Postcard from the boulevards: What France gets right about train station restaurants

Travelling used to be glamorous didn’t it? Don’t shake your head at me. I’ve seen the photos of stewardesses carving delicious hams and turkeys with paper-frills as part of the in-flight service.

Even the vagrants had it good. ‘Third boxcar, midnight train. Destination: Bangor, Maine.’ A whole train carriage all to yourself. Imagine that.

But nine-tenths of all travel now is drab, functional and distinctly unromantic – or delicious.

That’s the big loss to modern travel. Good dining. I know there are ways to travel in various luxury class flights and trains where you can drink Champagne from a shoe and be trusted with non-toddler-proof cutlery.

But that’s not how most of us are getting around. We’ve lost the ham trollies on planes. And while the TGV operators gamely maintain a ‘dining car’ so you can at least get a beer and a lacklustre sandwich on your high-speed voyage, dinner on the Orient Express it is not.

The solution used to be a jolly good meal before you got on or when you got off the train. A no-brainer too – train stations see metric tons of foot traffic and yet dining options in and around stations are increasingly bad it seems.

Though, not everywhere…

An in-and-out sort of place

In December I whizzed down to Bordeaux for a few days on a course. That first evening I met with two friends and one suggested we go to the Bouillon de Saint-Jean next to the station.

Recently renovated, its décor leant heavily on the late 19th century heyday of these classic dining halls.

‘Bouillons’ grew in popularity in Paris from around the 1850s as places to eat fast and cheaply, generally aimed at workers and the less well-off.

In this they were a sort of evolution of the classic bistrot, the name of which is itself derived from the Russian for ‘fast’ or ‘quick’ – ‘bystryy’*.

Anyway, I’ll tell you about the differences between brasseries, bistrots and bouillons another time. Suffice it to say that bouillons still exist and while not exclusive to station locations by any means, their modus operandi makes them perfect for those looking to grab a hot meal before taking the train.

I warn you though, it’s pretty wham-bang-thank-you-ma’am stuff.

They usually don’t take bookings – especially at busy periods – and you need to be there with your whole company before they’ll seat you. So no ‘my friend will join us in five minutes’.

I wouldn’t be under any illusions about the exquisite quality of the food you’re always getting either. Bouillons maintain their record for being pretty bloody cheap.

You can see the Saint-Jean menu online but I had: Six snails in parsley butter (€6.90), steak frites with a pepper sauce (€12.00), an affogato (€3.90) and my share of a half-bottle of wine (Château Pouyanne, Graves, for another €6).

Now at that price and with the rapidity it arrived, do I think this was lovingly knocked up by the chef from scratch? No, I don’t.

But the overall quality was pretty good and those prices are close to unbeatable – three courses with two glasses of wine for under €30!

If it’s a choice between a sad sandwich on a train, giving money to yet another fast food franchise or a hot meal with at the least the semblance of traditional cooking – I know where my money’s going.

A lost art

Overall, it made me think that this tradition of pre-/post-train dining is a) brilliant and b) a much-needed antidote against the drudgery of modern travel.

Paris maintains a pretty solid stable of station-adjacent establishments. Right off the top of my head there’s: Bouillon Chartier at the Gare de l’Est, Terminus Nord at the Gare du Nord and, of course, the daddy of them all, Le Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon.

Good luck getting into that latter one though. First recommended to me by the late father of a good friend some years back, I fear its status as a hidden gem is long gone.

And there are almost certainly more both in Paris and around the country. When I lived in Lyon, my girlfriend at the time was from Beaune, and at the end of weekend visits we’d often stop by at the Hotel de France opposite the station to eat before we headed back.

That was a proper hidden gem, though from the look of the website it’s got somewhat fancier in the intervening decade. Nonetheless, a classic case of a railway hotel offering good food because it’s good business.

Not that all provincial French railway stations are hiding ‘bistrot d’excéption’. Indeed, rural dining in France is currently in terrible peril.

But there is an intangible sense of fun and satisfaction finding good restaurants by train stations I’ve decided.

It’s satisfyingly old fashioned. The kind of thing Agatha Christie or Ernest Hemingway would mention in their writing.

You can imagine it now. ‘We trooped into the Café de la Gare. It was a cool, well-lit place with mirrored walls and a station clock set in a dark wooden frame above the door. We were weary from our journey but hungry. We ordered oysters, terrine and steaks and fell upon the food, washing it down with foaming glasses of beaujolais wine.’

The inside track

And it’s excellent insider knowledge too. It conveys a degree of well-travelled sophistication. ‘Ah yes, the Gare de Terminus. You should go here. The fish is excellent. Tell Maxime I sent you.’

And as someone who likes to be-on-time for my trips (to my wife’s despair), when we inevitably arrive hours early for our train the idea of being able to eat in peace and happiness mere metres from the station is delightful.

What I am saying therefore is that, we are failing as a society in allowing this brilliant culinary institution to slip through our grasp, more restaurants need to place themselves near stations, and Britain is trailing miserably behind in this regard.

It didn’t use to be, I’m sure. Britain was once Top Nation when it came to railways. But British rail travel never recovered from Beeching’s axe, nay, bloody cleaver, of 1963.

So, if you find yourself near a station, with some time to kill and an appetite, look for a place where you can treat yourself to a good meal and bring a little whiff of old railway glamour back into your life.

It really works. Believe me.

*When the armies of the Sixth Coalition occupied Paris in 1814, the Russian troops, who made up a sizeable element of the force, could be heard shouting this in any establishment they were in when asking for food and drink, so enterprising Parisians catered to this whim and the ‘bistrot’ was born.

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