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.