Five gluten free restaurant

Best gluten free club sandwiches in the city!

Lyon, a city that I love more and more.

As I distribute Italian gluten free products in France, I come here at least once a year to catch up with my actual clients and meet new ones.

So here I am in town for three days of meetings, experiencing new places and most of all, tasting great gluten free foods.

My first stop is Five, a 100% gluten free restaurant and coffee shop that opened almost a year ago.

The location is great: close the main train station, Lyon Part-Dieu, it is very handy when you travel for example, and you need to grab some gluten free food, that is fresh, artisanal, great tasting, ready & easy-to-go.

At Five, I meet with a dear fellow blogger from Lyon, Solène who animates the beautiful blog Sunny Délice creating delicious pastry recipes.

We were both looking forward to sharing a good meal and spending some time together for some deserved girls talk 😉

The restaurant is airy and bright: I particularly loved the big terrace outside where you can sit and enjoy the sunny, warm days that are about to come.

I also liked the grocery store inside the restaurant where you can shop a selection of gluten free products and where I hope, I will see one day soon my favourite gluten free Italian artisanal pasta on sale here too.

Arnaud, the founder and the owner of Five, welcomes me in with a warm smile: he is so passionate about his project that it’s a real pleasure for me to hear all about it.

Actually, before opening up a restaurant, he told me, he was working in the car business. His wife is celiac like myself and one day, he got sensitive to the issue, and he decided to do something about it.

The idea of creating a 100% gluten free restaurant bloomed in his mind quite quickly as, back then, there wasn’t much gluten free food available in Lyon.

He decided to quit his job and to take the leap!

After a cooking master class at the famous Paul Bocuse Institut, he hired a skilled chef who previously worked at the well-known Cour des Loges and together they created at the actual menu of the restaurant, fine-tuning all the gluten free recipes one by one.

Their biggest challenge?

The gluten free bread but today Arnaud is very proud of his achievement: the recipe is with rice and buckwheat flours, plus potato starch. The club sandwiches have become his best seller. I got one with smoked salmon and avocado: the bread was fluffy and tasty, the seasoning perfect, the ingredients top quality, a pure moment of joy for me!

I also had a vegan salad, it was fresh, generous and very good.

Everyday you can find a hot dish that varies according to the seasons and the chef’s creativity. Available also soups, quiches, desserts and fresh juices.

My sweet tooth couldn’t resist dessert and Arnaud invited me to taste one of his specialties: an almond-grilled hazelnuts cake that is really to die for! Airy, moist, tasty, not too sugary, I loved it!

At Five, 80% of the clients are not gluten intolerant, as Arnaud tells me: they are just regular people who go there because the food is homemade, fresh and most of all, it’s very good!

Projects like Five shows one more time that eating gluten free is not a constraint, it is not a fashion thing, it is just a valid alternative to wheat that is, as I like it to say, “differently good”!