🌞 Summer Substacks 🌞 72 Hours in Marseille
Ville d'éternité
It’s your first morning in marvellous Marseille, and the sun is shining, as it does for 300 days of the year. And you have one thing on your mind:
Where can I get a killer cup of coffee?
We are here for you.
You will get that cup of magic at Pétrin Couchette, which deservedly describes its offering as Pain Vivant & Cafe Délicieux. It’s on the Cours St Louis, not far from La Vieux Port, and on the edge of the funky Noailles district, which is the zone you want to get to know.
If it seems curious to find such an edgy, barista-led shop in a country where the coffee is usually pretty awful, then that is because it’s the work of a trio of Francophile Brits who have set up several food ventures in Provence and the Southern Rhone Valley.
This means, quite simply, that you can get your essential flat white, or a quality pour-over, whilst you sit on the street and plan your day. And there is no need to thank us: we were told about Couchette the previous evening, when we asked Camille, in the splendid Ourea restaurant: who serves the best coffee in the city?
If you were to ask us who serves some of the most interesting cooking in the city, then we would have to repay the favour and say that Camille and Matthieu and their team at Ourea are knocking it out of the park.
It’s a narrow, feel-good room, a 100-metre walk from the crazy-crowded Port, with a set menu at 63 euro and an excellent wine pairing at an extra 40 euro. The cooking is sympathetic and intuitive: they make a tagliatelle with potatoes, courgettes and asparagus with wild garlic, served with excellent brioche. There is tasty veal with chard and crispy polenta, and the local fish leche de ligne comes both as a carpaccio and cooked with carrots, turnips and pomelo.
Best of all, there isn’t a single cliched thing about Ourea, none of the plat-du-jour sameness that bedevils so many French eating houses. We ate here on our first evening, after flights from Cork to Schiphol and then on to Marseille and, after a long day’s travel, we felt we had struck gold.
People tend to look quizzical when you tell them you are going to Marseilles. It seems everyone has an opinion about France’s second city, and most of them are negative. No one warns you to mind your bag when in Paris or Lyon, but the popular imagination paints Marseille as a city filled with dodgy chancers.
Our expectation was completely different, and so was our experience. Friendly people – streets as unsafe as any major metropolis – but a city of enormous charm and astonishing energy. Part of what had fuelled our expectancy was a song and an album entitled Marseille, by the great jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal.
Marseille, je marche souvent seul dans tes rues
Et trop souvent aussi j'ai disparu
Marseille, mon cœur si seul cherche ta caresse
Car ma vie est trop remplie de tristesse
De ta mer de splendeur et de regrets
De ton soleil implacable jusqu’au soir tard
Marseille, ta voix ne cesse de m'appeler
Marseille, Marseille, ville d'éternité
(Marseille, I often walk your streets alone/And then too often I am gone/Marseille, my lonely heart needs your caress/Because my life is too full of sadness/From your sea of splendor and regrets/Your sun is unrelenting ’til it sets/Marseille, your voice keeps calling me/Marseille, Marseille city of eternity.)
Have a listen:
“I’ve spent time in Marseille. It’s a very impressive city.” Jamal told Downbeat magazine. “It’s the gateway to Europe. It’s the oldest city in France. And it reminds me of San Francisco. I can walk the streets of Marseille—that’s in the lyrics [of the title track].”
The tune is an homage from an 87 year old musician who enjoyed a professional career of more than seventy years, and who passed away in 2023, celebrated as one of the most distinctive jazz musicians of all time. (Jamal was an original who deeply influenced the legendary Miles Davis, the best known jazz musician of them all.)
The city begat the song, but the song in turn begets the city. Its caress is genuinely haunting, both lyrically and musically. Every great city deserves a great song.
If Marseille has a song, it also has a dish, and that dish is bouillabaisse. Back in the 1980’s local restaurateurs actually drew up a Marseille Bouillabaisse Charter, codifying what should be in the fish soup, and how it should be cooked.
But hunting for the legendary fish soup is a bit like coming to Dublin to eat coddle, or going to London for rosbif. The locals don’t eat it, and if they do then they cook it at home. You can get different riffs on the dish at the many over-priced places around la Vieux Port, but who wants to eat at some tourist pit? And anyway, the dish should only be served in places where you must order it in advance. Our visit showed that Marseille has other fish to fry, so caveat emptor.
You will have much more joy exploring two other small, owner-led restaurants we discovered, and which conveniently face each other on the Rue Fortia. ToMa is a handsome room run by the chef Thomas Estrader, with the style of cooking the French have taken to calling bistronomie.
What this means, in practice, is that the chef isn’t afraid to serve grilled shiitake mushrooms with sesame oil and soya, or to make a brown butter hollandaise for asparagus. This punky attitude delivers excellent eating: duck hearts with diavolo sauce; tempura of cauliflower with lemon fromage frais; good Duroc pork with grape must mustard; asparagus with spelt risotto; a sorbet of basil and yogurt with rhubarb and strawberries. M. Estrader has a history of working in starry establishments, but in ToMa his cooking is supremely unfussy, unpretentious, clean and convincing. Lovely wines, and a nice bar if you just want to drop in casually.
Mouné is just across the street from ToMa, and here Serje Banna and chef Najla Chami bring the flavours of Lebanon to a cheery room in the most cosmopolitan city in France. Garlic and mint labneh with sautéed peas and sumac; chick peas and courgettes in a harissa broth with garlic and fresh mint; roasted bone marrow with grilled bread; shawarma of duck with creamy polenta; crispy oyster mushrooms with toum, the Lebanese garlic sauce. These formed an excellent procession of dishes to share, and the house pours wines by the glass generously.
It’s a lively room, with locals and lots of Lebanese folk knocking back the arak, and M. Banna sets the temperament of the room by seating those tourists who like to converse loudly in Western broadcast voices outside, in the tables and chairs set on Rue Fortia.
Mouné typifies the atypical charm we found at every turn in Marseilles. It’s a great city in which to be a flaneur, wandering without purpose through the streets, eyeing the rumbunctious market in Nouaille, spending hours perusing the kitchen implements in the famous Maison Empereur, enjoying couscous in Le Saf-Saf, squeezing into Café Lauca, the “tiniest café in town”, wondering just how-on-earth Chez Jacques, a shop selling raw milk and farm eggs, can survive in the heart of the city.
After just a couple of days, Marseille gets to you, and gets in to you.
“Marseille, your voice keeps calling me” wrote Ahmad Jamal. Listen to the song, visit the city.
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