GOURMET LYON

Smooth Red’s Gourmet Lyon is a three-night package for independent travellers, staying in a five-star hotel in the heart of Lyon and including

self-proclaimed capital of great eating, they’re opening the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie this year. It should do for food what the Pompidou Centre does for contemporary art. The city’s best dining will, though, still be in the neighbourhood bouchons where hot saucisson, sliced snout salad or chicken with crayfish revive startling standards of conviviality. In

Burgundy, rotund locals leave one table only if there’s another one to go to, ensuring fresh supplies of eggs meurette and beef bourguignon. Visitors should pace themselves, or they’ll be stuck in the hotel until someone takes the wall down.

So it is across France. Languedoc has estimable fish dishes – Sète’s tielle pie is the greatest thing that ever happened to a cuttlefish – while cassoulet is simply feisty southern life in simmering stew form. Family restaurants in French Basque country provide axoa veal stew, piperade, Espelette peppers and, of course, Bayonne ham. Of which someone once said to me, as all French people ultimately say about all their food: “It’s a product which allows us to preserve our roots and identity.”

All French foodstuffs may be fancied up for the carriage trade, justifying £250 menus in places with chandeliers. They may, these days, be prone to Oriental or new world influence – French cuisine is scarcely hermetic – and they will, certainly, be subject to reams of impenetrable purple prose which French chefs are required to reel out by the metre. In this field, the unacknowledged champion is Christian Sinicropi of the Palme-d’Or in Cannes. In a land of impenetrable philosophers – Descartes, Sartre, Cantona – Mr Sinicropi soars to a zenith of incomprehensibility. Thus, from an autumn menu blurb: “A dimension of emotion, of sharing, of palliative exchanges superimposed on an initial approach with a title of nobility in two, three or four phases.” No one on God’s earth knows what this means. But the French will nod. They will not laugh. Even for fun, their cuisine is a serious business. That’s why it’s the best.

Anthony Peregrine will be talking at The France Show being held at Olympia in London at 11.30am today and tomorrow: thefranceshow.com