Notes From the South of France
A great city with fantastic food. Also a wonderful way to recycle.
For the past few years French friends have been telling me that Marseille has become the most interesting place to eat in France, and I’ve been hearing that the hippest young chefs have been moving south to take advantage of the low prices and great weather in what used to be France’s grittiest city. I needed to find out for myself.
We got off the plane to bright sunshine and a changed city that is unlike any I’ve visited before. This is a place so welcoming it turns strangers into locals overnight. And if you’re interested in diversity, this city is for you.
The food is fantastic! I left New York intending to put endless pictures of what we were eating on Instagram, and posting daily reports on La Briffe detailing each taste as I found it.
Then the world exploded, and as the news poured in - worse with each passing moment - the idea of posting pretty pictures of food just seemed wrong. So no daily reports. Apologies.
But if ever a city offered hope for the future, this is it. And so a few notes on what seems to me to be the most happily diverse city I’ve ever had the pleasure to roam around in.
If you come - and I hope you do - you cannot have a better guide than Taste the World in Marseille by Verane Frediani, a Marseillaise filmmaker. The book has just been translated into English by American Alexis Steinman.
Frediani begins by quoting MFK Fisher from A Considerable Town. “I myself have a different definition of the place, which seems to be as indefinable as Marseille itself - insolite. There seems to be no proper twin for this word in English. Larousse says it is “contrary to what is usual or normal”.… inwardly I know it means mysterious, unknowable, and in plain fact undefinable.”
So I will not try to define it. I will simply tell you what I’ve loved most about Marseille.
There are still vestiges of old Marseille, the one Marcel Pagnol wrote about so lovingly.
But modern Marseille is a city of immigrants, and if you walk up the Rue Longue des Capucins you will find stands selling North African mahajouba (above), pastillas and briks next door to places specializing in paella and French pastry.
My first serious meal here was at L’Epuisette, a beautiful 80 year old restaurant right on the water, The chef, Guillaume Saurrieu worked in three star restaurants all over
France, but when he took over this venerable establishment he dedicated it to local products from the sea. We had a gorgeous meal, each course a kind of deconstruction of the classic bouillabaisse, like the ravioli above, garnished with a kind of ratatouille and topped with red mullet.
Then there was an equally impressive meal from chef Hugues Mbenda at Kin. Mbenda arrived in France at the age of nine from Congo. “People complain that my cooking is not African enough,” he laughed as he tried to explain that his food combines influences from both of his homelands.
Let me just say that the food was ambitious, beautiful, and filled with flavor combinations I’ve never before experienced.
One of the most exciting meals was at La Mercerie, where Englishman Harry Cummins and Canadian sommelier Laura Vidal are plying their craft. Both veterans of Frenchie in Paris, they came to Marseille 7 years ago, fell in love with the city and have not looked back. Our meal started with the “taco” above, went on to the most extraordinary beet preparation, an intense porcini porridge and then rare squab surrounded by a kind of pate of its innards. We ended with a supremely simple plum tart.
Incidentally, their nearby coffee bar, Petrin Couchette, serves, among other things, this classic Marseille version of brioche called pompe a l’huile (above). Made with olive oil instead of butter, it should not be missed.
Another thing that should not be missed? Chateau La Coste, an extraordinary art park Irish gazillionaire Paddy McKillen has created around his winery. Amazing art by impressive artists - and amazing restaurants by impressive chefs. We had a feast at Francis Mallman, a meat-centric bacchanal that went on for hours.
It was all wonderful, but the best thing? The smoked butter served with the bread. I can’t stop thinking about it….
There is so much more…. like the best oysters I’ve ever eaten
and one of the most memorable 3 star experiences of my life at Le Petit Nice. I will tell you about them in the next few days, I promise. But right now I’m late for lunch at Mirazur, so I’m going to wrap this up.
More soon, I promise.
A few months ago I wrote about the Mill Recycling System. As I said then, I hadn’t tried it, but it seemed like a wonderful idea.
Basically it’s a food scrap recycling system; you put all your edible scraps into this handsome machine. Egg shells, fruit rinds, leftovers…the system takes pretty much everything but hard shells and huge bones.
Then, in the dark of night, it turns itself on and transforms all that messy stuff into food for chickens. In the morning when you open the lid what you have looks like soft, fluffy dirt.
When you have a boxful (it tends to take about a month), you put it into a prepaid package and send it off. No muss, no fuss, no odor.
A couple of months ago the Mill people reached out and asked if I wanted to try it. “Sure,” I said, blithely unaware that this is not a small piece of equipment. Or that it would, literally, change my life.
The first inkling that this was something of major proportions was when the postman dropped it off; it was rather large. Carrying the thing inside wasn’t easy: it weighs 65 pounds. But it’s an attractive piece of furniture, it’s very quiet, and I cannot imagine ever again being without it.
This is definitely not for everyone; it costs about a dollar a day. And it requires a bit of room. But for the last twenty years we have had a serious bear problem; we can’t compost because it attracts bears, and I spend more time than I would like to admit cleaning up the garbage the animals delight in strewing across our neighborhood. We’ve tried everything: sheds, locks, fancy garbage cans… Nothing has worked - until this Mill.
There is also, I should admit, something extremely appealing about seeing all those scraps turned into something useful. In this fraught moment, it is comforting to think that there are problems we can solve.
Ruth, thank you for acknowledging the wider world and for the notes from Marseille. We were there this summer and can't wait to go back. In addition to the vibe of the place and the food, we LOVED Maison Empereur (www.empereur.fr/en/, the almost 200-year-old kitchen and hardware store. Also not to be missed.
What a treat to see Hugues Mbenda pop up here. I met him and his wife Mathilde last year at Libala, their small casual place in the 6th. They'd mentioned that they were opening a larger space and I'm guessing Kin is it. I still think about the meal I had with them, often. A good excuse to get back to Marseille.