French Restaurant Review: L’Itinérance, Mers-les-Bains

Head to the Somme and the seaside town of Mers-les-Bains for a meal cooked by one of France’s most intriguing up-and-coming chefs.

With summer temperatures rising uncomfortably around the Mediterranean, many old-fashioned seaside resorts in northern France are enjoying a new wave of popularity. Most of them have long been popular with British travellers, but now they’re also getting a look-in from Parisians in search of a breath of fresh air for a weekend away, or a reasonably-priced low carbon-footprint summer holiday, since many of these nothern resorts can be reached by train and remain charmingly ungentrified. These factors explain why Paris restaurateur Jonathan Caron, who previously ran L’Innocence, a Michelin one-star table in the 9th arrondissement, decided to take over a slightly outdated hotel on the seafront in Mers-les-Bains, spiff it up a bit, and make it the improbable setting for his next restaurant, L’Itinérance, where one of the most intriguing up-and-coming chefs in France can be found.

His name is Manogeran Shasitharan, and he’s native of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As was circuitously related by Jonathan Caron after my spouse and I were seated for dinner in the seafront dining room, his journey to French gastronomy began with medical studies in England before a variety of problems sent him on the long odyssey that’s landed him in the kitchen here. Jack, as Shasitharan is known at L’Itinérance, worked in the kitchen of a variety of French chefs, including the late Marc Meneau and Jean-Michel Lorain, before fate delivered him to Mers-les-Bains, with its Belle-Époque villas and pebbled beach.

Our €75 tasting menu began with a provocatively delicious barbecued oyster seasoned with an extraction of rose vinegar. The gentle floral taste and tempered acidity of this latter product married brilliant with the sweet, lactic, saline flavours of the fleshy mollusc. Next, a dish of crunchy kale with apple, peanuts and fermented coconut cream, another umami bomb.

It was the next course that made me understand why I was having such a passionate reaction to Shasitharan’s cooking: roasted mushrooms with an XO sauce of mushrooms and a jus of mushroom-spiked almond milk. In Asia, XO sauce is usually made from fermented dried shrimp and is used in a way similar to Maggi sauce or cubes as a way of boosting flavour, but in a much more sophisticated register. In Malaysian cooking, there are deep resonances of contrasting taste and texture, and what Shasitharan has accomplished is a way of sublimating this Malay gastronomic kaleidoscope with French gastronomic technique and refinement. The results are fascinating for being so original and bracingly modern. We ate red mullet with mango, lemon, Buddha’s hand (a citrus) and citrus vinegar, scallops served two ways – raw with fermented mango and seaweed-infused honey, and sautéed with a condiment of coriander and celery and a bouillon made from the scallop’s beards seasoned with fresh curcuma. Then French lobster cooked in an oil infused with crushed lobster shell and a jus of the juices and meat extracted from the lobster’s head, with red curry – a spectacular dish.

This exquisite meal concluded with the best rice pudding I’ve ever had. It was fluffy, light, infused with black cardamom, dribbled with a caramel of chai tea and garnished with candied hazelnuts and a citrus condiment. Suffice it to say that Manogeran ‘Jack’ Shasitharan is going to put L’Itinérance and Mer-les-Bains on the map for food-lovers from all over the world. So go now – maybe as the perfect stop before or after Calais – before the world rushes in.

L’Itinérance, 24 Esplanade du Général Leclerc, Mers-les-Bains

Tel. (33) 02 35 86 12 89,

Prix-fixe menus €75 (six courses) and €49 (four courses). Lunch menus €28, €32. Rooms from €75.

From France Today Magazine