Tag Archives: Le Train Bleu

Gare de Lyon – take time to dine

23 Tuesday Sep 2014

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Train Bleu Paris

One of Paris’s Belle Époque dazzling restaurants is located in none other than a train station. A great suggestion for an afternoon is visiting the Jardin des Plantes and finishing it up with a late lunch at Le Train Bleu.

Originally created to cater to visitors of Paris’s Universal Exposition 1900,
the beginnings of this restaurant are linked with those of the Gare de Lyon. In the planning stage, the Compagnie Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (the PLM) decided to build a new railway station with 13 tracks capable of handling tens of thousands of visitors. The station’s buffet has an immense, richly decorated rectangular dining room, basket-handle arched ceiling, Caryatides, rococo mermaids, gilding, mirrors and 41 murals painted by 30 renowned artists evoking the most beautiful French landscapes traversed by the railroad: a view of the Mont Blanc, Antibes, Marseille’s old port, the Lac du Bourget, etc… ‘No restaurant is more beautiful than that of the Gare de Lyon!’ wrote Louise de Vilmorin.

Gare De Lyon

Having narrowly escaped destruction by the SNCF (French national railway company) after WWII, Le Train Bleu has been listed in the Historic Monuments Registry since 1972. The TGV menu is served in 45 minutes; it consists of a slice of home-cooked foie gras, a beef steak tartare with freshly fried potatoes and a cup of coffee.’  Don’t miss the traditional baba au rhum: the maître d’hôtel sets it down in front of you, cuts it in two, douses it with rum and leaves the bottle and the bowl of Chantilly cream on your table to be used at will.

Le Train Bleu
Place Louis Armand
75012 Paris

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Le Train Bleu Paris: where the Belle Époque and gastronomy intermingle

13 Monday Aug 2012

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Situated at the heart of the Gare de Lyon, upstairs, looking down the rails, the Train Bleu will definitely wow you just by it’s electric atmosphere, food and fanciful ceiling art alone. Yes, it will assault your wallet, but this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime feast for the eyes as well as the stomach experiences.

For example: Charolais beef tartare prepared at the table to your taste, home-cooked duck foie gras, home smoked organic salmon, knuckle of lamb served on a Cristofle trolley, rum baba and iced vacherin. The restaurant stops taking orders at 11 p.m.

A little history: The Calais-Mediterranée Express was a luxury French night express train which operated from 1886 to 2007. It gained international fame as the preferred train of wealthy and famous passengers between Calais and the French Riviera in the two decades before World War II. It was colloquially referred to as Le Train Bleu in French (which became its formal name after World War II) and the Blue Train in English because of its dark blue sleeping cars.

The height of the season for “le train bleu” was between November and April, when many travellers escaped the British winter to spend time on the French Riviera. Its terminus was at the Gare Maritime in Calais, where it picked up British passengers from the ferries across the English Channel. It departed at 1 p.m. and stopped at the Gare du Nord in Paris, then travelled around Paris by the Grande Ceinture line to the Gare de Lyon, where it picked up additional passengers and coaches. It departed Paris early in the evening, and made stops at Dijon, Châlons, and Lyon, before reaching Marseilles early the next morning. It then made further stops at all the major resort towns of the French Riviera, or Côte d’Azur: Saint-Raphaël, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, Cannes, Nice, Monte-Carlo, before reaching its final destination, Menton, near the Italian border. Early passengers included the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), Charlie Chaplin, designer Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill and writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Somerset Maugham.

Le Train Bleu
1st Floor
Lyon station
75012 Paris

Phone: + 33 (0) 01 43 43 09 06

For reservations call or email.