On the 15th and 16th of November, I attended a workshop at l'École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, sponsored by Arithmétique des Ordinateurs Certifiée , a consortium of three computer arithmetic projects: Lemma , Polka , and Arénaire . This was a rare opportunity for me to present my work to researchers (primarily academic) specifically interested in formal verification of arithmetic circuits, and to see what the Europeans are doing in this area. Lin, on the other hand, saw it as a chance for me to take her to Paris. I offered little resistance to this suggestion, as I also looked forward to visiting my old friend Jeff , who was last seen nearly ten years ago, heading off in that direction to become a painter. But of course, the primary focus of the week was food.
Lyon is a great town. It had been recommended that we stay in la Presqu'ile, the business district between the Saône and Rhône Rivers. But most hotels there were booked, and so we ended up at a place called Cour des Loges in le Vieux Lyon, which is on the West bank of the Saône. This was actually quite lucky, as we much preferred this area to the more modern sections. The hotel, consisting of four Renaissance mansions, was quite interesting (I'm afraid I never did learn the route from the lobby to our room) and fairly plush. Lin had no trouble amusing herself while I was at the workshop, mainly with the architecture of the area, which is all from the 11th - 14th centuries. Amphitheaters and churches, she tells me. I tend not to notice such things, but I do recall that the bar that became our hangout was called Café de la Cathédrale.
We arrived on the morning of Tuesday the 14th and faced the challenge of staying awake all day. That night, we were rewarded with a very decent Lyonnaise dinner at a place near the hotel called Aux Trois Maries. I had some escargots in garlic butter (nothing special, but it seemed the thing to do) and a breast of chicken with chanterelles in a cream sauce. Apparently, this was the time for wild mushrooms -- they were abundantly available on the street (chanterelles went for about FF75/Kg) and I wish I could have brought them home. Lin ordered duck soup and an entrecôte au poivre vert, and we finished with a plateau de fromages. Everything was quite good (although Lin was surprised by the local interpretation of "medium" and had to send her steak back), and it all went well with some generic Bourgogne rouge.
Wednesday was the night of our obligatory fancy dinner, for which we selected Chez Léon de Lyon, a well known restaurant in the center of town. It began with a series of interesting hors d'oeuvre, especially a tasty lentil salad and a pastry filled with lamb. Lin had duck soup again (she ordered this everywhere we went), which this time included a sliced duck breast with red beans and foie gras, followed by a sole de ligne cuite meuniere. I had cannelloni de champignons, and then a perdreau (partridge) gris rôti, which for some reason was served as two courses: the breast followed by the legs. We shared a nice Côte du Rhône Guigal. But for me, the best course was the fromage -- an impressive cart from which I selected a Valençay (chèvre), a St. Marcellin, and a very ripe Vacherin de Mont d'Or, a stinky number from Normandy. Lin enjoyed her dessert, an assortment of six bitter chocolate items, but I think her favorite part of the meal was her visit to the lower floor, which she insisted that I see for myself. At the bottom of the stairs was a sink (note that French public restroom designs are optimized through the sharing of hardware -- Mon Dieu!), facing a glass wall. Behind the wall was a well-composed and dimly lit wine cellar with a floor of pebbles on which an assortment of 6- and 15-litre bottles of various Bordeaux premiers crus were artfully arranged. Well worth the trip.
Thursday was a splendid evening. The workshop had ended that day (my own dreaded presentation in particular), and as the signs all over town were saying, "Le Beaujolais est arrivé!" It also happened to be my birthday. We spent the evening roaming the streets, where wine was flowing freely (well, FF10/verre, anyway). With our first glass, we were offered a saucisson (a local standard) and some kind of grilled pork with lentils, all in a wonderful but unidentifiable herb mixture. (This was perhaps the best thing I ate all week.) We wandered across the river to Chez Léa, where I had been wanting to try the celebrated poulet de l'ail, but we were told that this required a 45 minute wait, so we just had some pâté de lièvre (hare) en crôute (avec une bouteuille de Beaujolais, naturellement) and returned to the streets. There we ended up with a crowd of singing drunks who serenaded me with a few rounds of "Happy Birthday" (in English). They asked Madame what French songs she knew. Well, Madame must have been pretty far gone by then -- without hesitation, she broke into a chorus of "Michelle ma Belle", to the delight of the crowd, especially a pretty young man with long braids, who seemed to have fashioned himself after Grace Jones. We left our friends and headed back to the hotel, stopping for some moules et frites (with a Moselle, for a change of pace) along the way.
Oh, yes, the workshop. It was an interesting interchange between two distinct communities--those of computer arithmetic and theorem proving--and this was a welcome change from the usual confrontation between the model checkers and the theorem provers. I even managed to learn a bit about computational geometry, of all things. On the theorem proving side, naturally Coq was well represented, but so were HOL, PVS, and ACL2. I guess my talk went all right -- at least no one insulted me to my face, and that's always gratifying.
By the way, lunch with the workshop crowd was remarkably bad. The Champagne kir greeting on the first morning was a nice touch, but although our hosts were otherwise quite gracious, the fare went downhill from there. On both days, we were confined to the cafeteria at l'Ecole, where the quality was about what one would expect from an American school cafeteria. It would appear that my own priorities were not generally shared by my colleagues.
On Friday afternoon, we had our last Lyonnais meal at a neighborhood bouchon before taking the train to Paris. I had the soupe à l'oignon and a bavette a l'échalote (overcooked and somewhat tough, I'm afraid) with an authentic Lyonnais gratin dauphinois. Lin settled for a green salad with walnuts and a warm round of St. Marcellin, her new favorite cheese.
In Paris, Jeff met us at the train and showed us to our hotel, l'Hotel de Buci in the St. Germain district of the 6th arrondissement. I knew I had to get some exercise before dinner, and although it was raining, it was finally warm enough for shorts (although many of the locals I passed on the street seemed to express some disagreement with this opinion), so I ran a few laps around the nearby Jardin de Luxembourg.
Later, we met Jeff and Evelyn at their favorite restaurant, Coconnas. Lin started with her usual duck soup, this one with asparagus and cream, while I had a very tasty terrine of poireaux, chèvre, and tomates confites. Lin and Jeff shared a gigot d'agneau, Evelyn had a lamb shank with vegetables in broth, and I did a confit de canard aux cérises et l'Armagnac. Duck in cherry sauce happens to be an exception to my personal prohibition against mixing meat and fruit (the "New Kosher"?), and this one was especially good, with only the slightest hint of sweetness. We went a little wild with the wine, a St. Estèphe and a Pomerol, either of which, I suspect, would have cost a small fortune in a restaurant here. (I can't say how they were priced there, as with characteristic magnanimity, Jeff never let me see the tab.)
On Saturday, I went shopping with Lin in the morning and pretty much avoided eating, in anticipation of dinner. To prepare for this event, Jeff and I spent the afternoon foraging, mainly at the Mouffetard street market, while Lin went off to see the more conventional sights: le Tour Eiffel, le Louvre, etc. Dinner was chez Jeff et Evelyn. This began with some charcuterie that we had collected -- rillettes à l'oie, pâté de canard avec noisettes (fantastique), saucisson à façon Lyon à la choucroute, and a dry-cured jambon de Savoie that our hosts had acquired in their travels. Then came some rougets, fried with garlic and herbs, a salade verte, and some fairly exotic cheeses, including a Roquefort, a St. Marcellin, a Parmigiano, a Chevrot, and a Tome de Savoie, but the best of which was an Époisse, wrapped in grape leaves and cured in marc (a.k.a. grappa). Again, we went overboard on the wine, especially the Gevry-Chambertain that accompanied the fromage. The final course was Jeff's spécialité, cérises à l'eau de vie: in this case, cherries macerated in marc. We sampled his efforts from '99, '98, and '97, I think. A lovely way to get drunk at the end of a meal.
We brought back a few wines, including some of the better ones that we encountered at our dinners in Paris, as well as a few Beaujolais labels that we've never seen here. (I'm afraid the next time I pay $8-10 for a Nouveau will be somewhat painful.) I also came home with a new appreciation for both fromage and charcuterie, and plan to do some experimenting with the latter. I'd also like to try to reproduce Jeff's cérises, although he warns me that it won't work with the thick-skinned varieties that are commonly found here.
Finally, it must be noted that the French people were remarkably friendly -- nothing like what I had been led to expect. Recalling a somewhat different experience in Martinique, I assumed that Laurent (our workshop host) was putting me on when he suggested that the locals would generally appreciate any attempt on my part to speak their language, but this really was true. And there's something satisfying about making oneself understood in another language. But then, I get a rush when I manage to extract a can of soda from a machine using foreign money.
D.M.R.