolate fudge lava cake that made several of us unbutton the top snap of our pants (all I can say is thank God I wore a skirt with an elastic waistband). My host father had told me before I left that he spent a week working in Lyon several years ago and loved it there, but came back a whopping 3 kilos heavier – now I can understand why. Thank God there’s no scale in my bathroom!