Lyon to Paris to London

Posted on 2012/04/06 19:17:52 (April 2012).

[Monday 2nd April 2012]
After checking out of our hotel Chie and I headed out to find a cafe for a coffee and a croissant. Slightly bizarrely I asked "vous avez des croissants?" to which the owner replied "nous avons des pain au chocolat" - I said that would be fine, and he then proceded to walk next door to the bakery and buy some pain au chocolat. The next customer that came in asked for croissants too, and got croissants.

We had one final wander around the city before heading back to our hotel, where we met up with Junchan, who was going to join us for lunch at a restaurant nearby - a place called Daniel et Denise. This was another unmitigated disaster. Junchan had actually phoned ahead when making the reservation and mentioned I was vegetarian. They had suggested, apparently with enthusiasm, they could make a vegetarian omelette. Once seated, when we came to talk to the waiter, he pointed to the omelette on the menu, which was some kind of seafood omelette. I asked if there was any alternative to which he replied "assiette de legumes". Following last night's abysmal rendition of this I was keen to avoid it. So I asked if they could make something like a mushroom omelette perhaps. He shrugged his shoulders in a somewhat non-committal way, and when it finally arrived it was an entirely plain omelette. A small one at that, and not even a particularly good small, plain omelette. Nothing on the side, no frites, no salad, just a small, plain omelette. Like last night I ate about a tenth of it and left the rest in disgust. After a somewhat impolite rant about how backwards French cuisine was I decided I should just leave the girls to it, and go elsewhere for lunch.

I'd noted one of Lyon's three vegetarian cafes wasn't too far away - a place called Soline. Whilst the food there wasn't particularly great - I had some kind of strange stir fry of fennel with tofu - with very little sauce or flavour - it was at least filling I suppose, and reassuringly meat free. One day somebody ought to introduce spices to the French.

By now I was keen to leave the gastronomic wasteland that is Lyon as quickly as possible, and fortunately our train was at 3. Again I was briefly cheered up somewhat by the overall pleasantness of the TGV. Whilst France may be pretty much the worst country in the world for food from my point of view, they do at least have very good trains.

We were back in Paris around 5, and decided to repeat a previously successful expedition to the Rue de Rosiers, the Jewish quarter of Paris, wherein there's a famous falafel place called L'As fu Fallafel. The falafel are served with salad, rather chaotically assembled, in a pita bread. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but I suspect it's the sauce that is the real star of the show, rather than the falafel itself. We ate these standing in the cobbled street, along with lots of other people doing the same, and enjoyed the fact it was still pleasantly warm in Paris.

From here we got on the metro, and headed towards Gare du Nord. As we still had a bit of time to spare we popped into my favourite cafe - Au Train de Vie - where the owner never seems to understand my French. I thought I had been doing so well up to this point. Anyway, after a quick drink here, and a few minutes spent enjoying the trainspotters paradise of an interior, we wandered over to Gare du Nord to get our Eurostar back to London.

The Eurostar always feels a bit of a letdown after the TGV, it was getting dark by this time so there wasn't really any scenery to enjoy, and the journey was a little longer than usual as well. So it did seem to drag a bit, and I'd finished my book on the Venice Simplon Orient Express so it was a bit boring. Still, it got us there in the end.

Post a comment