Marseille’s exciting dining scene: from a prison restaurant to an ex-McDonald’s drive-through and a high-end food truck
- French port city Marseille’s vibrant food scene includes a fine-dining restaurant in a prison, part of a scheme to help rehabilitate inmates
- A converted McDonald’s drive-through offers high-end fast food, while the chef from three-Michelin-star Restaurant AM is running a discount food truck
My €5.90 (US$6.50) Ovni burger at L’Après M was created by three-Michelin-star restaurant chef Gérald Passedat, and it shows.
Each locally sourced ingredient at this fast food joint sings, from the organic lettuce grown on an urban farm, to the rosemary snagged from the car park. The pink meat inside the patty – still beautifully rare – explodes with flavour like a bovine beef bomb.
L’Après M’s golden arches may look familiar. That’s because the restaurant was, until recently, a drive-through McDonald’s in Marseille’s insalubrious northern quartier.
It’s one of several game-changing new places to eat in France’s second city, created by its most garlanded chefs. There’s even a fine-dining restaurant inside a maximum-security prison where diners are frisked by armed guards.
Back in L’Après M, business is brisk. Since the restaurant’s inception in December 2022, the poisson (fish) burger has been a crowd favourite. It’s an edgy play on the classic Filet-O-Fish, but with curried chickpeas and Asian cabbage slaw on the patty.
The recipe reflects Marseille’s migrant roots: novel ingredients have passed through France’s biggest port for 2,600 years. Dates entered Europe through here, and most probably tomatoes and bananas too.
