And she steams!

After tiring local political skirmishes and several delays in the start of construction, the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie et du Vin has finally opened its doors in Dijon.

President Emmanuel Macron apologized for scheduling reasons, it is said.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, during whose tenure the resolution for the largest urban development measure in the Burgundian capital since the nineteenth century was taken, was not seen either.

Instead, the self-confessed connoisseur François Hollande, a party friend of François Rebsamen, who has been mayor of Dijon since 2001 and was the driving force behind the ambitious large-scale project, came.

In addition, twenty thousand residents flocked to the opening ceremony,

put the paper chef's hats on their heads, which were distributed free of charge, and asked for refills in plastic wine glasses with the Dijon logo on them.

Dijon, now rejoice!

We remember: In November 2010, UNESCO included French food culture in the list of intangible cultural heritage.

"We have the best cuisine in the world," said President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Three years later, by which time Hollande had followed the self-confessed cola drinker and popcorn fanatic Sarkozy to the Elysée Palace, France decided to materialize the intangible cultural heritage in four locations and just as many Cités de la Gastronomy with different focal points: Lyon, Rungis, Tours and Dijon, where, "Bourgogne oblige", the focus should be on wine in addition to gastronomy.

Good food as an everyday virtue

What followed were bankruptcies, glitches, delays.

In Lyon, where the Cité, which opened in 2019 in the former Hôtel-Dieu, collapsed after only six months due to the too elitist concept and the effects of the Corona crisis, the hope remains that a Cité that has been stripped of too many big names and enriched with cultural offerings de la Gastronomie will reopen in 2023.

In Rungis, the location of Europe's most important wholesale market on the outskirts of Paris, the realization of the project and the planned extension of metro line 14 between the city center and the wholesale market are a long time coming.

In Tours, plans for a decentralized cité were only unveiled last spring.

A space for “solidarity and inclusive gastronomy” is to be created in the popular district of Sanitas.

Ateliers are planned for the market halls in the city center, which will show the richness of the products in the Loire Valley.

Since autumn 2021, the Villa Rabelais, a nineteenth-century bourgeois castle, has been functioning as a cultural center for gastronomy with corresponding events, exhibitions and courses.

The big hit looks different.

Dijon shows what it can look like and can build on a culture of enjoyment that is firmly anchored in society.

Good food has been an everyday virtue in the city since the legendary Dukes of Valois, in other words since the mid-fourteenth century.

The slogan “Des monuments, des restaurants” – monuments and restaurants – has not been in use for as long in Dijon.

There are monuments in the 100-hectare Secteur sauvegardé, the inner-city “preserved sector” that is under comprehensive monument protection, and there are actually an exceptional number of them, restaurants ditto.

A historic opportunity presented itself: with the closure of the Hôpital Général, whose history began as the Hospices de Dijon in the fifteenth century, the planners lost the vacant,