We expected to taste a crab steak, and we end up with a bouquet on the plate. Pansies, burnet leaves with a fresh cucumber taste and carnation flowers draw on the Limougeau porcelain a rustic pink, mauve and green watercolor around the crab meat flavored with tarragon and candied tomatoes. Exquisite sketch… The artist’s name is Nadège Serret.
On the terrace of Château de la Pioline, in the shade of century-old lime trees, each dish is a concentrate of fantasy and technicality.
This 40-year-old Provençal, originally from Drôme, trained at Relais Bernard Loiseau, was recruited in 2020 to shake up the stoves of Villa Saint-Ange, a brand new palace, an oasis of freshness and calm set in a set of bastides XVIIIe close to the Cours Mirabeau, the main thoroughfare of Aix-en-Provence, in the Bouches-du-Rhône. If she recognizes that “Customers demand classics of Provençal cuisine”, it mischievously shakes up little stuffed dishes, ratatouille and tapenade by adding touches of borage, fuchsia, herbs and spices gleaned far beyond the region (Thai basil, roasted ginger, etc.).
Nadège Serret is one of the new hats who are tactfully heckling the Aix gastronomic scene, somewhat eclipsed in recent decades by that of its big neighbor. “Marseille has experienced a series of culinary booms since the end of the 1990s, comments Emmanuel Perrodin, historian and nomadic chef living in the Phocaean city. There was the arrival of Gérald Passédat, Lionel Lévy… up to a new generation of chefs who came to the city more recently, such as Matthieu Roche or the Mercerie team. All have brought gastronomy into modernity. Aix, which offered bourgeois cuisine, and which is smaller, less mixed, had a delay that it is catching up to today. “
Simmered barigoule artichokes with onions
In fact, the city loving more and more lovers of good food. Today, its town center is teeming with cellars offering local wines and gourmet bites: Mademoiselle Wine, Au verre risé or even the Céleste cocktail bar, where the small world of Aix gastronomy meets to drink.
And a wind of fantasy is blowing on his stoves. Even the most seasoned chefs are on the move. Julien Le Goff, a starry cordon bleu, for example deserted the comfort of his Saint-Estève kitchens to set off to attack the Bibémus quarries, facing the Sainte-Victoire mountain, for an “unusual dinner”, one of the culinary events organized in the summer in the Bouches-du-Rhône.
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