AM par Alexandre Mazzia - Marseille
Rating: 17/20
Where: Marseille, France
When: Dinner for 4 on 12 May 2022
Cost: Tasting menu 335-395 Euro, Wine Pairing 145 Euro
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars, #80 on Top 50 Restaurants list (2022)
Why: A firework of different spices and flavors, not your typical French fine-dining restaurant
AM par Alexandre Mazzia is located on a side-street in a residential neighborhood of Marseille. Large windows look out on the street, but without much of a view. More exciting is the view of the open kitchen, which can be had from almost all tables, and especially from the two seats at the chef's counter. The decor is very simple: wooden tables, no tablecloths, diners dressed casually (French casual, not American casual, thankfully).
The name "AM" can be read both as the initials of the chef, or phonetically as the French word for "soul", which is what the cuisine seeks to display.
Ordering at AM is easy: for dinner there are just two possible tasting menus, distinguished by their length (and corresponding price). We went for the longer of the two, and skipped the optional cheese course. The menu format is carte blanche, so that the actual dishes are a surprise when they appear at the table. A wine pairing of only white wines (plus a dessert wine) is available as well.
AM is very unusual in how the food is delivered to the diner. There were five courses in our menu (six if you count the amuse bouches), but each course was a collection of several individual dishes. The printed menu we received at the end listed no fewer than 35 (!) dishes in total.
Eight amuse bouches, served at the same time, started our dinner. We were told to first eat a local fish, served as an almost raw slice, together with a crystallized cabbage leaf. The fish was a bit dry, and didn't taste of much 16. The cabbage leaf was nicely crunchy, and had strong flavor 17. I really wish I'd eaten them together in one bite instead of sequentially, since they probably would have complemented each other well in terms of flavor intensity and texture.
For the remaining amuses, only the final one was suggested, but the rest could be eaten in any order. The same was true for the following courses, the first and/or last dish might be specified, but the rest was up to us.
So, picking randomly, we next tried a langoustine in a broth of sumac spice. This was delicious with lots of spices and strong flavors, the langoustine pieces in the broth of good quality 18+.
A piece of parsnip served in edible paper felt more like a palate cleanser, with a nice marinated parsnip taste, but otherwise just a single-note dish 16. Sweet potato mousse on top of a seaweed cracker was a bit too sweet, but the cracker had a nice crunch 15. A cheese cracker "sandwich" also had a nice texture, but the pistachio mousse inside it had barely any detectable flavor 15. Two slices of beef, prepared slightly differently, were stacked on top of a biscuit. The biscuit was soggy, and the beef had little flavor 13.
The final amuse bouche was shrimp served on a spoon with chili oil and other spices. This was easily the best of the bunch, well spiced without being too hot 19.
Next up - the first "real" course, consisting of three dishes. The theme of this course, we were told, was to demonstrate the main pillars of the chef's cooking, such as spices and roasting.
We first tried a cup of salmon and trout eggs marinated in sake, with hazelnuts and (I think) hazelnut milk. This was a delightful dish - spices were used subtly, and the dish was light and exhibited elegant flavors 19. Less successful was a vegetable crisp covered with flowers. The cream inside the crisp "sandwich" made this feel cream-cheesy (and not in a good way), the flavors a bit muddled and not as precise as in the preceding dish 15. Smoked eel with chocolate was an interesting flavor combination, and better than it may sound. The chocolate was not very sweet, and added smokiness to the dish. The eel was not that flavorful, so as a whole I'd consider this interesting, but not terribly exciting 16. My dining companions disagreed, and thought that this was an excellent dish.
The second course arrived with bread and three dishes. The "Viennese bread" was spherical and subtly smoked. It came with a butter incorporating kaffir limes. The bread was not that memorable, but the butter was excellent 16.
First, we ate a dish of dorade and crab, marinated with sake and beets. This had subtle spices, and was fine, but not spectacular 16. The dish was served on a spoon and had to be eaten first, since this was the only utensil on the table and was needed for the other two dishes. I thought that this was pretty clever - imposing an implicit order for eating the dishes based on freeing required utensils. One could almost imagine this as an edible puzzle, if taken further.
One of the two dishes requiring a spoon was a bowl of semolina topped with orange, horseradish and a sauce of spider king crab intestines. Warm and hearty, this was also quite heavy and the flavors were muddled together; it was hard to taste the horseradish, for example 17. Better was a dish of marinated mussels, herring and mackerel, topped with beet slices and surrounded by a "white mustard" sauce. The seafood itself was spiced very nicely, with citrus and generally big flavors. The sauce on the other hand was very subtle, and made the dish lighter without contributing much flavor 18.
We were not given an explicit theme for this second course, but "variations of seafood" would seem appropriate. Crab appeared twice, with the semolina dish being a bit of an outlier in terms of both heaviness and flavor profile. The following third course also starred seafood, but this time solely in the form of crawfish.
Bread for the third course was focaccia served with a butter containing black cumin among other spices. And spicy it was indeed, I liked this better than the previous course's bread 17.
The bread came with crawfish served two ways. First, crawfish was deep-fried with seaweed "popcorn" and a lemon condiment. The crawfish was still moist and cooked perfectly with wonderful spices 17. My dining companions thought this was the best dish of the night ("easily a 20"), praising the clean, delicious crawfish flavor.
Unlike them, I liked the second preparation of crawfish better. It was served under a "fruit rollup"-shaped cassava, with carrots, powdered vegetables cooked in seawater, and an "eggnog" sauce - egg yolk cooked in rice vinegar with cumin. This was a hearty dish, the sauces wonderful but admittedly overpowering the more gentle crawfish flavor 18.
The final savory course consisted of no fewer than seven dishes. Try as we might, we couldn't come up with a coherent theme for this course. Maybe "everything but the kitchen sink"? This course had a breadth more often seen in an amuse bouche selection.
Spinach tempura with smoked pike roe and chili on top had a nice crunch and only a touch of spiciness to it 18. Morel mushrooms served with onions, garlic, raspberry and a sauce of duck and pepper were a meaty, rich dish that could have accommodated a red wine 17. Wasabi ice cream with bacon powder tasted mostly of sweet cream, we had hoped for more of a kick given the mention of "wasabi" 16.
Delicious in-season green peas formed the backbone of a dish with white asparagus, spinach, ginger and an emulsion of green tea. This was a generally wonderful dish with the exception of the spinach which tasted just like plain, unseasoned, boiled spinach that an uninspired cook might make at home. Maybe it was meant to be mixed with the rest of the dish, adding texture? By itself, it seemed out of place. The white asparagus was the smallest I've ever encountered, only a few millimeters in diameter 17.
A zucchini blossom was served with a dried eggplant slice in a passionfruit sauce - a surprisingly sweet dish for a savory course. The acidity of the passionfruit cut through some of the sweetness, and I thought this was a nice dish in general, but still an odd outlier in this particular course 17.
Three spinach leaves topped with different powders were served over fried noodles, alongside a vegetable curry. The fried pasta gave this dish an Asian touch. I'm not sure whether the spinach leaves integrated that well with the rest of the dish, but otherwise this was great 17.
Finally, a chicken miso soup with an oyster and different vinegars (no photo) was a nice, warm complement to the other dishes. It was full of flavor, but seemed a little bitter to me 16. My dining companions would have rated this considerably higher.
At this point we were too full to attempt the optional cheese course, which would have been a dish prepared with cheese as opposed to a traditional cheese cart. So instead, we went straight to the intermezzo, a sorbet of raspberry and harissa (no photo). The sorbet was very spicy, the spiciest dish on the menu in fact, overpowering even the raspberry flavor. It definitely did its job as a palate cleanser 16.
The final course - dessert - consisted of four dishes. Ice cream of green matcha had both nice texture and a welcome bitterness from the matcha 18. A canele cake topped with apple, along with a hibiscus flower sauce was my favorite dish in this course. More traditional than the other desserts, it was simply a really nice apple cake, and not too sweet 18.
Sweet potato slices were artfully folded around mango and dates, and served with verbena water. A very light dessert, sweet and with notes of cinnamon 16. The final dish was based on a dessert from the chef's childhood (he grew up in Congo). Banana cream was served underneath mango covered with puffed rice. A nice, simple dish 17.
With coffee and tea, the final six nibbles arrived. Pineapple and passionfruit ice cream was great, and almost made us forget about the earlier wasabi ice cream 17. A grilled corn meringue topped with frozen corn (no photo) was nice, but very chewy 16. A dish of sweet potato, raspberry, passion fruit blossom, lemon and basil was ok 15. Better was a cracker topped with mango and guava; the foamy chips were spicy, the dish not too sweet 17. A spoon of avocado and some spices was very spicy indeed, and tasted more of aniseed than of avocado 15. Finally, a sage ice cube with apple water, citrus and gin was a refreshing way to end the dinner. With (relatively speaking) little spice, it was a perfect capstone to the meal 15.
Thirty-five dishes later, lots of thoughts went through our minds. First, we felt really full. Not so much because we had too much to eat - most dishes were just a few bites -, but because the whole dinner lasted less than three hours. That’s a lot of food in a relatively short amount of time. We also felt exhausted and overwhelmed, since in such a short amount of time, it’s hard to appreciate and process each single dish.
Given so many different dishes with wildly varying flavors and levels of spices, it's easy to lose track and miss the forest for the trees. There is an overarching theme of using spices and spiciness in ways that differ significantly from traditional French cooking, and reflect the chef's upbringing in Africa (as was mentioned several times by the staff). That makes this restaurant very unique, and I'm very happy that we had the experience. However, I feel that serving multiple and very, very different dishes in the same course, and not imposing an order among them, causes a bit of whiplash. Think salty, sweet, salty, sweet, spicy, not spicy, spicy, ..., this was just all over the place. A clearer progression, or a more thematic grouping of dishes would have made it easier to appreciate and contextualize them. In fact, other restaurants that similarly serve more than twenty dishes, such as DiverXO or the early Alinea, do so mostly sequentially, so that there are just one or two things to focus on at a time, and the menu maintains some sense of overall direction in how dishes relate to each other.
As a final note, there were a few "lost in translation" moments during our dinner. The request for a pescatarian diet apparently didn't register, since we were served dishes with beef, chicken and duck, all generally not considered to be seafood. When one of us left for the bathroom just before a course showed up, the staff’s attitude was “well, too bad for them”, and proceeded to serve the dishes without all diners present. And we noticed only at the end that the sommelier had forgotten to serve the first of the paired wines. It was all a bit too hectic.
Overall: A firework of different and unique flavors and spices, making this an exciting, interesting, memorable, but also exhausting experience. Not a dinner that's easy to grok in its entirety due to so many individual dishes, but definitely yielding food for thought for many days afterwards. Ignoring the big picture (possibly unfairly), and just concentrating on the food itself, this felt a bit below a three-star level 17.
Tasting menu with 35 individual dishes
PS: The restaurant is not too far from the water, so this made for a lovely evening run with many locals on the same path.