The Chez Hugon Experience
Down a side street between Place des Terreaux and the Hôtel de Ville, behind red-checked curtains, Chez Hugon has been serving the cooking of old Lyon since 1937. It is one of the genuine bouchons in a city full of imitations — small, loud, family-run, the walls crowded with photographs and the tables crowded with regulars. The kitchen here has been led by women for generations, a lineage the family wears with pride.
Arlette Hugon embodied the fourth generation of female cooks from 1985, ran the stoves for some thirty-eight years with her husband Henri behind the bar pouring Beaujolais, and has more recently handed the kitchen to a younger pair, Paola De Almeida Rocha and Yasmine Zerrouki, raised on the house recipes. The food has not changed and that is the point. The quenelles are made in-house, light as a mousse but true to form; the tablier de sapeur — breaded, fried tripe — arrives with a sharp gribiche; and the menu rolls through poulet au vinaigre, gâteau de foies de volaille, andouillette from Bobosse and a proper salade lyonnaise.
A single set menu runs around €33, with evening mains roughly €23.50 to €33.50, which makes this one of the better-value serious meals in central Lyon. The wine is Beaujolais and Côtes-du-Rhône by the pot, the room seats barely forty, and Gault&Millau and the city's food press have long held it up as a benchmark for the real thing. It closes in August, as the old houses do.