Lyon: Le 126

Attention! Young chef at work. Ever since he opened his cozy restaurant, Le 126, with a mostly mocha color scheme, young chef Mathieu Rostaing-Tayard has been the talk of le tout Lyon gourmand. His blackboard menu, which changes daily, proposes dishes like garlic mousse with cockles, green apple and white chocolate; beef filet in red wine and sea urchin sauce; suckling pig braised in shrimp jus with cauliflower and preserved lemons; and butternut squash baked with Muscovado sugar and garnished with a licorice-and-sesame biscuit. As extreme as some of these dishes may sound, the surprise is that most of them are actually quite delectable. I sampled his cooking when he first opened more than a year ago and found it very promising, so the last time I was in town I stopped by again, and found it even better. The very good-value lunch menu started with Cévennes onions baked in a salt crust with langoustines and lemongrass; the main course was marinated swordfish with sweet potato purée, garlic, ginger and tarragon. To be sure, there’s an occasional clunker in the mix, but that’s rare, because Rostaing-Tayard, who trained with Lyon’s star Nicolas Le Bec as well as with Pierre Gagnaire at Sketch in London and Eric Briffard at Les Elysées du Vernet in Paris, is a hard-working, classically trained cook whose flights of fancy are like flawlessly calculated culinary equations.

126 rue de Sèze, Lyon, 04.78.52.74.34. Menus €28 and €35

Prices are per person without wine.

Originally published in the September 2010 issue of France Today

Alexander Lobrano’s book Hungry for Paris is published by Random House. Find Hungry for Paris and more in our bookstore.