Do you like food? I do. Imagine then, a whole interactive, whizz-bang tourist attraction dedicated to it. In France, its host city could only be the country’s capital of gastronomy: Lyon.
After Bordeaux’s Cité du Vin gave travellers a brilliant reason to return to Bordeaux, the foodie equivalent in Lyon – a huge attraction with myriad interactive exhibits – has been one of France’s most hotly anticipated openings for the last few years. All was revealed to the public on October 19th, 2019, and a couple of weeks beforehand I got a sneak preview for articles in The Times and National Geographic Traveller Food (links to come when the stories are published).
It’s set in the Hotel Dieu, which was the city’s hospital from the Middle Ages through til 2010. The palatial building, which sits on the bank of the River Rhone, was once the gateway to the city. Even now, one in three of Lyon’s inhabitants were born there, so it has a special place in their hearts. On the walls of the peaceful courtyards and cloisters around the entrance there are plaques that bear the names of four centuries’ worth of donors, while the staircase into the Cité’s central area arrives under a domed roof and a suspended sculpture of giant spoons, which seals the link between medicine and food.
If you’re an obsessive French foodie like me, you’ll love the ‘Bon appetit’ area, which tells the story of Lyon’s culinary history – from the Meres de Lyon, who established its reputation as a city for good food, to Paul Bocuse, the three-star Michelin chef who died last year at the age of 91, and the legendary French chefs who further put the country, and the area west of Lyon in particular, on the map.
The ‘Miam-Miam’ area (that means yum yum in French, if you’re wondering) is for the kids; there’s a bold and colourful play kitchen; they can sit in a huge open mouth and play an on-screen quiz about healthy living, and a cow inside a giant milk carton will tell them about dairy produce.If that isn’t enough, they can disappear into a huge mirrored box that celebrates vegetables.
The digital exhibits are best in the section titled A Table, which has interactive digital stallholders regaling you with facts and posing quizzes about such produce as apricots and Salers beef. And the ‘experience’ (because what else do you call these new kinds of exhibits?) is one in which you sit at a table and a roll call of the best table scenes in all of French film is projected onto the silhouettes of other diners.
But what is a food museum without the chance to eat? The top level sees a live kitchen with 10 different chefs cooking tasting plates centred around a particular ingredient or country’s cuisine (Japan is the first to be showcased). An extra ticket for €12 (the entry ticket is €12 too) buys you three tasting plates and a drink. And as any trip to Lyon should be planned around mealtimes, it serves as an excellent entree to what else the city has to offer. For more info, see the website.
3 must-eat destinations in Lyon
1. Les Halles de Lyon – Paul Bocuse: this is the food market to end all food markets, with all the very best local produce there for the picking. It’s even worth booking an apartment with a kitchen in order to have the chance to cook (we stayed at Citadines on a previous visit which was excellent). For stuff to take home, the selection at Bahadourian is amazing.
2. The Bouchons
These atmospheric bistrot restaurants grew from Lyon’s silk trade, catering to the workers and merchants. Their menus are mostly offal-based, because traditionally this was cheap. For France From the Source I interviewed two Bouchons chefs, Florence Perier (of Cafe de Peintre) and President of the Bouchons association, Joseph Viola (Daniel et Denise), both restaurants are excellent. Be careful to choose a reputable one (though not all the best ones are in the official association, to make things tricky) – lots of restaurants (particularly in Vieux Lyon) pose as Bouchons but are touristy imposters.
3. Bocuse
The legendary chef (who died aged 91 in 2018) was a pioneer of French gastronomy and his restaurant Paul Bocuse in the village of Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or just north of the city has held three Michelin stars since 1965. The restaurant is set in a colourful, Baroque-style building, with murals and statues of Bocuse. The menu features classic dishes, including the truffle soup created for the French President Valerie Giscard d’Estaing when he awarded Bocuse the prestigious Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1975. It was, without doubt, one of the most incredible, but gut-busting, meals of my life. More detail coming in my Nat Geo Food feature (March 2020) issue.
More suggestions in this feature.