The Full Lunch at a Traditional Lyonnais Bouchon

A bouchon is a traditional Lyonnais restaurant, typically small (twenty seats), family-run, serving the classic dishes of the Lyonnais kitchen at lunch and dinner. The tradition is associated historically with the women cooks — the meres lyonnaises — who fed the silk workers of Lyon's Croix-Rousse neighbourhood from the 19th century. Their legacy is a cuisine that is the opposite of fussy: terrines, cervelas (the Lyon sausage), gratins, and the famous quenelles de brochet (pike dumplings in crayfish sauce) are the canonical dishes.

A proper bouchon lunch takes three hours and consists of an entree (the charcuterie platter, typically, with rosette de Lyon sausage, rillettes, sabodet, and terrines), a main course (quenelles, tripe with onions, andouillette, or a roast), cheese, dessert, and a pot of Beaujolais or Cotes du Rhone. A pot is a small jug of house wine — 46cl, the traditional Lyonnais serving — and it will be refilled without discussion. The bill for all of this, in the right bouchon, is around thirty to forty euros per person.

Lyon is France's second city by most measures and first by appetite. The city sits at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone rivers, which historically made it the distribution point for all the best of France's regional food production: the wines of Burgundy and Beaujolais to the north, the cheeses and trout of the Alps to the east, the Charolais beef to the west, the oysters from Brittany that arrive via the TGV. In Lyon, these ingredients simply live in closer proximity, and the bouchon is how the city assembles them into a philosophy.