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British food lovers have a complicated history with the French. Back in the 18th century, we were chauvinistic, proud of the roast beef of old England and scornful of their weak and effete menus, their fripperies and soupes maigres. Then, maybe somewhere in the late 1800s, we shifted and embraced them with what must have been terrifying enthusiasm. We’d lost our own food culture somewhere and appropriated theirs. We believed all significant chefs were French, as were the best dishes. We dignified our own crap with Frenchness, turning brown Windsor into soupe du jour, and made Paris into ground zero for anything gastronomic.
When I first got interested in food, Britain was already pulling away from France again, questioning the hegemony. France was too tied to its history, we declared. When other capital cities around the world were breaking new ground, embracing new cultures, experimenting with new techniques, Paris seemed mired in tradition. These days, the chatterati claim, Paris has caught up, but at the expense of cultural patrimony. There’s as much novelty and cross-cultural international modernism in Paris as in any other global capital. If you want tradition, they’ll tell you, you need to get to Lyon.
Lyon was always a centre for great food. Birthplace of Paul Bocuse, the nation’s revered gastronomic pontiff. Situated in a heartland of amazing produce, blessed with solid provincial wealth and stubborn pride, and most importantly, a second city, entirely unaffected by metropolitan concerns about modernity or international relevance. It’s as if Birmingham had looked at British food history and culture, then told London, “You carry on with the small plates and tall food, bab. We’ll look after this.”
The Madeira sauce requires a third basket of bread and demands a second bottle of red
Café Comptoir Abel is in a back street down in the flat part of the city near the Saône river. It’s difficult to place historically as the interior and exterior look hundreds of years old, but the clean tidiness is jarringly modern. It has two dining rooms that would be as dark and atmospheric as a film set were the lights not cranked up to that peculiar degree they seem to favour here. It reminded me of being a kid on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland when an alarm went off and the lights came up. Weirdly, you enter the restaurant through the kitchen.
Everything on the menu is a classic, specialities of the region with the implicit reassurance that nothing will be messed with. I’m travelling with my buddy Triss, with whom I’ve been massively overindulging for decades now. The conversation turns, as it often does, to what, precisely, it is about this kind of food that brings us back to it again and again. What is it about places like Lyon? Pretty much every restaurant in town is serving some combination of the same menu.
Saucisson chaud with warm lentils is nobody’s idea of wild novelty, but getting the flavouring of the lentils right — firm, separate, scented with herbs and oil but cut with precisely judged sweet vinegar — is something one encounters too rarely. The sausage is smooth but with some texture, a sort of coarse Morteau, thick-skinned with an evanescent redolence of the byre.
Fond d’artichaut frais au foie gras maison is similarly textbook, with the artichoke heart flavoured subtly by a court bouillon and the salad beneath dressed with something sweet and citrus — compliments to the rich foie. Ris de veau is breadcrumbed and butter-fried veal sweetbreads, and is revelatory. I’m used to sweetbreads being all about the creamy, smooth interior, but these are done with a more robust crust. This means the crusty bits mixed through the smooth meat, sharing butteriness and caramelisation. A minuscule variance, but superb with morels in cream.
Of course I try the kidneys, which nail every KPI. They’re in small pieces, rare at the centre, and emitting just sufficient pissiness to challenge, establish authenticity and then evaporate. A cutting-edge contemporary restaurant might achieve this by having a waiter hiding under the table with an atomiser of warm urine and a hand fan, but these guys have no need for tricks. These kidneys smell this good because of the incredibly short time since they were in a calf, filtering wee. The Madeira sauce requires a third basket of bread and demands a second bottle of red.
It seems wrong, somehow, to end on a sweet note so I take a bowl of Cervelle de canut, fresh cheese with garlic and herbs. How could I not? The name means “silk worker’s brains” and is probably a satirical comment on 19th-century working conditions. It tastes like sloppy Boursin cheese and is the ideal fuel for weaving back through the deserted streets of the old town, talking utter rubbish with your oldest mate.
So what do we conclude? Do you know, I think we might have come close to nailing it this time. When we read that menu, there were no surprises. When the food arrived, nobody could describe it as “perfect”. It was simple, robust and, let’s be honest, brown. And there was nothing in the flavours or their combination that was an innovation or a personal twist from the mind of the chef. Yet each of the base constituents was made exceptional by some subtle element of its preparation. How are the lentils so good? How can the crust on the sweetbreads do that to the sensation? This is a vanishingly rare occurrence.
Pretentious as it sounds, the meal made me think of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopèdies”. An old tune that bears replaying. You don’t need many notes, if you consider each one and play it like it matters.
Café Comptoir Abel
25 Rue Guynemer, 69002 Lyon, France; maisonabel.fr/maison-abel/le-cafe-comptoir-chez-abel
Entrées: €10-€19
Mains: €20-€38
Desserts: €4.50-€9
Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com
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