Anthony Bourdain once picked out the “most underrated” travel location
The late Anthony Bourdain was a much-beloved author, chef, and travel documentarian, a sharp-tongued punk rocker of the culinary world who often touched on the need to take cooking back to basics, bored of celebrity chefs and their overly polished take on cooking. His take was that bad food was made by chefs who are indifferent, or worse: “Those who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone,” something the sardonic Bourdain could never be accused of.
His hit series, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, saw the chef travel the globe in search of some genuine authenticity and great food. It was on the show he named Marseille as one of the most underrated locations he’d been to.
His punk, anti-conformity spirit was on full display during the Marseille episode when he declared half the reason he was so attracted to the French town was because its standing with the locals wasn’t great.
“If you’ve been to France, chances are you haven’t been here, France’s second-largest city, the oldest city in France,” explained Bourdain. “It sits right by the Mediterranean. The food is famously good. Yet it’s a victim of bad reputation, bad history. Marseille, as it turns out, is exactly the kind of place I like.”
In his field notes, Bourdain wrote that his 2015 trip there was spent with good friend and chef Eric Ripert, the chef and owner of three-Michelin-star Le Bernardin in New York City. Ripert, despite having grown up only a few hundred miles away from Marseille in Antibes, had never been there before. Famous for encouraging people to expand their palettes, Bourdain revelled in the chance to introduce Ripert to Marseille, so the pair could learn something together.
“Maybe there was some learning after all,” he wrote. “We both learned that Marseille is a great, underappreciated travel destination, a hidden gem that isn’t hidden at all—a great city with great food and great views, sitting right on the edge of the blue Mediterranean, surrounded by freakin’ Provence. It’s got it all.”
Bourdain also touched on the racist perception that Marseille is not France, which the locals told him in “unguarded moments”. The subtext of those comments, to Bourdain, stemmed from the fact it was “too Arab, too Italian, too Corsican, too mixed up with foreignness to be truly and adequately French.”
But to Bourdain, that’s what made the city glorious. In the episode, he concluded it was not France – but in the best possible way. The Middle Eastern spices that enriched its food were a hit with Bourdain, who had high praise for the mixed “cultural and culinary influences have enriched Marseille with flavours and colours all their own.”
But it wouldn’t be Bourdain without a flash of sarcasm, so naturally, he added: “But there’s another major influence: the Corsican mafia.”
