Joe Ray

December 23, 2007 - The Boston Globe - Travel

LYON - The design on the door says it all: a line drawing of owner Georges “Jojo” Dos Santos locked in a passionate embrace with a bottle of wine.

Dos Santos’s flipped-up haircut and spunkiness are reminiscent of the cartoon reporter Tintin, and he and his shop, Antic Wine, are two of the most recognizable icons in Lyon. Only two minutes after my arrival, he exclaims, “Let’s go!”

Apparently, the tour of Lyon by Jojo does not begin with wine.
Something of a walking Rolodex, Jojo, 37, leads me around the historic Vieux Lyon neighborhood. Doing so, he not only shares some of the city’s best addresses, but also shows me a hidden path to its notoriously hard-to-reach inhabitants. Luckily, this is the historic gastronomic capital of France and if there’s a secret passage to the soul of the Lyonnais, it must include the esophagus.

We start by walking into the postage-stamp-sized Boulangerie St. Vincent. The bakery’s tiny size seems to amplify the smell of yeast in rising dough and the buttery odor of croissants in the oven. It gets me so worked up I’m willing to go on record and call this the best-smelling bakery in France.

Dos Santos walks across the floor, grabs a baguette à maïs - something like a multigrain baguette made with fresh corn kernels - breaks it open and stuffs his face inside.

Wine merchant Georges Dos Santos leads a discussion during a wine-centered private dinner at Les Adrets in Lyon.(Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

“Ahh - smell this!” he exclaims, emerging from the torn loaf with a huge smile on his face and flour on the end of his nose. If you could get drunk on the smell of bread, it would happen with this baguette.

We scoot around the corner to the Halle de la Martinière market, and my guide makes a beeline for his favorite cheese shop, Le Jardin de la Martinière. Owner Virginie Messad gives us a taste of some seriously good Morbier, with a perfect creamy texture and raw-milk flavor, as she and Dos Santos discuss the market’s stature in the neighborhood, far from the hubbub of the city’s ritzy and touristy Les Halles de Lyon market.

The tour has already brought us past a beautiful butcher shop, Dos Santos’s favorite place for ice cream, a furniture restoration workshop that looks like it belongs in the early 1900s, and a pristine bakery, but when Messad asks me what I think of the city and its people, I realize we have been moving so fast, nothing has sunk in.
We hit the brakes when Dos Santos introduces his photographer friend Frédéric Sonier, who goes by the nom de plume Frédéric Jean.

“We’re bad at making people feel welcome, and we’re closed,” says Sonier, describing the typical Lyonnais. “But that mentality is changing. People are becoming more open and sympathetic.

“It takes a while to discover their richness - they’re like the ‘traboules,’ ” he says, referring to Lyon’s easy-to-miss pedestrian passageways that link one street to another, often hiding a beautiful courtyard.

“I can’t speak for everybody,” Sonier says, “but I share what I love.”

The soul-baring - and a state of the union for Lyon’s cuisine - comes from a pair of unlikely sources. Jojo stops for lunch at Les Adrets, a few doors up from Antic Wine on the Rue de Boeuf, and introduces chef Jean-Luc Wesolowski , 57, and cheesemaker François Maire, 42. Los Santos gets a “Cheers”-esque welcome as he makes the rounds of the restaurant, with warm hellos to everyone in the kitchen and half the customers.

Chef Jean-Luc Wesolowski of Les Adrets prepares dishes for a private dinner party. “People want to sell authenticity where there is none,” he says. “Food is made to make you dream.”(Joe Ray for The Boston Globe)

Wesolowski sits down after the busy lunch service to describe the slow change that’s happening to Lyon’s revered cuisine.

“Bouchons are like museums,” he says, referring to the bouchon Lyonnais, the city’s version of the bistro that focuses on hearty food like coq au vin, straying often into offal dishes like tripe, and serving it all up with plenty of wine. Today, the authentic bouchon Lyonnais is wildly outnumbered by knockoffs and finding a real one isn’t easy.

Wesolowski describes his own cuisine with a nonchalance that makes it sound like the simple dinner he prepares in the restaurant’s kitchen almost every night for his wife, but others might say his cooking is the perfect evolution of a bouchon.

“Bouchon is exploited,” says Maire, who is slowly orbiting toward our table after citing a mistrust of journalists. “People want to sell authenticity where there is none. It’s a great idea, but it’s too clean. Food is made to make you dream.”

Wesolowski would probably be a bit more upset by the slow death of one of Lyon’s icons if he didn’t understand why it was fading away.

“Before, people here were manual laborers who worked very hard - they needed heavy food,” he says. “Now, road workers have machines to dig their holes. It’s logical.”

“Here, the menu changes every day,” he explains. “I go to the market in the morning and if the fish is beautiful and the fishmonger gives me a good price, I’ll buy it.” He passes these prices on to his customers, particularly at lunch when a prix-fixe menu is all he offers and the three-course meal with wine and coffee is a bargain at $20.

“Now, with [today’s] lunch over, there’s nothing left,” says Wesolowski. “This is the principal characteristic of a neighborhood restaurant.”

That said, it’s not over for the bouchon. Wesolowski occasionally makes bouchon standards such as pork with lentils, fish dumplings known as quenelles, and a salad made with pigs’ feet.

“He’s unique,” says Maire. “He still works with his heart.”

After lunch, at the Café de la Cathedral, I get Dos Santos talking about wine while he sips on a San Pellegrino mineral water served in a Perrier glass. Even that becomes something of an indirect ode to the character of the Lyonnais. He begins by talking about the semi-regular tastings he runs at Antic Wine, where anything from reasonably-priced wine to an expensive magnum might be served with some wonderful charcuterie, all for a ridiculously cheap $15.

“The tastings are a lot of fun, but we certainly don’t do it for the money,” he says.

Case in point are two empty bottles left from previous tastings on a shelf at the shop, one from Château Haut-Brion and the other from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and each of them worth a couple of C-notes.

“I’m generous - I don’t do this for free, but I love working with food and with people,” Dos Santos says. “Wine has got to be accessible to everybody. There’s always money, but you’ve got to have magic, too.”

Later in the evening, Dos Santos plays waiter at Les Adrets for a private wine-tasting dinner he has organized with Wesolowski. The consummate host, here Dos Santos is clearly in his element. He skates around the floor, making jokes in the kitchen and with the clients, who try several wines over the course of the evening. He’s all smiles, simultaneously running the show, charming everyone in his path, and, at the end of the night, sharing a drink with them.

At one point, he stops at a waiter’s station to test a Burgundy he has just opened, pokes his nose in a glass, inhales deeply, then takes a sip. Then, like an aside to the camera, he turns to me, tingling with enthusiasm, and finally talks about the wine.

“Ça,” he says, flicking the glass with his finger and making it sound a sharp, satisfying “ding!” “C’est magnifique!”

Click here to see my full photo shoot that ran with the story.

Joe Ray, a former cook, is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Paris. He can be reached through his website, joe-ray.com.

If you go…

Where to buy wine

Antic Wine
18 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-78-37-08-96
anticwine.com
The wine shop of Georges dos Santos is a veritable Lyon landmark. Closed Monday.

Where to stay

ARTELIT
16 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-78-42-84-83, 011-33-6-81-08-33-30
dormiralyon.com
Frédéric Jean’s beautiful, central, cozy B&B. Reasonably priced at $132-$176. The bed’s in a loft, however, leaving you with little headroom.

Cour des Loges
2-4-6-8 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-72-77-44-44
courdesloges.com
Go high-class, Lyon style: beautiful decor, lush rooms, stunning atrium courtyard. $351-$878 a night.

Where to shop

Boulangerie St. Vincent
49 quai St. Vincent
011-33-4-78-29-34-23
The pain de maïs (bread made with corn, but not corn bread) is to die for.

Jardin de la Martinière
Halle de la Martinière
Rue de la Martinière
011-33-4-78-29-56-24
Killer Morbier and goat cheeses, but ask owner Virginie Messad what’s best.

Where to eat

Les Adrets
30 rue du Boeuf
011-33-4-78-38-24-30
Dos Santos’s favorite place to dine in Lyon and a prix-fixe lunch at an unbeatable $20. Closed in August.

Le P’Tit Bouffon
73 rue de Sèze
011-33-4-78-24-00-16
Stop feeling like a tourist and go to this friendly, no-frills restaurant with a Basque influence. Dinner with wine around $40 a person.

Glacier Nardone
26 quai de Bondy
011-33-4-78-28-29-09
glaciernardone.com
Closed Jan. 1-March 10 Get in your licks . . . at Dos Santos’s favorite place for ice cream.

Information: lyon.fr/vdl/sections/en/

See the .pdf version of this story as it ran in the Boston Globe : page 1, page 2