French Restaurant Review: The Marcel, Sète

With his contemporary take on French cuisine, the Avignon-born chef of The Marcel has managed to win the hearts of the Sétois, the fascinating port overlooking the Thau lagoon in the south of France.

One of the most beautiful stretches of train line in France is the segment that runs along the Mediterranean Sea most of the way from the Spanish border to the old port town of Sète (afterwards it heads inland towards Montpellier and Nîmes). I’ve made this trip many times over the years, and the fleeting glimpses of Sète I’ve had from the train have left me fascinated. To begin with, it has a dramatic setting at the foot of a great round seaside outcrop known as the Mont Saint-Clair and at the easternmost shore of theÉtang de Thau, a long salt-water lagoon that’s one of the great centres of oyster farming in France.

The port was founded by King Louis XIV in 1666 to create an outlet to the sea for the Canal du Midi, which would facilitate the export of wine from Languedoc to the rest of Europe. Sète boomed during the 19th century as the transshipment port for wine from Algeria, then a French department and the largest exporter of wine in the world. As an adjunct, Sète was also the largest cooperage town, producing tens of thousands of wooden barrels annually. All of this came to an abrupt end when Algeria gained independence in 1962.

Instinctively intrigued by ports, I’d been wanting to visit Sète for a very long time and so was delighted when Canadian friends who live in Narbonne suggested we meet up there for a weekend, because among its other attractions, Sète has recently emerged as a seriously good food town. Arriving by train late in the afternoon, as I stepped down on to the station platform, I immediately had the impression of being somewhere different and far away.

On an overcast spring afternoon, Sète felt pleasantly moody and very Mediterranean as I walked to my room at the Rio, an old cinema converted into a delightful B&B with a winning retro vibe. A sucker for the vinyl jazz records and old-fashioned record player I found in my room, I sat on the balcony overlooking the city’s main canal and took in the briny sensuality of this mysterious place, before nipping out for a quick snack because I was ravenous after missing lunch. I bought a tielle, a sturdy shortcrust hand-pie filled with spicy octopus ragu that’s a local speciality, at the Paradiso bakery and ate it on a café terrace with a glass of flinty Picpoul. The pale orange blazes around the crimping that sealed the tart tipped off its seasonings of smoked paprika and tomato, and it was a perfect gastronomic expression of a city where so many of the locals have southern Italian heritage.

I met my friends for dinner that night at The Marcel, a handsome Michelin-starred restaurant run by young chef Denis Martin, a native of Avignon who has impressively cracked the codes of this clannish port to become its favourite local chef. With a floor of polished cement tiles, exposed stone walls and several metal chandeliers of flea-market provenance, the dining room had a nonchalant sophistication that immediately put us at ease, and the young staff were warm and attentive.

Martin cooks in a well-lit open kitchen at the head of the dining room, which adds some theatre to the experience of a meal here, and his seasonally revised tasting menus offer a similarly dramatic presentation of the best local produce, which is prepared with precision and wit.

In a port like Sète, seafood stars, including the sublime red Mediterranean tuna that debuted our meal. It was prepared like a vitello tonnato, the Italian dish of finely sliced roast veal with creamy tuna sauce, but refined and deconstructed to include garnishes of plump caperberries, pickled red onions and a thick breadstick wrapped in a fine slice of smoked pork belly and served with a reduction of dried bonito broth. Next, a delicate and very tender slice of cuttlefish hid a little mound of potato ‘spaghetti’ seasoned with seaweed vinegar and a reduction of rouille, a succulent and very clever contemporary riff on fish soup. This was another exceptionally good and original dish that perfectly defined why Martin’s cooking is so appealing.

He privileges the natural tastes and textures of his produce, enhancing and revealing them with gastronomic ingenuity that never becomes precious or silly. This is exactly the type of contemporary French cooking I enjoy most today – light, legible and lyrical, and the Montrealers agreed. Plump grilled langoustines with a vanilla-spiked celeriac purée and baby spinach with toasted hazelnuts followed, another effortlessly elegant and intriguing dish, since the crunchy buttery nuts met the sweetness of the crustacean with a thrilling subtlety.

Then we were piloted into port by a dish with a rich gust of umami, roasted veal with black truffles, poached bone marrow, and a potato-and-Jerusalem artichoke cappuccino, followed by an intriguing course of caramelised pumpkin seeds and citrus under a cloud of chocolate to set us up for a delightful dessert of assorted citrus fruits refreshed with saffron and garnished with a pane of meringue, biscuit viennois and sorbet kalamansi (the latter being a small citrus fruit with a powerful taste). Priced at €115, this seven-course meal offers excellent value. Don’t miss Les Halles de Sète, the town’s lively market, and be sure to book a table at The Marcel’s simpler Cuisine du Marché restaurant for lunch.

The Marcel, 5 rue Lazare Carnot, Sète, Tel. (33) 04 67 74 20 89,

From France Today Magazine