Around the corner from Hôtel de Ville/Place des Terreaux in Lyon you will find Vidici. An Italian chain, serving coffee and food. I’ve walked past it a couple of times, in doubt to enter, since it wasn’t really clear to me what I could find. Yeah – I know, if I would’ve entered, I would have known, but Lyon has so many spots to hang out, sometimes it’s kind of hard to choose. When my colleague told me it’s possible to compose salads, I decided to go.
A lunch invitation on a sunny day was the perfect opportunity and I was pleasantly surprised by Vidici.
As for the food, their concept is easy. You order at the counter, they prepare it directly in front of you. You can choose between pasta, foccacia and salad. As I already mentioned, you decide how the salad will be composed. You can choose for pasta, salad or a mix of both. Three sorts of vegetables, 1 protein, 1 cheese, 1 condiment and dressing. When I was there, they only had meats as protein, so I could choose a second portion of cheese. The vegetables could have been better, they didn’t have freshly cut veggies. Everything was cut in small pieces and mixed, or grilled. It looked as if all of them contained oil – not really my idea of a fresh vegetable. The salad was huge! Or maybe my appetite wasn’t big enough – I was slightly hungover. Anyway, I couldn’t finish the whole meal.
No problem, food isn’t served on fancy plates here. You get your dish in an organic box with cover, which made it ideal for me to take my leftovers home.
The taste of the meal itself was good, although a bit too oily – probably my own mistake for shouting ‘stop’ a bit too late when she was pouring the pesto dressing over my salad. At least they weren’t mingy with all of the ingredients. My companion ordered pasta arrabiata, a spicy tomato sauce with olives. Good that they warned about the meal being pretty picante, because it really was! His bottle of water was empty in a few moments.
So, as I already said, at Vidici is passionate about Italian food, but also about coffee. There is a special coffee counter, where you can order all sorts of coffee and special things, like syrups in lots of tastes. Ever wanted to taste a frappé that tastes like macarons? You can find it here. The latte macchiato has a good cream layer – which is very important to me, because I always ‘eat’ the layer first.
Oh, when you leave: don’t forget to clean your table. Since there is no service at the table, the staff isn’t walking around all the time to clean up your mess. Putting your stuff in the bin to free the table for the next customer won’t cost you a lot of effort :-).
