City by the Sea

Landon Nordeman I learned later that the 1970s had been tough for Marseille. The city taken over a crime-tarnished reputation that deepened the tourism slump that had begun when France’s North African colonies became independent. The hundreds of thousands of French colonials who used to summer in Marseille could no longer easily visit the city.

Elsewhere in France, famous bakeries were tarted up for tourists with quotations to match, but this was a neighborhood spot where the cashier flirted with bakers in floury T-shirts, and old ladies with sturdy thighs and wire shopping caddies stopped in for a baguette. And unlike the other great ports of Europe, this city hadn’t lost all of its brawny allure since the fascinating business of loading. Unloading people and goods was removed from the center city to distant dockyards.

Marseille still had buckets of what the French call de la gueule , or character, and this is what seduced me the day I arrived with the desperate desire to exchange the sea I’d grown up on—the cold, dark green waters of Long Island Sound—for the storied shores of the Mediterranean. Landon Nordeman That first day, as I aimlessly followed the crowd off La Canebière, Marseille’s gritty main drag. Up a trade street with cabbage leaves and smashed oranges in the gutter, it struck me as both sad and funny that such expense and effort had gone into keeping me at arm’s length from everything I yearned for—color and chaos, spontaneity and sensuality.

For the past 27 years, I’ve lived in Paris, but I’ve carried a torch for Marseille. It’s far less celebrated for its cuisine, but its deep history as a port city gives it a singular wealth of influences—that riot of different kitchens that seduced me on my first visit—to draw on.

Landon Nordeman One of Europe’s oldest ports, founded by the Greeks in 600 B.C., Marseille has always attracted wayfarers, traders, and exiles. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the city boomed as the main port for France’s burgeoning colonial empire and for a time shared with Chicago the title of world’s fastest-growing city. Much of its population of 850,000 (it’s France’s second-largest city) has Italian roots.

The Italians brought pizza and the Spanish developed the city’s taste for dear saffron in its signature bouillabaisse. The latest wave of newcomers are young professionals, including chefs attracted to the city for the richness of its Mediterranean influences and the region’s phenomenal elements to support those influences.

Today, Marseille’s dining scene is maturing, drawing from centuries of diversity to go far beyond the rustic, hearty food that sated my young appetite; the city is evolving into one of the most interesting dining destinations in France. According to Pierre Giannetti, a native of nearby Martigues,, for several years and did a stint at El Bulli but came home since he loves Marseille’s polyglot makeup, particularly now that attitudes have become more cosmopolitan. “In the past people stuck to their own tribe, but the city’s new social mobility has had a big impact on restaurants.

He explained how the generational change in Marseille has carried over to its cuisine. “The younger Marseillais are embracing the city’s Mediterranean identity, which used to embarrass their parents, either because they were trying to distance themselves from immigrant origins or because they’d bought into the bourgeois myth of the north as being superior,” Giribone stated. The more I eat in Marseilles, the more apparent it becomes that the city is adding a new layer of restaurants to its culinary geology. I shared the story of my first bouillabaisse with the grandly named chef Arnaud Carton de Grammont after a very good lunch at Le Café des Epices, a casual little place where I feasted on au courant dishes like marinated organic leeks with a slice of homemade mushroom cake, and sole with quinoa and plenty of Mediterranean vegetables—tomatoes, zucchini, green beans.

It’s rarely good in restaurants, but it’s what tourists want,” he stated. “But today, we’re moving on from that stereotype.” Sicilians and Corsicans came to work in the port, drawn by the city’s flour mills and soap factories; chefs are choosing Marseille for its character. By mating the culinary traditions of its amazingly diverse population with the Mediterranean’s phenomenal seafood and produce, the young chefs of Marseille are taking these flavors further, placing this city on the starting block to becoming one of the great food towns of France.