Richard Elliot's Blog: Le Sud Restaurant, Lyon

Wednesday, 6 January 2016

Le Sud Restaurant, Lyon

Bread and olive at Le Sud

One of my early thoughts when we decided to go to Lyon, the culinary capital of France, was to do a spot of Michelin star collecting. The only problem was that everywhere we looked at were very expensive. My usual trick of looking out for the cheaper lunchtime set menus didn't yield any results so we started to look for alternatives and decided upon Le Sud a brasserie owned by Paul Becouse, who also runs the city's only three star restaurant.

Even though it was 'only' a brasserie Le Sud still felt like it offered the full silver service. My linen napkin had a button hole with which you could use to attach it to your shirt, which of course I did.

A pot of Côte du Rhone - we had two

Having discovered that a 'pot' of wine was the Lyon equivalent of a carafe we decided to order a pot (or two) of Côte du Rhone. They were exceptional value at 12.60 EUR. The quality of the wine was easily on a par with anything else we'd drunk on the holiday was considerably cheaper than the rest of the wine list.

Ed loved the concept of the pot so much he bought one to take home with him.

Pumpkin and chestnut soup

I started with the pumpkin and chestnut soup. It was a lovely autumnal soup although I didn't get huge amounts of chestnut.

My main was a pan fried fish with light curry sauce, a choice inspired by a similar dish Mike had ordered the day before. The fish was delicately cooked and paired well with the curry sauce.

Fish with a curry sauce

For dessert I had the poire belle Hélène. A poached pair, fanned out to cover a ball of vanilla ice cream and surrounded by a pool of dark chocolate sauce. I loved the poached pair and vanilla ice cream but found the thick dark chocolate sauce a little too intense for my taste.

The service was discreet, efficient and friendly when required. The only oddity, in what was a very pleasant evening, was my trip to the gents. While the femmes and hommes cubicles were complete separate, le urinoirs were only a small partition away from the unisex hand basins. I couldn't help thinking everyone's modesty needed a little more protection.

Poire Belle Hélène

On the way home we stopped in at the Mama Shelter hotel for a final bottle of Côte du Rhone of the holiday. The hotel has a great bar with good music. It was pretty busy, but we were able to secure some seats at the bar in which to enjoy our bottle of wine.