Food History of Rennes

Key eras

Condate and the Roman crossroads, 1st to 5th century

Rennes began as Condate, the Gaulish settlement at the confluence of the Ille and the Vilaine, and became a walled Roman town on the road network of Armorica. Its food economy was inland and riverine rather than maritime: grain, pork, river fish and the produce of the surrounding bocage, moved along the Vilaine towards the sea. That inland position is why the city has always been a market town first and a seafood town second, despite sitting an hour from some of the best shellfish beds in France.

Buckwheat and the medieval countryside, 15th to 17th century

Buckwheat arrived in Brittany in the late Middle Ages and thrived on soils too acid and too poor for wheat. It needed no leavening and no oven, so it was cooked as a thin batter on a hot stone, and it became the daily bread of the Breton peasantry. In the same period the salt tax that squeezed the rest of France exempted Brittany, so Breton dairies went on salting their butter when everyone else stopped. Those two accidents, buckwheat and cheap salt, still define what Rennes eats.

The Parlement de Bretagne and the market town, 16th to 18th century

When the Parlement de Bretagne settled in Rennes the city acquired a resident magistracy, a legal class and the appetites that came with them. The Marché des Lices grew on the old jousting ground outside the walls to feed that population and has traded on the same site ever since. The fire of 1720 destroyed much of the medieval town and produced the granite and slate centre that stands today, with the surviving half-timbered streets around Place Sainte-Anne marking what escaped.

The crêperie becomes a business, 1900 to 1970

Crêpes and galettes moved off the farm hearth and into commercial premises across the first half of the twentieth century, first as market-day stalls and fairground stands, then as sit-down crêperies. The galette-saucisse followed the same path in Rennes specifically, travelling from the horse fairs and country markets into the Marché des Lices and, from the 1960s onwards, into the terraces at the Stade Rennais ground. The cast-iron billig replaced the hearth stone and standardised the product.

The student city and the bistro turn, 1970 to today

Two universities and a large student population reshaped Rennes' eating economy around cheap lunches, late bars and the drinking strip on rue Saint-Michel that the city calls the rue de la Soif. From the 2010s a bistro layer grew on top of it: small rooms with short weekday menus built on Ille-et-Vilaine produce, joined by a Michelin star in town and two more in the villages around it. The Centre Culinaire Contemporain, opened in Cleunay, gave the city a professional cooking school and a crêpier training college.

Immigrant influences

• Rural Breton: The largest single influence on Rennes' table is internal migration: families moving off the land into the city through the twentieth century brought the buckwheat galette, salted butter, cider and the andouille with them, and turned domestic food into commercial crêperies.
• Maghrebi and North African: Post-war labour migration from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia built the kebab and couscous counters that feed the student quarters, and the Mediterranean street-food formats that later operators reworked into pita and mezze counters in the centre.
• Central and West African: Congolese, Senegalese and Ivorian communities established restaurants in the lanes off Rue Saint-Georges and around Rue Derval, where cassava-leaf saca-saca and grilled fish are cooked for a mixed local and diaspora crowd.
• Japanese and East Asian: The universities and the technology cluster at Cesson-Sévigné brought a steady East Asian student and professional population, and with it ramen counters, teishoku rooms and the French-Japanese cooking that produced the city's Michelin-starred kitchen.

Signature innovations

• The galette-saucisse: a grilled pork sausage rolled in a cold buckwheat galette, eaten in the hand with no plate and no cutlery, a Rennes format rather than a Breton one
• The commercial crêperie as a full restaurant, with a savoury buckwheat course, a sweet wheat course and cider poured from a bolée as a fixed sequence
• The Marché des Lices as a Saturday institution on the same ground since the seventeenth century, now one of the largest food markets in France
• The Coucou de Rennes, a local chicken breed rebuilt from near extinction in the late 1980s and put back on city menus as a marker of local sourcing
• The Centre Culinaire Contemporain in Cleunay, which houses a professional cooking school, a crêpier training college and a public class programme in one building