French Restaurant Review: Brasserie Roseaux Lyon

Often, a good meal is almost as much about successful casting as it is the food. In other words, successfully picking the right place for a meal according to your mood, appetite, the weather and the season. Choosing the right social setting is important as well. Sometimes I like a place where people dine quietly and don’t speak between tables, and on other occasions, I prefer going to a restaurant where there’s the loud soundtrack of good times in the background – laughter, cutlery on plates and people cheerfully chat their neighbours up during a meal.

What recently brought all of this to mind was a superb lunch I had on a cold, damp Sunday in Lyon when I had three and a half hours between checking out of my hotel and catching my train. Sundays are often difficult in France for the simple reason so many places are closed, so I had mulled over my options and made a reservation at this very popular restaurant well in advance.

I’d practically memorised the menu posted on the hotel’s website, and had designed what I thought would be a perfect Sunday lunch. One way or another, I knew I’d eat well, since the chef-owners, Tabata and Ludovic Mey, are among the most gifted of a rising generation of talent in the gastronomic capital of the Gauls.

They’d previously owned an excellent Michelin-starred Lyon restaurant called Les Apothicaires, where I’d had many outstanding meals. Then they’d closed up shop for a while, to return with Ombellule, a contemporary French table that promptly won a twinkler from Bibendum as well, and Brasserie Roseaux, which is next door and showcases classic French dishes.

En route to the restaurant, I worried that I might be seated at a wobbly table between a set of swinging kitchen doors because I was dining solo. But the French are usually admirably attentive to solitary diners, since going out alone for a meal rightly strikes them as a dignified gesture that implicitly represents sensible self-care. And for food and wine lovers, it’s simply common sense.

Happily, the elegant young maître d’hôtel escorted me to a charming table by a window overlooking a courtyard of plants in the quieter second dining room, the one up front being filled with large families taking an elderly relative out for a nice Sunday lunch, a meal much venerated in Gaul. The unexpected Barbarella-like 70s décor of brass and glass chandeliers that might once have been in a Los Angeles hotel lobby was amusingly tongue-in-cheek, and my young waitress, who had just moved to Lyon from Brittany, was charming.

The first thing to come to the table after I’d ordered was a fragile brioche turban with some excellent butter. All of this buttery fat paired beautifully with the etched glass carafe of white Saint-Joseph I ordered to accompany my meal.

Accompanied by a tangle of tiny bitter salad leaves and pickled mustard seeds, my terrine Georges Bocuse a mix of pork, veal and poultry – brought the barnyards of France to the table with its unctuous rusticity. I ate it very slowly to savour the way that each mouthful had a slightly different flavour, but consistently remained almost shockingly delicious.

Next up, a pan-roasted free-range chicken breast glossed with a velvety sauce suprême, a sauce derived from velouté, which is a ‘mother sauce’ traditionally made from roux (a mixture of butter and flour) and meat stock, in this case, chicken stock. The sauce is reduced with heavy cream, strained through a fine sieve or strainer, and finished with a spritz of lemon juice.

Served with a golden potato mille-feuille and celery root, the succulence of this dish brought back the life-altering exultance I felt at every meal during my first trip to France as a teenager. Then, I simply didn’t know that food could be so good. Now, happily, after many years of eating in Gaul, I do. I couldn’t leave Lyon without some cervelle de canut (which translates as silkworker’s brain, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the way the noise in the silk mills of Lyon destroyed the sanity of those who worked in them).

Cervelle de canut consists of fromage blanc mixed with chopped chives, chervil, parsley and shallots, dressed with salt and pepper, a little olive oil and maybe a splash of vinegar, according to the whims of the chef; it’s one of those simple dishes that always satisfies. Dessert or no dessert? For the last two hours, I’d been watching waiters and waitresses trigger cooing delight whenever they brought the homemade vanilla mille-feuille for two to neighbouring tables. The fragile golden leaves of pastry were redolent of butter, while the ivory-coloured cream that bound them was scented by tiny flecks of vanilla bean.

I asked the waitress if I could order this pastry, eat half of it on the spot and take the rest of it away with me. “Mais bien sûr, quelle bonne idée,” she said brightly. Suffice it to say that the second half of the mille-feuille never made it to my final destination, and that I enjoyed my lunch at Brasserie Roseaux more than any meal I’d eaten for a very long time.

I can’t wait to return too, and next time I’ll come accompanied so that I can sample one of the moreish main courses for two-maybe the sole meunière or the rotisserie roasted pigeon.

34 Cours Franklin Roosevelt, Lyon.

Tel. +33 04 51 68 08 91,

www.brasserieroseaux.fr,

Lunch menus €28 and €33, average à la carte €80

From France Today Magazine

Lead photo credit : (c) Alexandra Battut - Agence Camille Carlier