Marseilles’ beloved bouillabaisse gets an update: burgers and milk shakes, anyone?
The recipe for the famous fish soup dates back centuries and in 1980 a Bouillabaisse Charter was created to define the dish’s ingredients. Marseilles’ chefs have worked around this and come up with some new takes
Three-Michelin-star chef Gérald Passedat gazes over the Mediterranean from his Marseilles restaurant, Le Petit Nice. “Bouillabaisse was originally a poor dish for poor people,” he explains. “The ingredients come from there.” Passedet gestures to the lapping sea below his restaurant terrace, where you can find rascasse (scorpion fish), cigale de mer (slipper lobsters) and étrille (velvet crabs).
In centuries past, these hard-to-sell sea creatures were landed in the southern French city’s Vieux Port and boiled (bouilli in French) dockside in seawater. Larger fish were added, then the heat was lowered (abaissé). And with that, the humble “bouillabaisse” was born.
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Global awareness of the bouillabaisse brand stems from strict codification of the dish nearly 40 years ago.
“The Bouillabaisse Charter was created in 1980 to stop bad chefs selling bad bouillabaisse,” says Passedat. “Some cooks were even importing frozen fish!”
The charter states that at least four types of local fish must be used, including scorpion fish, red mullet, conger eel and John Dory. The original signatory restaurants included Le Miramar, which now offers bouillabaisse cooking lessons in both English and Chinese.
After the bouillabaisse rules were set, experimentation started. The classic dish of local seafood simmered in an ocean potage, with boiled potato on the side and garlic croutons, became a framework that Marseilles chefs could push to the limit.
