Where should I eat in Bordeaux, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Start with the cake that wine built. The canelé — a small fluted cylinder of rum-and-vanilla custard with a caramelized crust — was, by the standard account, perfected by Bordeaux nuns using egg yolks left over from the wine trade, whose cellars clarified wine with egg whites and had yolks to spare. Baillardran and La Toque Cuivrée run shops across the city; eat canelés warm in the morning, and know that the copper molds and the beeswax-butter lining are not marketing but the recipe's machinery. For the working city's table, go to the Marché des Capucins, the covered market the Bordelais call the belly of the city, where Sunday mornings run on Arcachon oysters and white wine at the market bars — Arcachon's oyster parks, an hour west, supply the city's raw bars all year.

The classic plate is entrecôte à la bordelaise: a rib steak in a sauce of red wine, shallots and bone marrow, served in the brasseries of Saint-Pierre; Le Petit Commerce pours its fish-market version of the neighborhood's cooking (all seafood), La Tupina on the rue Porte de la Monnaie has cooked the southwest's farmhouse canon — confit, cassoulet-adjacent comfort, Bazas beef — since 1968, and the fine end of the spectrum holds two Michelin stars at Le Pressoir d'Argent, Gordon Ramsay's dining room in the InterContinental on the Place de la Comédie. In season (roughly February to April), the connoisseur's order is lamproie à la bordelaise: lamprey, the Garonne's ancient fish, stewed in red wine with leeks and its own blood — dark, medieval and magnificent, with Sainte-Terre on the Dordogne as its capital. Spring brings Blaye's white asparagus; autumn brings cèpes in everything.

Drinking is the city's profession, so do it at headquarters: the Bar à Vin of the CIVB, in the Maison du Vin facing the Quinconces, pours a rotating list of 30-odd Bordeaux wines by the glass — including classified growths — at prices held deliberately low as the region's showcase. Then specialize: a Pomerol or Saint-Émilion in a Saint-Pierre wine bar, a dry white Graves with the oysters, and if you find it, a glass of Sauternes with the cheese course rather than dessert — the local order of things. The town of Saint-Émilion adds one more sweet: its macarons, flat almond discs made to a recipe kept since 1620 by the Ursuline sisters, nothing like the Parisian sandwich.

Sunday at the Capucins market: a zinc bar, a dozen oysters on crushed ice, a glass of Entre-Deux-Mers going pale gold in the market light, and the stallholder already shucking the next round before you have finished the first.

Bordeaux's great red-meat secret is not the steak but the cow: Bœuf de Bazas, from the grey Bazadaise breed raised southeast of the city and celebrated each February at the Fête des Bœufs Gras (a tradition running since the 13th century), is the beef the region's chefs name first — look for it on menus at La Tupina and the brasseries rather than assuming any entrecôte is equal. The other quiet glory is Aquitaine caviar, farmed from sturgeon in the Gironde estuary since the 1990s revival — a local luxury hiding in plain sight.

• Canelé at opening — Buy two warm from Baillardran or La Toque Cuivrée; one for now, one for the train to Saint-Émilion
• CIVB bar before dinner — The Maison du Vin's bar is the cheapest education in Bordeaux wine anywhere; go at 6 p.m. before the dinner crowd
• Market Sunday — Oysters and white wine at the Capucins on Sunday morning, then a long Saint-Pierre lunch

Lamprey is strictly seasonal (winter to early spring) and increasingly scarce; restaurants that serve it run out by April. August closes many of the neighborhood tables (La Tupina traditionally takes its holidays in the summer peak). The market bars are a weekend-morning institution — weekday visitors find the Capucins quieter and some stalls shut — and the great brasseries fill on rugby and football nights at the city's stadium calendar.

Book La Tupina or the Pressoir for the splurge night, put the CIVB bar at the start of the trip (so later glasses make sense), and leave one Sunday morning unplanned except for oysters.