The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Liberté, egalité, gastronomie…
Will Dijon’s new city of food and wine succeed where Lyon’s failed? Nicola Williams reports
You have to admire the determination and self-belief of the Burgundians. Last July, just eight months after opening inside Lyon’s medieval hospital, the Grand Hôtel Dieu – France’s original Cité de la Gastronomie – announced it was closing. This year, Dijon is going all out to open its own version.
The Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie et du Vin (International City of Gastronomy and Wine), which is taking shape west of the city centre, will open towards the end of 2021. Attractions planned include exhibition pavilions, live cookery demonstrations, a wine school run by Dijon’s hallowed Ecole des Vins de Bourgogne and a Ferrandi Paris cooking school. The €250million (£220million) complex will also include restaurants, shops, and a four-star hotel. And, handily for oenophiles, the site sits at the start of Burgundy’s revered Route des Grands Crus, a Unesco-listed driving itinerary winding 24 miles south through Côte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune vineyards.
It is not without irony that Dijon’s Cité will have some elements in common with its failed counterpart in Lyon. Dijon’s new attraction also occupies the city’s old hospital, founded by the Dukes of Burgundy in 1204 as a home for abandoned children and operational as the main hospital until 2015. While some buildings have been demolished to accommodate a resolutely contemporary Cité, developers have preserved the apothecary, chapels dating from the 15th and 19th centuries, and several of the gorgeous glazed-tiled roofs that are so distinctive to Burgundy.
Lyon and Dijon were among four French cities chosen to promote the “French gastronomic meal” following its 2010 inclusion on Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list – hence the two cités. For motorists breaking the journey from Calais to the Alps or the Riviera – anyone, actually, craving French gourmet know-how – Dijon will be the stop.