PortraitFlashback (1/6). In culinary terms, the summer season rhymes with outdoor dining and cooking over embers. The opportunity to meet chefs who have been caught in the fire. On board his food truck, the three-starred Marseillais Alexandre Mazzia offers famous round breads made with vegetable charcoal.
New star of the Marseille gastronomic scene, Alexandre Mazzia recently won all the honors: crowned “cook of the year 2019” by Gault & Millau, it received three macaroons from the Michelin guide in 2021 and recently entered the international ranking of the 50 Best Restaurants. Inspired, innovative, quirky, perfectly in tune with the times, the culinary creator is at the head of the gourmet restaurant that bears his initials (AM), opened in 2014.
But also a food truck, named Michel, in homage to his fishing grandfather. Inaugurated in the spring of 2020, the truck offers raw cooking, on the barbecue, which brings it back to its origins. “During the first confinement, says Alexandre Mazzia, we had to close for more than three months. At that time, when I went for a run on the seaside, I saw vans grilling small dishes that people were ordering to take away. I immediately wanted to do the same. This allowed me to continue to make my teams work, while being closer to the people, products and tastes that surround us, but also to practice a direct and popular cuisine, which carries our DNA, but on the street side. »
For this chef from Pointe-Noire, Congo, son of a timber merchant and a chartered accountant, cooking over a flame is essential – a childhood memory buried deep within him. “For the first fifteen years of my life, I lived on the African coast. Every day, with my mother, we went to contemplate the sunset over the Atlantic, sitting on a driftwood trunk, and the smells of smoked and grilled fish filled the air. This is where my passion for burning finds its source. It’s also my first mafés and my first saka-sakas [ragoûts de feuilles de manioc] that simmered by the fire when I was a kid. It has become the architecture, the very backbone of our menu. »
In her restaurant, Mazzia flambés, roasts, burns her ingredients meticulously. Spices, vegetables, fish, juices… He seeks the perfect roasting, the caramelization which takes the tangent, the particular bitterness of what is consumed, almost burnt, not yet calcined.
On board his food truck, the captain and his team have fun with the embers and serve black buns (with vegetable charcoal), lightly smoked, stuffed with spicy avocado tartare, fresh sprouts, vegetables. roasts or grilled fish. Straight from the boat, the hake is marinated in miso (fermented soybean paste) and mirin (rice alcohol), barbecued, drizzled with lemon and olive oil, then coated in satay butter for a spin of the whole world.
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