Hi Lyon -- Hi the best of Lyon.
In Vieux (Old Town) Lyon, there are restaurants down the streets and at the corners. During meal times it is always crowded. We decided to walk into this one out of the many well-decorated ones -- the owner was soliciting on the street, saying that there was a 30% off...in English. Also there were quite a few guests sitting outside eating already.This was how the inside looked like. Very neat.
Mom was curious about the pink wine a lady was having sitting at the table next to us. The waitress said it was neither a red wine nor a white wine -- it's called a Rose'.
It tasted sweet. As a know-nothing for drinks, I assumed it was good -- somewhat like champagne.
This chicken liver cake was a starter I could never finish -- the liver was crushed into a very tender and powdery structure, and it delivered to me as nothing exciting. I thought a liver cake would be similar to what I could get from a crab cake: the crab cake could never be mashed to the extreme extent because it would not be interesting to eat crab meat without the cluster and threadiness texture. Furthermore, the tomato sauce was not indicated on the menu, and it did not reduce the fleshy taste of the liver, which made me tired of it after the first bite. If the chicken liver was, say, roasted in small chunks and maintained in a firmer mouth-feel, and then topped with, like, red wine sauce, it might have rocked my world. But these are just my directionless wonders -- maybe it would not be what the cook meant to convey through the presentation.
Mom wanted to try the Lyon local special, the tripe sausage. However I did not like seeing "mustard sauce" in the dish description, so I ordered this Pork Sausage in Red Wine Sauce instead, thinking that the sausage would be the same and that just the sauces were different. I was wrong -- they are two different sausages. Luckily this pork sausage I never planned to order saved my world. The sausage steeped in red wine had the flavor of fresh pork instead of smoked or preserved pork. I thought I would be overwhelmed by the quantity of the sausage but it turned out so good that I finished them within a heart beat.Sorry the picture was taken too late after it was taken down into a fragmented post-sharing pattern. Guess what it is? It was thinner than normal steak. I grabbed a piece and sensed how stretchy it was -- it reminded me of calamari at the first bite, but the color difference that demonstrated the two layers revealed that it was not calamari. Mom shouted out: "stripe of cow!" 
Antie Zhu ordered this steamed mussel in garlic sauce. I remember having this dish in Scotland last year when the mussels were larger and there was tomato sauce on top -- I got tired of it only after finishing off five to six mussels. While with this pot of mussels here, there was so much freshness in their small bodies and the light garlic did not steal the mussels' thunder.
------On the following day we came back to this very same restaurant since Antie Zhu missed the mussels here. This time, my friend who had been studying art for two years in France finally got the chance to order the well-known Lyonnaise "Tripe Sausage". Tripe sausage is having beef tripe (and only beef tripe) in the sausage, seasoned with some salt -- and black pepper would lighten it.
This "Veal Chin and Tougue", picked by mom randomly from the menu, became the highlight of the night for me. The fact that I did not recognize the word and thought it meant "duck" did not dissonate with our sense when the four of us took our first bite. The meat was so tender, filled with the original flavor which was smooth, like the authentic duck soup boiled for hours that did not need any dressing to complement it. And the skin was gluey and jelly (are these appropriate descriptive words here? I doubt it. Please help.) and they went so well with the meat. Later I realized that "veal", as you know, was not duck meat at all...it means young cow, which means the tender meat we were having was braised beef tongue. Yep it was so good.The dessert that kept surprising us.
Strawberry Soup: authentic strawberry flavor hidden in this straightforward pink. Sweet and sour in strawberry meat and seeds. 
Chestnut Mousse: every scoop was mellow and creamy -- not as cold as ice-cream and had more sophisticated savor! This natural chestnut flavor was something I never approached except for eating a chestnut. This is better.
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On the third night we ate at a restaurant next to it. The service and food there was not comparable to what we experienced at Les Chandelles. I still remember the time before we sat down at a table here after the hostess talked to us on the street. I was quite against soliciting before, but after seeing the host, the hostess and the waitresses working hard at their service in the past several days, I have gained more about French gourmet meal as a multi-dimensional experience. I walked to the host and told him: this is the best we've had in Lyon. Best wishes.