A few days in Marseille

This week, I’m sharing some of the great places I ate in Marseille, along with a recipe for spiced chicken stuffed with couscous.

Marseille is wild, dirty, beautiful. You explore its wide boulevards dodging scooters, mopeds and trams. There’s grafitti everywhere and it feels like there are churches on every street. There are always bells, and glimpses of the sea. You hear a dozen languages as you walk down the street and smell the aromas of a dozen different cuisines.

One of my abiding memories of our visit is of being met with so much kindness, that sort of warmth that looks you straight in the eye. It feels very much like a city apart, entirely of its own. It reminded me a little of Lisbon and of Barcelona before its heart was ripped out by airbnbification. I can’t wait to get to know it better. In the meantime, here are some of the places we ate during our visit.

BREAKFAST

Pétrin Couchette

Each morning, we had breakfast at this tiny café in the Noailles neighbourhood. It’s opposite the Maison Empereur (AKA The Shop) so it made a great perch to wait for it to open at 10am. It’s a delightful place, pas comme les autres – no baguettes, no croissants, no pains au chocolat, no take-away coffee and no commercial yeast. You can see their exceptionally good breads, cakes and cookies being made in the back as you order your coffee. The baking is really top notch. My breakfast of choice was their pompe a l’huile, the brioche of Provence, Séan had their carrot cake one day and marble cake the next because when it’s your birthday week, you can do what you want. They also make great sandwiches and “monster” cookies if you want a picnic to sustain you all the way from the Vieux Port to Notre-Dame de la Garde. Run by an Anglo-French team of great charm and talent.

Petrin Couchette
7, cours Saint Louis, 13001, Marseille
www.petrincouchette.com

The queen of sandwiches, egg and watercress.

An old railway crossing sign, customised for the café. Once it read, “Un train peut en cacher un autre” – one train may hide another – now, “un pain”, a bread. The name of the café is a play on words. Pétrin is a table for kneading trough, though it sounds a little like train, and couchette is a sleeping carriage.

A pompe à l’huile, a piece of carrot cake and coffee.

LUNCH

Both of these places are open for dinner too, of course, but they’re very well placed for a midday pause while exploring the middle of the city.

Les Lumières

A small, lively restaurant the Panier neighbourhood, open for breakfast. lunch and dinner. On our first visit, we went for dinner and it was so busy, we sat at a table outside on a cold, February night and didn’t even mind, so warm was the welcome. When we went back for lunch a couple of days later, we were welcomed like regulars. Expect omelettes and homemade granola at breakfast. At lunch, a short menu of simple and imaginative mains such as steak tartare with lemongrass, ginger and coriander, and in the evening, great plates of charcuterie, and a short menu including dishes such as sea bass carpaccio with kumquat and olive oil, citrus zest and chives, smoked camembert with rosemary and red wine jelly, duck with clementines and shallots in red wine with parsnip and celeriac purée, pear tart and chestnut moelleux. At lunch, the set menu, entrée, plat, dessert, is 19.90€. In the evening, expect about 15€-25€ per plate, 7€ for dessert.

Les Lumières
34, Grand Rue, 13001, Marseille
Instagram: @leslumieres_marseille

The small charcuterie plate. Credit Julia Leonard.

Steak tartare with lemongrass, ginger and coriander. Credit Julia Leonard.

Prémices

Vaucluse endive with watercress, oranges, orange zest, hazelnuts and Comté.

This is a bright, fresh and confident modern bistro. Their dishes are simple-complex – they look simple on the plate, but the execution is complex, requiring deft technique and a great palate. This is the correct way around. Complex-simple restaurants are to be avoided at all costs. For my lunch, I had tarte tatin of Cévenne onion and rosemary, with onion bouillon and buckwheat vinegar, pangrattato (toasted breadcrumbs) and smoked eel, then sea bass with salsify pannacotta, wilted pak choi, fish sauce seasoned with timut pepper, then tarte tatin with Chantecler apples, smoked cream, whisky caramel and hazelnuts. Yes, that is two tatins in one meal, inspector, so bite me, I’m delicious (as Irish super-hero Garron Noone would say). At lunch, the set menu, entrée, plat, dessert, is 32€, at dinner, it’s 49€ for four courses.

Prémices
11, rue Beauvau, 13001, Marseille
premicesmarseille.com

Tarte tatin of Cévenne onion and rosemary, with onion bouillon and buckwheat vinegar, pangrattato and smoked eel.

Lemon risotto with spinach, fried shallots and 24-month-old Parmesan.

DINNER

La Marine des Goudes

This is the view when you visit in daylight. Highly recommend.

When in Marseille you have to eat bouillabaisse, right? By instinct, I imagined restaurants around the Vieux Port would be ladling up lacklustre efforts aimed at tourists (correct me if I’m wrong, am very much here for recommendations). I’d read about La Marine des Goudes, a restaurant in the ancient fishing village of Goudes which, though technically within the municipal embrace of Marseille, is affectionately known by Marseillanais as le bout du monde (the ends of the earth).

Goudes is about 15km from the city. I decided on dinner, so as not to take up too much of our daylight wandering about time (DWAT). This resulted in quite a lengthy – about 30 minutes – and spendy - I will never tell – taxi ride. At one point, Julia asked “Are we going to Corsica?”

Also, here’s the thing about night: it’s dark. We drove along the coast road to a restaurant in a charming fishing village with a peerless view of the Mediterranean and we could easily have been on the A10. Next time, I’ll go in daylight and take the boat (April to September, and in fact it’s two boats, you change onto a smaller boat at La Pointe Rouge and the whole journey takes about an hour).

To restore ourselves after this journey more befitting of Lady Hester Stanhope, we ordered plates of oysters and sea urchins, panisses with cuttlefish mayonnaise, and spagehtti vongole. And, of course, bowls of their bouillabaisse made from a recipe almost unchanged since 1848. It’s a punchy 49€, but it was generous, filled with the freshest fish imaginable, and I’m never going to make it at home. I’m saving up for the two-course lobster dinner, 70€, where you have the claws as a starter and the tail as a main course, next time. When I will arrive thriftily, on my boat.

La Marine des Goudes
16 rue Désiré-Pelaprat, 13008, Marseille
la-marine-des-goudes-restaurant-marseille.com

The presentation of the bouillabaisse, taken by our friend Tareef.

Poulet rôti au couscous parfumé

Chicken stuffed with couscous

When we were in Marseille last week, we went to the wonderful spice shop, Saladin. Of course, I came home with a bag of goodies I couldn’t wait to play with in my own kitchen, inspired by the Moroccan and Algerian shops, cafés and restaurants of Marseille. With this recipe, you roast the chicken stuffed with couscous and then cook the carrots in the tin while the chicken is resting – a proper one-tin dinner.

I list olive oil in the recipe ingredients, but when I made this last time I used the chicken fat that rose to the top when I made chicken stock. If you have some, please feel free to use it too.