The university restaurant and it's interesting food...

For 2,90 Euros you can’t really expect much, especially when it pays for a 3-course meal. But considering it’s in Lyon, gastronomic capital of France, you’d hope that they’d try to make it edible. Unfortunately the university food is much like the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead; when it’s good it’s very very good, but when it’s bad it’s awful.

The subtle art of flavouring does not seem to have been discovered yet, and the lack of flavour of some cheap food is ‘cleverly’ disguised by adding pepper. So much pepper that the food then becomes inedible. Unless of course, you REALLY like pepper.

The salad side-dishes are a mystery, and when selecting your dish it is much like a lucky-dip at lunch-time. You can see what it is; carrots, lentils, fluorescent pasta, but unless you sample each dish with your fingers while you are trying to work out which one you’ll like, there is no way of knowing what it will taste like until you sit down. Even something simple that should have an obvious flavour, like grated carrot, is unpredictable and will often have many strange dressings and flavourings added to it. You can get lucky and choose something with little or no flavour. Or you can get unlucky and opt for a dish which tastes like something that shouldn’t be put in the mouth. Like nail-varnish remover. With the desserts, its normally best to go for something that hasn’t been made on the premises, like fruit or a pot of yoghurt. If you do want to branch out a bit, there is the tricky lucky-dip decision to make, and the wide selection of France’s answer to angel delight. It is essentially a strange bowl of gloop, which comes in different colours depending on the flavour, which moves of its own accord. Very sickly, and difficult to eat more than one bowl of. Or so I’ve been told. After paying, getting cutlery and then glasses, there is the issue of finding a seat. Normally not too much of an issue when there are only two of you, but when in a larger group, people are asked to move bags, coats and even themselves so that you can all sit together (‘could you move down the table please?’). But still, for 2,90 Euros it’s not bad.