Lyon, 2024 (In Full)

Burgundy, Beaujolais, Chartreuse, and everything in between.

Friday, Oct 4, 2024

1337 hrs

Lyon (coffee shop, city center)

The last two times I’ve been in France, I’ve needed to have my belt adjusted because I’d lost a little weight (humble brag).  I’ve needed a couple more holes notched in my (only) belt for a few months now.  I’ve been to a couple of cobblers and seamstresses in the city, but have struggled to find anyone who works on long loved goods with their actual hands.  I’ve had hems fall out, tailors tell me that they don’t think that shirt needs to be adjusted, it looks fine, and a man tell me that the stitches coming out of my well worn boots aren’t fixable, and that “It’s easier to throw them out and get some new ones”.  It breaks my heart, our passion for Kohls and Amazon instead of maintenance and ateliers.  Alas, when I’m here (in urban France, at least), I see dozens of little shops, where people still know how to do things– to make clothes, to fix shoes, to repair watches.  So, like last year in Nantes, I popped by one of these tiny little shops (probably 12’x20’, tops) and in what was certainly broken but evidently comprehendable French, asked the woman if she could help me fix my belt by cutting a few new holes in it.  She said, yes of course, one moment, and put down her current project.  She took my belt, and with a few short raps of a mallet on a steel punch, I had two more holes.  I asked her what I could pay, and she shook her head, “no, not necessary”, as she sat back at her workbench and resumed fixing the zipper on a beautiful leather jacket that looked as old as me.  I thanked her, put my belt back on, and resisted the urge to say, “in that case, could I get a few more, you know, for when I’ll need them in the spring?”.  It would’ve been terribly rude, but I also think I like this silly, personal microtradition, of getting something fixed by an artisan when I’m here. Remind me to pack those old boots next time I’m headed overseas.  I can’t just throw them away.

1450

Lyon (Croix Rousse public library)

I was a little bit self conscious about not having enough professional visits lined up for my folks this week.  We decided to skip the summer trip for a number of reasons, among them the brutally hot weather that France has suffered from the past few years and the massive crowds (thus higher priced everything) during that classic Northern Hemisphere tradition we call “summer vacation” and the Europeans call “holiday”.  The summers in Europe can still be magical, no doubt about it.  But they can also be a racket, a slog, and a sauna all in one, and we wanted to wait until things cooled off (airline prices included) to make our annual pilgrimage.  The only thing that bit us in the ass with our timing this year was that the entire region would be smack dab in the middle of harvest during our visit, or at least just finally finishing with it.  Harvest is an exciting time of year for a winery, but especially for the “small” wineries that we work with, an exhausting one for the winemakers.  A lot of these outfits are multigenerational duos or even completely solo projects, and when harvest rolls around, they’re quite literally setting up a cot at the winery and living every moment along the newly fermenting juice.  They constantly monitor the looks, aromas, sounds, tastes, and scientific data reports, ready at a moment’s notice to make a snap decision about pumping over, cooling down, clarifying, filtering, racking, etc.  Simply put, they don’t have time for a group of Americans who want to steal them away from their most sensitive and precious work of the entire year for 2 hours just to show us jokers around and taste some wines with us.  And, of course, we completely understand.  It’s, as Hannah said, like someone showing up the week of New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, and Entrecote all at once for us. We’ve got shit to do.  It’s almost (read: is) rude to even ask, but I’m a dope and I didn’t really think it through before requesting visits.  I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to hear “lol, no” as often as I did, but I was.  On these trips, I typically line it all up months in advance right down to the hour on big group visit days.  Meeting times and addresses are solidified, a plan for food is formed, driving directions are reviewed for possible detours of the snaring and beneficial alike.  But this time, seemingly everyone I asked said something like, “unfortunately, we’re projecting to be right in the thick of harvest during your visit, and we don’t book anything during harvest”.  So our pickin’s were slimmer than usual, and yes, that worried me.  

These wine trips have a certain message to deliver to the brave and fun loving souls who embark on them with me each time.  The messages end up being delivered differently each time, often organic in nature and nothing I can prepare us for.  But despite the delivery methods being variable, the messages and take-aways inevitably end up being about the same:

1. How fucking lucky are we to do this for a living?  I mean, we make money knowing about, preparing, and enthusiastically sharing the gospel of delicious things that one puts in their body to sustain life and pleasure.  The work is challenging, especially as we get older.  The perks are few.  But the ability to appreciate a piping hot snail drenched in butter, parsley and garlic washed down with high toned and luxurious Meursault is not something that most people have (“Eh, idk about snails, sounds gross, and I definitely don’t like oaky Chardonnay”.  Lol, ok Philistine. More for us.), and these trips truly act as tune ups for good taste and inspiration.  

2. Wine (and food) are an ongoing anthropological experiment.  Wineries, like restaurants, are just people, personified in a bottle or on a plate.  Everyone feels differently about their place within this self imposed caste- the high school kid who works at a fast food joint can’t wait to graduate and move on from this gruel, whereas the professional chef who finally got the opportunity of their lifetime at the helm of a kitchen is pouring their guts and baring their soul each day to be great and earn the respect of diners and peers alike.  It’s no different for winemakers- some are doing this because it’s a job, and others are doing it because it’s their life.  You can damn sure tell which is which tout suite when you arrive at a winery for a visit.  Let us be energized and inspired by those who passionately toil in the fields and at their addresses, and not dismissive of but empathetic to those who are in it for a buck.  Not everyone wants to climb K2 everyday when they wake up.  And that’s cool.  Sweetbreads aren’t for everyone.  

The visits we were fortunate to book (mostly) did not disappoint.  We started the trip in Burgundy, as it was the longest drive (wanted to get that out of the way day 1) and, to me at least, the cradle of fine wine in the entire country, if not the world.  As a wine person at a French inspired restaurant, you’ve gotta get to Burgundy.  You’ve gotta see the Cote d’Or, or “golden slope” with your own freakin’ eyes to understand the cru system that’s assigned to the land, not the person who farms it, that originated here centuries ago, and why a lot of the winemaking world followed that lead.  We ducked into the little village of Saint Romain, nestled over the Cote, forming a triangle with Meursault and the duo of Volnay and Pommard (it’s hard to mention one without the other, for similarities or differences).  Saint Romain is both cursed and fortunate to be just off the main drag of the pricey, famous appellations of the Cote d’Or.  Cursed because they can’t sell their wine for as much money as the others (we always go back to this principle at our wine tastings- value is found in un-famous places), and fortunate that they don’t have to sell their wine for as much money as others, so it increases their drinkability and exposure with folks who love wine but maybe can’t swing the $100 bottles.  Franc Buisson, the 8th generation co-winemaker at Domaine Henri & Giles Buisson (his brother is also greatly involved, to whom the title of chef applies, I’m not sure), felt that it was generally nice to be the “value proposition” within some of the portfolios who represent his family’s wines.  Sitting on the sales sheet along side DRC, whose wines sell for thousands of dollars per bottle, not only makes you look like a hell of a deal, but also lends your brand a lot of credibility.  “These wines are cut from the same cloth as these really expensive ones” is a nice marketing tool.

The drive into Burgundy was rainy but beautiful.  The leaves are starting to change colors, including in the vineyards.  The landscape was plastered with green and crimson, the rain on the windows of our Peugeot staining them into a drippy oil on canvas.  Franc met us with a kind and casual “oh shit, that appointment is today?” kind of energy.  I parked, he snagged some wine and glassware, and we piled into the harvest truck to head up to the top of the slope of the valley of Saint Romain.  When I say Saint Romain is a tiny village, I mean it maybe has the population of a square block of Richmond.  Only about 150 people live there year round, which skyrockets to a whopping 180 in the summer when the rich folks come to their second or third home in the Burgundy countryside for a few months.  It’s rocky and remote, with a landscape far less gentle than it’s neighboring villages.  It’s a pretty even split between Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that the Buisson family grows, divided among seemingly dozens of small parcels as is so common in the region (even vineyard and land ownership inheritance laws originated in Burgundy… have I mentioned that it’s an important region for wine people to understand yet?).  The focus on all of the things that tell you someone gives a shit about what they’re doing- working organically and biodynamically, keeping their sulfur use reasonable (30 ppm for reds, 70 ppm for whites, for those keeping score, lord fucking knows some of you are for some reason I will never understand), and letting the vintages tell their wines what they’re going to be.  In real wineries, there is no “house style” like there are in the mega-producers.  There’s no additives, no tweaking with chaptalization (adding sugar) nor acidification (adding, yes, acid).  Sure, the winemakers all have their own personal preferences when it comes to pressing and aging materials and timing and temperatures and extraction and bottle aging and countless other elements of turning grapes into wine.  But the Buissons make what I would call “honest” wine.  No smoke and mirrors, no goofy labels, just wine made by people who care a whole lot about how it tastes.  To get on their harvest team of anywhere between 30-50 people, you’ve gotta know somebody who can get you the invite, usually needing to be personally vouched for by someone who has already worked a harvest with them.  It’s a privilege to hand pick the grapes off of those vines, and everyone who sweats it out on those hillsides is aware of that.  

The wines of Domaine Buisson that we had the fortune to taste were, as expected, of exceptional quality. We walked through their subterranean cellars together, watching the harvest and winemaking crews finishing up what was just the beginning of the winemaking process (they had picked their last grape just the day before our visit).  They, like most good winemakers, were always experimenting with small batches done in different shapes and materials, these experiments taking years to yield conclusive results.  Once we sat around the humble and homey tasting room table in what appeared to be the living room, which looked as if it doubled as a board room, dining room, and perhaps poker table at times, more bottles were opened.  We tasted the reds first, followed by the whites, as is tradition in this region (it’s an important region, haven’t you heard?).  “You know why we taste the whites last here?” Franc asked us.  “Because we make REAL white wines in Burgundy”, he said with a huge smile.  And of course, he’s right.  Burgundy is one of the only regions in the world where the whites often outshine the reds, even on the market.  Almost every other of the world’s most famous wine regions tout their red as the prized jewel in their crowns- Barolo, Bordeaux, Tuscany, Rioja… ask anyone who works at Grisette, some people would rather drink Bordeaux with their mussels and fish than open a bottle of far better pairing white wine (these people are not fools, just lost and probably ignorant, thoughts and prayers for all of them).  And while I’m not deep into the world of collecting wine, I’m aware of the status of red Burgundy within the market.  It’s a beast, accounting for some of the most expensive and sought after bottles on the planet.  But the whites, according to most, stand toe to toe with the reds.  They have depth, and character, and oomph, often with price tags to match.  Give good white Burgundy a little time to relax in the bottle, even just 5-10 years, and you’re rewarded with something very special in your glass.  Go even longer, 10, 20, 30 years, and you’ve got something altogether different from what you typically think of wine tasting like.  The tertiary and non-traditional wine aromas and flavors take over, and you get taken for a ride.  They’re not necessarily meant to live forever (no wines are, except Madeira, of course), but they’re undoubtedly delicious and of equal value (to me) as their red brethren.  As he warmed up to us, Franc asked us a lot of questions.  I love it when the winemakers are as curious about us as we are them.  We shared conversation about our similar missions of making an honest product that we can be proud of, and our collective appreciation that it can be enjoyed by more than just super rich people.  Their wines aren’t cheap (just as I’d never use that word to describe any of my restaurants, except Beaucoup during happy hour, now that’s fucking cheap).  You’d likely see them on our list within the top price bracket we typically have (somewhere between 80-100 bucks), which though it feels expensive to me, is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to village level and premier cru Burgundy.  

We wrapped up the visit and I drove away feeling lucky and satisfied with how the first one of the trip went.  See the appellation and vineyards?  Check.  See the cellar and everyone hard at work, you know, making wine?  Check.  Taste some awesome stuff?  Check.  Have some meaningful and industry specific conversation with an insightful winemaker?  Check.  Buisson was great.  I immediately texted my rep who sells their wines and promptly bought everything they had in stock (which wasn’t that much, but still), well knowing that we were going to be excited to share their wines with you upon our return to Grisette.  Their whites aren’t in stock at the moment, but we’re definitely going to pick those up too once they’re available.  We headed to Beaune for a quick orientation and walk-about, downing some much needed espressos and traipsing through the medieval village sidewalks in the rain.  I had a brief PTSD flashback to when we stopped in Beaune with our kids this summer for lunch and it was 100 degrees outside and everyone was hot and generally miserable.  We actually got the espressos from the exact same little cafe that Megan and I had absolutely terrible take-away sandwiches from with the kids in August.  It was weird to be back in the exact same place just a couple of months later, a feeling that has recurred more than a few times to me on this trip as I get more familiar and comfortable with Lyon as a city.  We headed to lunch in Meursault early for our reservation, as the time crunch of our next appointment (an entire hour’s drive south) was creeping in.  The restaurant was in the basement of an old castle, the room originally serving as the kitchen for the entire chateau.  I’d found it in the Michelin guide, and it sounded like a pretty stereotypical but well executed example of what a traditional Burgundian dining experience would be like for my folks to use as a measuring stick for the rest of the week.  And, as is tradition, we sat, unwelcomed and seemingly completely disregarded for about 20 minutes.  

1654 hrs

Lyon (still Croix Rousse, but now in a little cave a manger)

French bistro front of houses are chronically understaffed.  Restaurants (we’re talking about Bistros here, not gastronomic temples with tasting menus) the size of Grisette regularly have 2 people working the floor at a time.  Now, bistros in France typically don’t have a bar that you can sit at, but still.  2 people running a 50 seat restaurant floor is nuts.  For comparison’s sake, at Grisette we have 5 at a minimum (two bar, two serve, one Maitre d’), and up to 7 on the floor (the aforementioned 5, plus an additional server for the patio and a backwaiter).  With triple the staff for the same number of guests, I often feel like Gris is chronically over staffed.  Now, their kitchens often sport a heaftier crew than their American counterparts.  Whereas we go into service with 4 BOH on (1 chef, 2 cooks, and 1 dishwasher), a little 50 seat bistro here may have 6 or 7 people in the back (a chef, a sous, a protein cook, an entrementier, a garde manger, a plongeur, etc).  It’s a curious swap, given that bistro food in France skews less good than you might expect it to be.  And this is all without mentioning the preshift work done in the kitchens, with respect to the bakers and prep people who have been in their flour covered clogs since you were still fast asleep.  Anyways, back to the understaffedness of a French bistro.

It is hard to describe the patience of a French diner without observing and experiencing it yourself, and cross examining it with your American restaurant expectations.  French people will walk into a restaurant, be quickly whisked into a table by whomever sees them first, and then promptly ignored for longer than you’d believe.  They are ice cold in the face of what we perceive is rude, poor service.  The French casually chat, never nervously look around for anyone who works here, and never getting downright pissed off.  10 minutes goes by and you get a menu.  At 15, the server will come by and ask you what kind of water you prefer.  At 20, you get your water, start to say your drink order, to which you’re interrupted by the waiter.  “Tell me the food first”, they communicate to you in too-fast-to-comprehend French or remarkably good English (the big city bistro servers around here speak restaurant English better than most American servers in America, oh, and German, Spanish and Italian too, plus enough Russian to get by in a pinch.  It’s impressive to witness the code switching.).  So you painfully place your order, then tell them what you want to drink, and then you once again will sit for a while.  It’s not that everything happens at a glacial pace– those motherfuckers are hustling.  There’s just a lot of people eating and very few people to serve them.  In America, if service was as slow as it is here, you’d get 1. a ton of bad reviews, which, like it or not, matters a lot, and 2. people would literally just walk out.  I’ve done it before, I’ve seen it happen in places around town that shall remain unnamed, and it would be like napalm for your reputation.  Try to pull this slow service shit in Richmond and see how long you stay open.  Americans are fussy, hurried and so much more annoyed by waiting than anyone on this Continent appears to be, for better or worse (it’s usually (but not always!) for worse, and we all know it).      

Lunch in Meursault was fine.  It wasn’t bad, in fact, it was really good.  The food was cooked properly, the wines were really tasty, and once we got rolling with the meal, the pace wasn’t too sluggish, even by our Americanized standards.  We all shared bites of very predictable but cozy, simple but slightly elevated, French country cooking.  Snails, beef cheeks, haricot verts salad, celery root soup, roast guinea fowl, things like that.  We splurged on the wine (we’re in Burgundy, we had to), and shared a lovely meal together before heading south towards Macon, back in the direction of Lyon, for our afternoon visit.  It was now totally pouring outside and I was worried that we were going to be a little late.

***Aside***

It does nobody any good being mean.  Really, it doesn’t.  Talking shit about anyone is fantastically non-constructive in every way, and only exists to serve and inflate one’s own ego.  In the restaurant and wine world, as it is in many industries that are competitive and social, it’s easy to be mean.  It’s hard not to slip into being a shit talker, and dragging other people and restaurants for sucking at stuff, even when we’re imperfect ourselves.  And while one is often not wrong about that shit one is talking, that doesn’t mean one is not an asshole for saying it out loud to others.  There is a time and place for brutal honesty, which is different from hot takes, churning the rumor mills, and throwing out speculative hypotheses, but hurtful nonetheless.  And this isn’t the platform for any of that.  So long as I am part of the restaurant industry, I will remain as diplomatic as I can be while maintaining honesty and integrity.  You wanna know how I feel about something?  I’m happy to tell you, as I have lots of strong opinions, loosely held about all things restaurant related, but I hope you have an hour to spend talking with me about it, because my opinions will come with a huge dose of context and caveats.  So the following will be short and sweet, with no names and nothing specific enough to come across as “being mean”, while also illustrating the point that not every single winery we visit is full of emotion and meaningfulness.

***End Aside***       

Our next visit was not very inspiring.  The wines ranged from fine to good.  The people were incredibly nice and warm.  We were not there for a terribly long time, and despite the letdown after our appointment with Buisson, I think visits like this are super beneficial, especially for first time wine travelers like some of my squad.  It’s proof that the great ones are hard to find, and a reality check into how a lot of wine is actually made.  That, like our guy Ben, who upon completing a couple of years at Grisette, moved to France to work in kitchens, says, “there’s a lot of really bad pastries over here, you’ve gotta watch out for them”.  And while these wines and our visit wasn’t objectively bad (I would drink any of those wines if someone handed me a glass of them at a party and not think twice.  Some of them were quite good even), they weren’t special.  Like the sneaky pastries, the wines were just commercial wines, meant to lube the masses.  Their purpose in the grand scheme of the industry is different from that of the Buisson wines (and you’d best take note that the prices of them reflected that reality, nobody walked away from this thinking that these wines were shitty and overpriced, just cheap and not amazing).  When I needed a new laptop, I asked around the staff and a few friends, “what should I buy?”.  The tech inclined all replied “dude, get a macbook, you totally won’t regret it”.  If it’s good for Cam and Cousin Matt, it’s gotta be the best for me right?  Hah, no way.  Our chef at Jardin, Bobby (who is maybe the most similar to me in age and technological give-a-shit, which is to say, we don’t give a single one), said something along the lines of “dude just get the chromebook that’s refurbed or on sale at Walmart”.  And that’s the advice I followed, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s worked out great.  This machine I’m typing on fires off emails and goes to ESPN dot com just like any Macbook I could’ve bought would, and for the cool price of $199.  For my purposes, this is may as well be the nicest computer in the entire world.  Matt may think this laptop is a total piece of shit, but who cares?  He’s not the one using it every day.  Not everyone that lifts a glass of Chardonnay to their lips is tasting is nearly as critically as we do (a lot of people don’t even smell their wine, they just go straight to the mouth, which is CRAZY to me).  And thank god that’s the case, right?  How shitty would the world be if we were all a bunch of wine snobs?

It’s also important for the staff who travels with me to have some “reality check experiences”, or at least slightly disappointing ones.  The worst thing we could do while traveling is not recognize that things are imperfect in their places of origin.  Nobody comes out the womb in France knowing how to cook a suckling pig just right, or how to butcher a flat iron, or how to make great Chardonnay.  Some people spend their lives pursuing excellence of a craft, some pursue a living, some pursue a life rich in family time, or they spending saying “fuck all of these obligations” and get high and hop trains until their bodies finally break.  There’s nothing at all wrong with any of those choices, so long as it makes one happy and doesn’t yuck in someone else’s yum.  You can grow up to be basically anything other than Clarence Thomas and be alright in my book.

There should be a pause here for wrapping up this thought, but I’m really digging this place (it’s quiet and its BTG offerings are really good).  But anyways, let’s keep it rolling until I’m ready to venture back down into the city center from Croix Rousse here in a bit.  *Deep breath, cracks knuckles*

The evenings on these trips are always a little different, as a lot of my folks travel with their sig O’s on them.  The sig o’s aren’t invited on official visits and industry things, but I find that it encourages staff participation by way of their partners feeling included and appreciated in the process.  None of what we do in our restaurants is possible without a lot of partners being very understanding.  We work nights, weekends are sacred, and passion about one’s craft that bleed’s into time off the clock is an expectation (I mean reading cookbooks and visiting restaurants, not sending people home with prep work without compensation, relax, Dave Infante, I can see you labor hackles raised all the way across the Atlantic).  I also think that when young people travel together, fun ensues, and I want these trips to be as fun as they are educational for the staff.  I tap out around 9-10 PM most nights at home, which means maybe I sneak in an extra hour or two while I’m traveling.  Last night, I was in bed before 9.  I’ve stayed out until about midnight every other night this week, which, combined with the 6:30 alarms most mornings, has run me pretty ragged.  I’ve enjoyed going out for drinks with everyone after dinner plans have wrapped up.  I’ve had dinner with Dylan and Elizabeth every night, and today was really my first fully solo day.  I’ve spent it (as you’ve perhaps gathered) popping around from place to place, looking for a little table to type at without being a nuisance.  My lunch ran the gamut from fine to great, as it does at old school spots in every city.  I don’t have any firm dinner plans, but I think I’m going to head back to my little tiny studio flat, drop my tote, and walk over to this Japanese place that Jeremy was espousing about.  Everyone is out with their partners, as they should be, and I’m really beginning to miss mine.  Megan is a fixture of my France memories, here to walk alongside me, share the food with, and, as always, be the translator when my sometimes slurry, overconfident French becomes incomprehensible to our poor server who would really just prefer if I’d speak in English so they could understand me.  I’ve wished she were here the entire time, though I can’t say the same for my two little men who often accompany us.  I love those guys, but they’re a drag to go out to eat with.

2144 hours

Lyon (in my little flat)

Dinner at the Japanese place made me sad.  Not because the food wasn’t great (it was), the server wasn’t great (he was), and the sake wasn’t interesting and borderline enjoyable (it was; sake is just not something I’ve had exposure to enough to realllly comprehend it’s flavors and textures and nuances.  Maybe me and Jeremy should go to Japan).  It made me sad because there’s nothing like it in Richmond.  Like, zilch.  Japanese food is something that is criminally underrepresented in our city.  Not white person sushi, but the Japanese model of “Izakaya”, which literally translates to “eat-drink-place”.  It’s a watering hole with great food that comes at you whenever it’s ready, though not to be confused with tapas.  The bastardization of the word “tapas bar” makes me want to scream too, but that’s a post for a different day.  This place was small, dark, loud, busy, and fun.  The food was excellent and not at all pretentious while maintaining a baseline of pleasing presentation.  Sound like somewhere else you might know?  I want Izakaya all the time, and it’s a huge bummer that it doesn’t exist in our city in this form.  Nokoribi is one of my favorite places to eat in Richmond, which is pretty dang close.  I’m not sure where society stands on cultural appropriation at this moment (remember when a white dude making a burrito made him a bigot?  Yeah, that was a wild time), and it would take a handful of lengthy trips to Japan to study up, but it really is one of the best ways in the world to eat and something I’d love to be a part of, even a small part.  Housing raw fish and smoky grilled things with beer and plum or rice wine in a tiny little joint?  Yes please.  

On Wednesday morning, we were fortunate to have a more reasonable rendezvous time.  I met up with Ben, who had popped down from Paris for a couple of nights to hang with me in Lyon, and we way overloaded on sugar, butter and caffeine for 9 AM at a great patisserie.  Across the board, no misses (though the kougins at Marie Bette that I used to make (and they still do) were better.  You really want a ton of caramel crunch on those things.  Make me almost nervous about my teeth, ya know?).  The highway was moving and the skies were clear as we took off to visit Domaine Saint-Cyr in southern Beaujolais.  

Beaujolais enjoys (and detests) a similar curse to that of Saint Romain– it’s not well respected enough to charge a lot for their equally hard work as Burgundy’s vignerons do, but it’s adored in wine industry circles and gets a ton of exposure on good restaurant wine lists around the world.  You can pour the good stuff by the glass and turn people on to something delicious for 15 bucks instead of 100.  It’s always 100% Gamay, most easily explained as Pinot Noir's darker-fruited, easy drinking, less sexy cousin.  There are 10 crus of Beau-Beau, which anyone on the Jardin staff could probably rattle off without hesitation (ready?  Honest effort here, no googling, here we go: Fleurie, Morgon, Moulin a Vent, Chiroubles, Julienas, Chenas, Brouilly, Cote de Brouilly, Reigne, Saint Amour, boom, still got it).  The crus are up in the northern part of the region, closer to southern Burgundy, and while they’re a bit more expensive than the straight up Beaujolais or Beaujolais-Villages, which are known for value, the crus in particular often really outdrink their price points.  I love the dark black and blue minerality that seems to cut like a knife through the many of the crus.  Bluish granitic soils dominate many of them, go figure, and they balance the fruit nicely.  We’ve sold a shitton of Beaujolais at Grisette (far more than we have Burgundy) over the past 5 years, and though it’s enjoyed the same high moving status at Jardin, we’re about to get way deep in the weeds with it over there this fall.  I’ve gotta be honest though, I’ve never fallen in love with it as much as a lot of other somms have.  It serves its purpose, but it rarely jumps out at me as “the only thing I want to drink” in a moment.  The non-cru stuff has especially underwhelmed me over the years.  I came here determined to change my mind about it, and Domaine Saint-Cyr, maybe one of the most fanatically “natural” wineries in the entire region, had its work cut out for it.

I don’t trust natural wines because they’re volatile.  They’re often different from bottle to bottle.  They are sometimes badly flawed and taste, well, bad.  I can definitely think of some natty stuff that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed in the past, and I bet 80% of our wine list would probably qualify in some way shape or form as “natural” depending on a lot of seemingly random thresholds.  The militantly natty folks (those who make it, those who sell it, and those who drink it, and all of them ONLY it), though, I just can’t typically get down with.  As someone who holds myself accountable to being a responsible restaurant owner (paying the back equitably with the front, using as much local product as I can, etc), I understand the necessity of principles.  But as someone who is also realistic, I’m not willing to tank my entire life’s work for a principle (and turns out, neither is Saint-Cyr, which we’ll get to).  The bottles of splendidly “natural” juice still have to get schlepped across an ocean, don’t they?  How good for the environment is that, exactly?  And they need to be sprayed with copper and sulfur more often than “non-natural” grapes, don’t they?  A few more passes with the diesel filled tractor to spray, who will know, right?  Just slap a stupid, shitty label on it, make sure you mention the buzzwords, and the kids will glou glou that shit right down, no?  

Now, before I continue to come across as a pompous anti-natty prick any more than I already have, let me tell you, there are some really great natural wines out there, and I’m proud to sell them at all three of our restaurants.  But, like pastries in Paris and in my personal experience, there are more bad ones than good, and a somm would be a fool to not look at them with a more critical microscope.  Every bottle on the list is a representation of my good taste.  Even if it’s not what I’d typically prefer to drink, every single bottle has my seal of approval that it’s good at being what it’s supposed to be.  And natty wines can run the risk of going rogue on me far too often for my liking.  Something Raphael, the winemaker at Saint Cyr mentioned is that these wines have roller coaster like lives.  One day, they’re shut down and muted.  Months later, you might taste them and they’re wide awake and screaming.  A year later, they might quiet down again.  There is most definitely some sort of chemistry explainable reason for this, but the lack of stability is always a daunting thing to overcome for him in the cellar, and for us on the floor of a restaurant.  There’s also a little mysticism thrown in with the science that my brain struggles to grasp fully, I can’t lie about that either.  It feels like a bunch of silly religious mumbo jumbo to me, but damn if wine doesn’t taste a little different based on what day it is.  I truly think it does change, and that admission fucks with me and my entire understanding of the world all the time.

Raphael is a big dude, a rugby prop if I’ve ever seen one.  He was walking across the tops of the concrete tanks in the winery when we entered, and the first thing I noticed, which I also blurted out loud, was “holy shit, look at that dude’s calves!”  His forearms are bigger than most people’s biceps, and he’s got some big meaty paws on him.  In a winemaker royal rumble, he’s Hacksaw Jim Duggan, making royal blue speedos look manly and whooping people’s asses with a 2x4 (for those of you who aren’t 38 year old guys, look him up, I’ll have Cam teach me how to drop hyperlinks into these things soon, I promise).  So this Stockinger barrel with arms and legs hops down off the tank and introduces himself. He’s got some work to do, he explained (I told you everyone is busy as shit this time of year, and it’s true here at Saint-Cyr too, the energy in the building is palpable), but Sophie will get us started with a little walk through the cellar and an explanation of their cuvees.  Not 15 minutes later, as she got us lined up for the tasting, Raphael joined the group and she returned to her matters at hand, clearly pressing.  It was great to have an hour with this guy one on one.  I felt like I asked a million questions, more than I usually do, because I wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth (a Clydesdale, in this case) just how he does it, making wine in that style without worrying about the volatility.  “Of course I worry, I worry all the time!”, he told us.  Almost everything is a gamble.  Usually, if you’re careful and thoughtful and good at it, you win, and you make really delicious wines.  And every once in a while, something goes awry and you’ve gotta dump some stuff out and send some money back to those who purchased a lot of it.  

Saturday, Oct 5

1103 hrs

Lyon (Vieux Lyon, in a bizzare little cafe outside the metro station)

Whew, had to call it last night around 11:00PM.  I wrote off and on all day, and was running out of gas, just torching natural wine and the lack of Izakaya in Richmond… unhinged behavior for someone who not 1000 words ago claimed to be a diplomat of the industry.  I slept HARD for almost 11 hours straight.  As it turns out, going to bed stone cold sober and not on a painfully full stomach is good for your sleep cycles!  Who knew?  I panic checked my phone when I woke up, making sure twice over that my flight out isn’t today.  It is, in fact, tomorrow.  I’m good.  I can relax.  This is my last day in France for a good long while.  I usually won’t leave until the next trip is semi-booked, or at least agreed upon and loosely planned.  The plan always changes, but its comforting to know that there’s a calendar date to look forward to.  This time, there is no plan, and that’s hanging over this overcast day like a cloud of quasifinality.  Let’s head back to Beaujolais, shall we?

Sparring is an exercise.  There is no winner, no loser, and certainly no hard feelings at the end.  We spar to sharpen our skills, our reflexes, to remind ourselves of the gestures of combat without trading any harsh blows.  I spar because I want to learn from someone who I can sense has a firmer grip or mastery of a subject than I.  It’s kinda like playing a sport a level up from where you belong.  You play a full season up in Level 4 with the really good skaters, and when you go back down to Level 3 with the pretty good skaters, the game happens in slow motion and you have a little jump on everyone.  That’s how I left sparring with Raphael.  I was asking questions that I honestly didn’t know the answer to, not just prodding him for explanations of his witchcraft (turns out, it’s a lot more science than witchcraft).  We talked about which cuvees had the legs to be open for two days, what the terroir of Southern Beaujolais was like, how he holds back bottles until they’re “ready”, even when his literal bank tells him that he needs to sell them or else.  And we talked about how he puts a small amount of sulfur *gasp* in a couple of their flagship wines just to be (more) certain that they’re gonna be clean.  Those wine sales keep the lights on at Saint Cyr.  You can gamble with the single vineyard cuvees because everytime you make the rose, you take your earnings off of the roulette table and put them in your pocket.  It’s what a lot of my favorite natural producers do (Olivier Pithon has Mon P’Tit Pithon, Domaine Lampyres has H20, hell, even Clos Cibonne has Tentations de Cibonne).  Those wines are all part of the winery, sure, but they’re damn near second labels for some of them.  They’re meant to provide a base layer of economic stability so the winemaker can let it rip with the rest of them.  We do things similarly at our restaurants.  Let the steak frites sell itself.  Don’t overthink it, and for fuck’s sake, don’t take any risks with it.  We need the steak frites to be simple, delicious, and revenue driving.  It’s not just smart business, it’s necessary.  The conversation with Raphael was never once contentious, always a healthy mix of knowledge and emotions, and really beneficial for all of us.

That’s all without even mentioning the wines.  The wines were revelatory.  I’d tasted them in the past, and we’ve sold a little bit of them recently (Calvin loved them, for what that’s worth (it’s worth a lot, that dude had good taste)).  But to dig into a lineup of 9 cuvees, to side by side crus, terroirs, and vintages was such a treat.  Once Raphael knew we weren’t hostile and actually engaged professionals, he did what all good winemakers do.  He went and got his weird cuvees for us to try.  It happens all the time, and it’s very flattering, as if he’s saying, “ok, you guys get it. Here’s what I’m really proud of and why, what do you think?”.  It was a really nice tasting with a really nice guy and really nice wines.  It shifted the group’s mood from our previous day’s less than ideal experience, and we were all of a sudden on fire for Saint Cyr.  Luckily, there’s plenty in stock back home, and it’ll be hitting the menu ASAP.

Saint-Cyr opened a restaurant at their winery in May, aptly named “Cafe Terroir”.  We sat for lunch, surrounded by floor to ceiling glass walls flexing the breathtaking rolling hills of Southern Beaujolais, all a little giddy.  This was the kind of visits we come here for.  Mind changing shit.  Preconceived notions tossed overboard, biases firmly checked.  We essentially ordered one of everything off the menu, a couple of bottles of wine (one from Saint-Cyr, one from Guy Breton, Raphael’s favorite producer), and what ensued was, to this point, the best meal we’ve had all week.  A parsnip 4 ways dish was texturally dynamic and delicious.  The beet cured salmon (Adam, you made it a thing) was refreshing.  It all kept coming.  Butternut squash soup, potatoes with mushrooms, what may have been a kilogram of roasted pistachio sausage in red wine sauce, a whole roasted bresse chicken with mushroom veloute… and it was all beautifully seasoned, cooked, and plated.  It was an extraordinary meal, capped off with dessert, chartreuse, and a very necessary espresso.  Our Saint-Cyr visit was challenging and rewarding, and we’re all excited to share their wines with you starting next week.

30 minutes after leaving, we found ourselves standing on top of Mont Brouilly, the highest point in the southernmost cru’s of the region.  It was covered in that distinctive bluish hued granite, vines, and little pockets of forests and meadows.  We took in the view, laughed at the ridiculous outhouse toilet situation (just ask one of us sometime, we’ll recount it in detail), and generally walked off lunch for a bit before heading back to Lyon.  I wish we could’ve stopped at one more winery.  There’s a woman making wine in Cote de Brouilly who I would’ve loved to visit, but was told by the wine distributor “you haven’t sold enough of that wine for me to connect you with them”, a response that completely shocked me (I’ve bought a lot of that wine over the last half decade… a lot).  I wasn’t asking for anything for free, just an email introduction. Harkening back to the “don’t be mean, maintain diplomacy” mantra of earlier, we’ll leave it at that.  But my god, get out of the wine industry and go sell widgets if that’s your philosophy.  I’ll never buy a bottle from that company again. Honestly though, in our slightly euphoric state after our visit and lunch, you don’t want to spoil a good thing.  Less can be more in scenarios like this.  The day was nearly perfect– we were challenged, professionally, and we got that deeply mined quality time together.  

1230 hrs

Lyon (on the hill of Fourviere, sitting on the patio lounge of our lunch spot before our 1:00 reservation)

I had to get out of that cafe down in Old Lyon.  Even with airpods in, the techno music was pulsating, the second espresso of the day was quickening my pulse in an uncomfortable way, and I needed a walk.  I took a short stroll to what has over the years become my favorite dive in Vieux Lyon, Cafe de Cathedral.  It’s right next to (you guessed it), a huge Cathedral, and as touristy as it gets.  Photos of Marylin Monroe and old Coca-Cola signs adorn the walls, maybe trying to make us rubes from the States feel more at home.  I have sat in the exact same bar stool more and a few times now, which is a delight and a delicacy in a country that, again, doesn’t usually have barstools.  Despite the ever changing cast of characters who have worked behind the bar, they’ve all maintained some amount of flippant congeniality, happy to pour you a beer and leave you alone or chat, whatever you’d prefer given they have the time for the latter.  A quick baby beer, and up the hill I went.  

Fourviere is a monstrous basilica perched high up on the hill behind Vieux Lyon.  To get there, you can either endure a journey of thousands of literal steps up, hoof it up the switchback roads, or take an old school mountain side train car called the funicular, which rides similarly slowly heading up the hill of the Grizzly, Hurler, or Rebel Yell (you can probably even sit backwards on it too!), for those vintage Kings Dominion inclined.  I chose the first method, which was to pound the stairs.  It’s not that bad for even remotely fit people such as myself (not fit, just remotely fit), but it’s still enough to get sweaty and out of breath and downright uncomfortable in my Michelin starred lunch clothes.  I’m here at Tetedoie, the only starred joint I’ll be eating at this week, overlooking the city on this pretty veranda with a glass of Santenay Blanc.  Dylan and Elizabeth will be here shortly for our send-off meal together, celebrating (among other things) a week well spent working, eating, learning, playing, walking, and chatting together.  I tend to talk about work non-stop, not just on these trips, but generally speaking.  It’s hard for me to find joy in things that do not somehow revolve around or relate to the restaurants.  While it’s exhausting to some (Megan is infinitely patient with me, but even she sometimes asks for a pass), it’s energizing to me.  The lunch I ate on the first day I was here was so good I took handwritten notes the whole time.  I’ve slowly been cobbling together a New Year’s Eve menu throughout the week to consult with Adam about when I return.  In the words of Patrick O’Connel, it’s a consuming passion.  OK, Elizabeth and Dylan are here.  Time to eat.

1726 hrs

Lyon (my little flat)

Lunch was a 10/10 experience.  The company and conversation was wonderful as always with those two, the food and wine was stellar, and the view paired with the most thoughtful service we’ve had since we’ve been here made it especially memorable.  I’ve always maintained that one should never eat at a restaurant with a good view, and I almost didn’t book this place because of that one fact.  People will eat dogshit at restaurants with a good view, as I experienced first hand at one little oceanside Martha’s Vineyard haunt (hint, it’s a color and a pet, and Clinton was fond of it.  Bill.  Definitely not Hillary.).  But Tetedoie defied the odds.  The food was firmly modern– some spheres, some foams, some mousses, some painstaking knife cuts and presentations– but retained soul, flavor, and eatability.  At the end of the meal, we were invited to the rooftop to enjoy our coffee and mignardises in the sunshine, which was such a nice touch of service.  After 2 hours of crab, foie, mackerel, duck, etc, it felt good to walk up a few flights of steps and get some fresh air and sunshine with arguably the best espresso of the week.  As starred joints go, it was a very satisfying experience and worthy of parting with a few hundred Euro.  I typically only do it once or twice a year, and today was the day.

There is a very small list of places I’ve been that have made me consider my maker, the cosmos, my role on this earth, and all sorts of other existential things like those.  Easter Sunday 2008 along the Euphrates River in Iraq is one.  The first time I ever saw Paris from the top of Sacre Coeur.  Hiking up my first 14er in Colorado.  Our visit to Lopez de Heredia in Rioja.  Being a little messed up with friends and swimming out to a rocky island in Blue Hill Harbor among what we found out was likely a lot of Great White sharks.  All of these experiences consisted of some amount of chills, tears, and being overcome with emotion.  I’m forgetting some important ones at this moment, I’m sure.  Thursday’s visit to the Chartreuse Monastery immediately leapt for the top spot on that list. 

I’ll spare you the long, detailed history of Chartreuse and do my best to distill it (heh, get it?) down to a few sentences.  Chartreuse is a liqueur made in the village of Voiron, tucked into the beginning of the Savoie mountains, which progress into the French Alps.  It is made of over 100 herbs, spices, and botanicals exclusively by Carthusian monks, who take their centuries long task of producing these spirits extremely seriously.  They live in a monastery up in the mountains, about 30 minutes from where the stuff is actually made, spending most of their time in prayer, study, keeping the place tidy, and growing a lot of (but not all of) the botanicals that go into the liqueur.  Only two of them (Brother Jean-Jacques and Brother Sebastien-Marie) know the recipe, with a third brother always next in line, training while the other two are still alive and able to work.  The recipe is not written down, only passed along orally (they’re allowed to talk at the distillery and when they go for their 4 hour Monday hikes through the mountains surrounding the monastery, though they really still don’t do much talking, even when it’s allowed).  The two brothers who know the recipes are forbidden from traveling together lest something terrible were to happen.  Imagine a car careening off the side of an Alpine cliff and the only two dudes who know how to make the Magic Green Elixir both inside?  I don’t even want to think about it.

The spirits themselves (they make a Yellow and Green variety, as well as a few special, longer aged and blended cuvees) are curiously delicious and completely unique.  Many try to copy them, and some come close to succeeding in recreating herbal liqueurs to mimic Chartreuse.  But nobody nails it exactly right, and it has become a bit of a Green Dragon that people will chase into madness.  In Lyon, you can get a pour of it pretty much anywhere for 8 bucks.  In Virginia, thanks to our brutally stupidly run ABC system, it’s rarely available, and when it is, will run you about 20 bucks a pour in a restaurant (plus tax and tip, sheesh).  They only make but so much of it, they refuse to ramp up production (they’re silent monks, what do they give a shit that they’re suddenly “cool” in the cocktail bar scene?), and if they both drop dead at the same time, there’s no back up plan.  That’s it.  It’s gone, and they’ll get back to focusing on God now, thank you very much.  It’s all pretty hard to wrap your head around, just the concept and ridiculousness of it all, honestly. 

Our plan for the day was straightforward– we were driving to a tiny roadside parking lot a mile or so down the mountain from the Monastery (which takes no visitors ever, other than other Carthusian monks visiting from other monasteries around the world), hike up with a picnic lunch, and sit in silence in a meadow, just quietly observing the spectacle and having some moments of internal dialogue with ourselves.  After the visit, we’d hike back down and drive into Voiron for a private tour of the museum and the old distillery (they opened a newer one a few years ago because the town of Voiron had grown too large to house so much flammable stuff in the center of town… one stray cigarette butt and the whole town could’ve gone up in flames).  It was an ambitious agenda considering we closed down a bar called “The Monkey Room” the night before, but we were determined to see everything we possibly could.

We found the lot after an ill fated trip a little too far up a road that we definitely were NOT supposed to drive up (it’s a meme on these trips that I drive up a mountain road not meant for us at this point, I blame it on the road signs and GPS, but it’s likely just my stupidity and brazenness).  The tone is set right from the get go, with the extremely clear and easy to understand “Zone de Silence” signage, complete with a robed monk in prayer.  This isn’t a place to chat and laugh as you plow into nature, it’s a place for quiet contemplation.  As we began our trudge up the mountainside, I looked around at my compatriots.  Everyone was amped up.  I had chills and was giddily smiling.  We had made it all the way here, to this tiny little pocket of the world in the mountains, just to see this.  To be in nature, to make our pilgrimage to the Mecca of the world of liqueurs, and it was time to do it.  As if a sign from some heavenly being, right before we started the hike, we saw the most incredible red stag just over a babbling stream from the road.  It was huge, the size of an elk or even a small moose, with an enormous rack and rippling muscles.  While it made us freeze in awe, it casually turned and looked us dead in the eyes and went back along its way, weaving through some cow pastures and back into the forest.  It was moving, it was powerful, and it was awe inspiring.  

As we got to the top of the hill, the Monastery walls started to come into view.  We took our time taking photos, touching the walls and monuments along the outskirts of it, and taking it all in.  We spoke in a pseudo sign language to one another about just where the hell we were supposed to (and not supposed to) go.  I felt like if I took one small step in the wrong direction, either an intruder alarm would go off or I’d just take a silent blow dart to the neck, never to be seen again.  After observing the terrain surrounding the outer walls, we found a little spot for lunch along some felled logs just a hundred meters down the road.  As I unrolled our spread of cheese, pate en croute, and sandwiches, Tito popped a 2008 red Burgundy to pour into paper cups.  We ate while we stood, enjoying the misty damp air, rolling clouds, and stunning sheer rock cliffs surrounding us.  A small troop of older French folks, maybe a dozen and a half in all, with their hiking sticks and backpacks, emerged from the treeline on the hill above the monastery.  They turned down our offer to join us, but gave us the critical intel that if we walked in the direction that they came, there was a trail along the walls to give us a good look inside.  We started to clean up our lunch (gotta Leave No Trace up there, my god, talk about being smited), and the old French folks all rallied in a gaggle on the road and faced the church in the middle of the Monastery.  After the bells rang out for noon, they broke into a quiet song about Christ and the Lord, all to the tune of Greensleeves.  Despite being against the Zone de Silence rules, it was beautiful and heartwarming.

We took their advice and trekked up and around the outer walls, through some thick mud and over a ton of quartz.  We made it to the original cross in the mountainside, and finally got our postcard view inside the walls.  The monastery itself is actually kinda big considering that only 25 people live there.  Later, on the museum tour, it would be explained that they want enough space to never bump into one another, or even see or speak to one another.  About half of it is gardens and orchards that are immaculately maintained.  The scene is right out of fantasy, some kind of LOTR or GOT world.  We completed the loop by coming down the hillside pasture with more shrines and monuments of sorts along it.  The spring water melting off the tops of the mountains was rushing down an aqueduct type system and into the side of the Monastery, so I stopped and took a quick drink from it (I mean, if there’s some kinda supernatural shit going on here, it can’t hurt to put it in my body, right?).  At one point, right before we hit the road/trail to head back down, a DHL van pulled up and left a small package inside the front gate before driving off.  We spent a few minutes speculating about just what the hell was delivered.  Maybe salt (do they season their food?)?  Medicine (isn’t that what the herbs are for?)?  Who knows.  Even monks need some shit every now and again, I suppose.  The drive back down to Voiron was fun and energetically chatty.  We felt accomplished, not just for the bit of exercise that we got in, but for having made the journey.  We’ve all heard the mystique and lore and tales surrounding Chartreuse for our whole beverage careers, and we ACTUALLY went there and saw it with our own eyes and felt the nearly thousand year old walls with our own fingers and drank the spring water, and that’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me.            

For all of the lack of worldly trappings of our monastery experience (it’s just their god, nature, and a bunch of silent dudes out there), the corporate headquarters of Chartreuse is definitely swanky.  From the hot herbal tea at the reception desk to the gift shop in which everyone probably spends a fortune, it is abundantly clear that the second the monks hand the bottles over to the non-monks, money and capitalism are making the rest of the decisions here.  The bathrooms are nice, the floors are marble, the TV screens depicting the history of the brand are crisp and huge, and the staff is attentive, polite, and well dressed.  This is the corporate booze world that Calvin has told me tales of but I’ve never personally experienced.  Wanna go on a yacht?  Wanna drive a Lamborghini?  Talk to your liquor reps, they can hook it up.  The amount of cash that flows through high proof spirits companies compared to little 20 hectare wineries is insane.  Our tour guide, Barbora, was polished, knowledgeable, and unflappable to our endless assault of questions and curiosity.  She had an answer for everything, down to the numbers of bottles, good vintage call backs, names, dates, you name it.  We took our time perusing through the facilities, learning the story, looking at old photos, videos, advertisements, and menus, for over an hour.  It finished with an interactive smell and feel of the botanicals used in the spirits, followed by a tasting of the Yellow and Green.  After Barbora was done with us, she turned us loose on the lobby bar, where we tasted even more exclusive cuvees, all gratis.  We ordered some hot chocolates with Green Chartreuse (what a pairing, holy shit) and planned our gift shop strategies.  We all got a little carried away in the shop, and probably paid for our visit thrice over for the company.  But isn’t that what one does, high off a once in a lifetime kinda of visit?  

Sun Oct 6, 2024

1137 hrs

Lyon Airport (actually, on a little plane as it boards, headed to Brussels for a connection)

Of course, I found my favorite wine bar in Lyon the night before leaving, hiding right under my nose, having walked by it about 50 times this year alone.  It’s probably a good thing, in all honesty.  I would have spent 3 hours and countless dollars at La Cave des Voyageurs had I known about it’s tiny, cramped splendor.  Last night, I had a very specific route planned: head back up to Croix Rousse to have a campari and soda somewhere lively, find that little cave a manger that I wrote from on Friday (I couldn’t remember the name, but knew I could find it just by walking around where I reckoned it was), have a glass of something nice there, head back to Vieux Lyon for a kebab at my favorite kebab joint, and get to bed early.  I hate, and I mean hate, flying even remotely dehydrated and hungover.  It’s rough enough sitting on stuffy, dried out planes for 12 hours, and doing it feeling like total crap is my nightmare. When I’m headed to Europe, I’ll typically stop consuming any alcohol for a week or two leading up to the voyage.  I don’t drink on weeknights at home typically, and regularly go stone cold sober for weeks at a time to stay healthy and keep my palate sharp.  I also know that I’m gonna slightly overdo it on food and wine for a handful of days in a row while I’m over here, and being uber healthy right before I leave and upon my return always makes me feel a little less guilty about indulging while away.  All things in moderation, including moderation, right?

My strict schedule for last night hardly went as planned.  I got my campari and soda, though the guy working behind the bar at the Italiano aperitivo bar said it was a strange order and that he’s never made that before after I stopped him from pouring Coke into my Campari.  I managed to find the little Croix Rousse wine bar with no resources other than memory, but they closed at 8:00, and I arrived at 8:01.  It was already nearly empty and I could tell the staff was closing up shop, so I kept meandering (with a little help from google maps now).  I popped by another wine bar, and despite the high energy inside, I promptly did an about face and kept on moving upon seeing Georges Le Bouef and Jonathan Drouhin labels all over their back bar.  Those are the French equivalents of California’s Justin, or Prisoner, or *winces* Apothic Red, and I wasn’t about to have my last glass of vin be some mass produced bullshit.  From there, I went to my next option, a natty joint just a few blocks away.  It was way cuter and more friendly than either of my previous swings and misses, but had that “yeah we don’t have a menu, I’ll just tell you what the wines are like and you pick based on my descriptions” system of ordering that I fucking loathe.  I had one glass there of “very crisp, very mineral white wine from Alsace”, and, for one of just a few times in my life, called the producer blindly.  I’d tasted that cloudy, fruity, not all that mineral driven (in my opinion) Eidelzwicker juice a dozen times before, and got a quiet kick out of calling a random blind glass (though I suppose it’s not blind blind if I was told it was from Alsace, but still, go me).  The wine was good (better than I remembered and expected it to be), but I still wasn’t satisfied.  In an entire week, I’d walked around this city looking for just a spot to park for an hour or two and drink great wine by the glass, and I was starting to worry that it either didn’t exist or that I wouldn’t find it.  I felt like Goldilocks, tasting my way through places that were either too hot (you don’t want what you think you want, you want what I want you to want, oh, and all that big stinky VA is just terroir!) or too cold (mass produced soul-less juice).  Couldn't there be somewhere that was just right?  A place to drink great wines but also not a condescending game of mousey roulette? 

I hopped back on the metro, feeling less than encouraged by my penultimate day’s whimper of an ending.  It was about 9:30 at this point, and I was finally starting to get hungry enough to rationalize a kebab (lunch was a doozy).  I got off at the Theater and strolled over the bridge to Vieux Lyon towards Made in Berliner for a freshly baked pita filled with shaved milk fed veal and all the fixin’s.  I couldn’t have been 100 meters away when I noticed a little faded awning on the corner across the street that said “Bar a Vin”.  “What the hell, one more shot”, I figured.  Worst case scenario I’ll walk in, not like what I see, and walk right back out to get my kebab.  I excused myself past a couple of fellas smoking in the doorway and went down a few steps to the tiny bar (with barstools!), and grabbed one of the last empty stools.  There were a couple of young, loud, wine nerds on my left and a couple making out on my right.  All of the wines they were pouring by the glass were lined up along the bar with the glass price written in white marker on each bottle, a few of which were obscure but recognizable producers and regions (Lo Sang del Pays Marcillac?!  First Flight Syrah?!).  The food menu was tiny, just snacks really.  The place was tiny– 6 barstools and maybe enough room for 15 people otherwise at a smattering of high and low top tables.  It was distinctly not a  “nice” place.  A few different languages were being spoken in the packed house, everyone took turns smoking in the doorway, and I ordered a glass of Bourgogne rouge as I settled into my seat.  When I asked to see the full wine list, the barman dropped a 30 page volume in front of me and told me that there’s more than that in the cellar if I should wish.  I took stock of what people were drinking around me and eavesdropped on the conversations that I could understand.  Everyone was talking about wine– producers, vintages, the variable tannic expressions of Mencia, how disappointed they were in a visit last week, setting up tastings.  “Get the fuck outta here, this is crazy”, I thought to myself, probably kinda just sitting there stunned and smiling.  I found it.  I found My Place.

The next couple of hours were spent yucking it up with the two French guys next to me, who were equally bad at speaking English as they were gracious about my poor French (it’s better than I think it is, they said, which I’ll take as a win).  The bartender sized me up pretty quickly as an industry guy (this was the industry place, he told me later), and started pouring some fun tastes of things.  I paged through the giant wine list (which had bottles ranging anywhere from $35 to $450 to $you’ve gotta ask us) for a half hour or so before making a decision about where this night was headed.  I really wanted to get some good sleep and feel energized in the morning.  But this place was RAD, man.  I had the green light to practice truly conversational French with a bunch of like minded wine people, and the bartender seemed jazzed about our growing clique of dorks at the bar.  A 2014 single vineyard Roc des Anges white caught my eye for something like 68 bucks, and I said to nobody in particular “fuck it, let’s do it”, and ordered it.  The bartender nodded in approval, went to the cellar, and came back with a filthy, dusty, bottle of the old(ish) white Roussillon blend of Macabeau and Grenache Blanc.  He uncorked it and poured tasted for everyone at my request, and everyone let it rip on what they thought of it, good or bad (it was great, not amazing, and definitely ready to drink, maybe even a year or two older than I’d wished it was, for the record, but it was what I wanted– a glass full of texture and minerality).  At this point, my brain was taking dopamine hit after dopamine hit, and none of it was from the alcohol.  This is what a wine bar is about.  The sharing, the camaraderie, passionate conversations and good spirited debates about topics that fly right over the heads of non-wine people (civvies, normies, whatever somewhat backhanded term you want to call people who aren’t wine people).  And not every single person in that bar worked in the industry.  There were some insiders, for sure, but a lot of them just really truly love wine.    

I had been there for almost an hour when I overheard some English being spoken in the corner behind me.  Two guys were talking about Pinot Noir, and setting up a tasting of Burgundy vs Oregon vs California when they got home with their colleagues and friends. The whole place was properly socially lubed up, and when one of them mentioned being disappointed by a recent bottle of a specific producer in Oregon who I am quite familiar with (and share his disappointment in that particular bottle), I leaned back and chimed in, “yeah man, I hear ya over there, the Chards are dope but the Pinots leave a little to be desired for what you pay for them”.  The guy with his back to me turned around, looked at me and goes, “Donnie?!  What the hell are YOU doing here?!”.  It was none other than Jardin regular (and third place finisher in the 2024 Blind Tasting Championship, I might add) and friend of the restaurant group, Ryder Kenerson. He was traveling with another wine guy, Kevin from Charlottesville, and they’d spent the past week visiting some great domaines in the Rhone Valley.  The odds of bumping into someone you know in general while traveling abroad are minuscule to begin with.  Seriously, think about it.  There are 7 or however many billion people on the planet, and about 250,000 of them live in Richmond.  Of those 250,000 I am familiar with maybe a couple thousand of them, at most, which is an inflated number because of the restaurants.  It’s my actual job to recognize people, recall their name and something about them, even if I only see them once every 6 months.  To come all the way over here, thousands of miles from home, hunt down this wine bar all night, and end up sitting 4 feet away from someone I’ve talked to, poured for, and drank wine with back at my very own restaurant was unreal.  It was the wine universe smiling down upon me, some higher Bacchus type being leading me to this little humble wine bar, hidden in plain sight on a corner in Vieux Lyon.  I sat with Ryder and Kevin for a while and sipped my delicious, gently oxidized prize, sharing a splash with anyone who was around and wanted one, as we talked about the states of the Charlottesville and Richmond restaurant scenes.  It was a refreshing conversation after an hour of barely keeping up with the French guys, in conversation and in the quantity of wine consumed.  

After Armagnacs (and well after midnight), we said some goodbyes and went our separate ways.  I went off to finally get my kebab.  I was hungry hungry at that point, and even though I was pretty clear headed and hadn’t over consumed too much, I needed something to soak up the wine.  It hit the spot and by the time I got home (good thing I’d already packed), brushed my teeth, called Megan and the boys, chugged water, and laid down for bed, it was almost 1:30 AM.  I laid there, a little buzzed and plenty full, took some intentionally relaxing deep breaths, and let my mind wander into a rare air of tranquility as I fell asleep.  I sometimes struggle with giving myself grace.  I’m generally hyper critical of everything I’ve ever done or said.  Lately, I’ve suffered from the same impostor syndrome that I had as chef opening Grisette, but now as a 6 years older (and with 2 kids) restaurateur.  To have a quiet mind is a luxury that I simply never have, even while “meditating” in a sauna or doing yoga (which I find are quiet hours to make mental lists of the next things I have to do when I’m done with all this stretching or sweating while sitting still).  But the events of the evening, finally discovering my happy place, and bumping into someone familiar in a far away land was enough to get my brain to just shut up and appreciate what had just happened.  The evening was nothing that I wanted, yet everything I needed.  

1647 hrs

Somewhere above the Atlantic, south of Reykjavik

I’ve stopped trying to summarize these trips with some overarching, transcendent theme.  Sure, there are lessons learned throughout each of them, something new to be gleaned about any number of topics, like how to travel, eat, and drink better in some specific place.  More importantly, though, there are similar questions raised (and reassurances rendered) no matter where I go.  Is what we’re doing in our little ecosystems in Richmond is both special and worth my sometimes undivided attention?  Even though our lives are lived in chapters and volumes within a series of stories, and we may find satisfaction or successes within many of them, a chef only has one real prime, and I often wonder whether I’m using the most of mine or not.  Is Grisette (and Jardin and Beaucoup) the best I can do?  What does that even mean at this stage of my life?  How long will I allow “doing my best” at something professionally define me?  What happens in 10, 20 years when I’m 48, 58 years old?  Will I still have the “it” that makes so many people happy?  Will young, passionate people still want to work for me?  Will I even want to own and operate restaurants anymore?  If not, what of my self worth then?  These are deep questions with complex answers, but I genuinely think that these trips help my mindset when doing my best to answer them.  These trips with my staff energize me 10x more than they ever wear me down, even with the lack of good sleep and increased imbibing.  Going to the “best” bistros, restaurants, and wine bars in Lyon, Madrid, Paris, New York, Chicago, Bilbao, Portland, Perpignan, Nantes, Logrono, you name it over the past 5 years, reassures me that we are, in fact, on to something.  My teams are talented, and it’s up to to stoke those talents with proper context and guiding principles (and above industry average compensation and benefits, let’s not pretend like anyone is volunteering here).  As long as I keep coming back inspired to teach and share what I learn while I’m away, I’m going to keep doing them. 

When I get home tonight, I’m going to sneak into my little boys’ room without waking them, kiss them both on the forehead, and then take the dog for a good long walk.  Megan will undoubtedly already be sleeping, or close to it, and we’ll catch up over coffee in the morning.  I might even uber eats some Peter Chang’s to be delivered right when I’m supposed to arrive. Either way, happy to be almost home.