The culinary summit

One of the main reasons to include the city of Lyon in this trip was to finally obtain a reservation at L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges, the flagship restaurant of Paul Bocuse, arguably the originator of nouvelle cuisine.  He prepared the menus for the inaugural flight of the Concorde.  Bocuse has 6 or 7 restaurants around Lyon but as our cab driver said on the way, "you are dining at the BIG Bocuse". 

The day dawned sunny and warm, with the heat increasing when we stopped dead on the autoroute on the way to the airport in Bordeaux due to a very unfortunate fatal accident ahead of us.  We made the flight with time to spare and arrived in Lyon, obtaining an impromptu tour of the beautiful city on the lengthy cab ride in from the airport.  It looks like we will have wonderful exploring opportunities for the next two days.

L'Auberge is celebrating 50 years of operation, having maintained 3 Michelin stars for several decades of that time.  Bocuse, at 89 years old, is unfortunately too frail to pay his daily visits to the restaurant however, Madame Bocuse still personally greats each patron at their tables and wishes each a memorable stay.  She is a delight!  We have sampled more innovative menus and we have eaten more complex food preparations however it was truly a treat to try the Bocuse menu which features many of his famous signature dishes.  Everything about the experience was perfect, from the venue, the service, the decor and of course.......the food.  The bill was pretty special too but, what the heck........we are only doing this once!  To me the telling tale of the "total package" in world class restaurants is the staff attitude.  Almost all great restaurants serve up memorable food (although we have tried a few where that was not the case) but often the staff take themselves way too seriously.  At L'Auberge we were joking and laughing with the staff and even had one waiter head to kitchen for "more information" when we disagreed on where Bocuse had trained in his early years (we were both wrong!!!)

The long cab ride back from the restaurant took us along the illuminated river banks with all the historic buildings glowing.  The ride further illustrated that we have much to see in the next two days.  Gotta get going...............

The pics are:

1- We arrived early at 8:30 p.m. however the place filled up shortly thereafter

2- Happy to be here!

3- Have you ever seen such a generous serving of foie gras?

4- There has to be something on those desert tables that we will want to try ;-)