French Restaurant Review: Marius, Paris

This new restaurant in Paris Gare de Lyon train station serves up flavourful and affordable Mediterranean food to eat in or take away.

Marius, the lively, light-filled new brasserie at Paris’s Gare de Lyon train station (which serves Lyon, Avignon, Provence and the Riviera) offers a welcome alternative to the usual dull offer of franchised sandwich vendors like Paul and the welcome hope that eating in France’s transit hubs might actually improve.

To be sure, the Gare de Lyon has one of the best train station restaurants in the world, the magnificent Belle Époque Le Train Bleu, which is named after a famous night train that once journeyed between Paris and Nice, but landing a reservation at this restaurant is a trial and it’s expensive. In contrast, the pan-Mediterranean menu at Marius offers an intriguing take on how much French eating habits have changed since 1900, when the Gare de Lyon reopened after an extravagant remodelling by architect Marius Toudoire, as well as some appetising and affordable food to eat in or take away (a good alternative to the sorry food served on French trains). Among the dishes on offer at Marius are brik à l’œuf de la Goulette (La Goulette is a seaside suburb of Tunis), a crispy pastry filled with an organic egg, tinned tuna, potatoes, parsley and a side of harissa; sea bream tagine with pickled lemons; and shakshuka served with pitta bread.

This new address is the brainchild of Paris chef Yoni Saada, whose Tunisian grandfather was the founder of the oldest kosher butcher shop in Paris’ Marais district. Saada grew up eating both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking, which honed the love for and curiosity about food that led him to enrol in the prestigious École Ferrandi cooking school in Paris. Diploma in hand, he worked for Yannick Alléno at the Hôtel Meurice and Frédéric Anton at Le Pré Catelan before realising that his preferred gastronomic idiom wasn’t haute cuisine but street food. Now his Paris restaurant, Zaza, specialises in Israeli street food; his Bagnard sandwich shop showcases Nice’s famous pan bagnat sandwich; and Bagnard par Yoni Saada, a bistro at the Galeries Lafayette department store, serves up a diverse Mediterranean menu. Saada’s goal? “Making good eating democratic.”

Marius, Gare de Lyon, Place Louis Armand, 12th arrondissement, Paris.

Open daily with non-stop service from 5.30am to 9.30pm.

From France Today Magazine