Yorkshiremen, crab claws and small portions

Rarely have I seen my boyfriend happier than on Friday night when I presented him with a big hunk of steak, some oven chips and a crème fraiche and Portobello mushroom sauce.

“This is one of your best,” he smiled, chomping as the grey sauce dribbled down his chin. My heart sank as I remembered all those complex, slaved-over compositions: the spatchcock chicken and fennel and cannelli bean stew, the pancetta and blue cheese risotto and the perfectly spiced curries.

“If all I have to do to please you is whack the best part of a cow on a griddle pan for a few minutes and shove some chips in the oven, then why do I bother?” I thought.

And then it hit me. I bother to woo him with such fripperies, such lovingly crafted dishes partly because I’m a feeder, and like an appreciative dining partner (which he inevitably is) but also because I have a fixated, almost Machiavellian relationship with food.

A bit like Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who insist on feeding capers, river trout and celeriac to families on low incomes, I insist on feeding soufflés, shellfish and star anise to a man who would be quite happy with a Fray Bentos.



And so it came to be that when we went out for a meal on Saturday night we ended up not in his curry house of choice, but in an Indian seafood restaurant, Rasa Samudra on Charlotte Street. There wasn’t any meat on the menu, and we ordered a crab and fish dish to share.

This meal was to be his treat, and, being a Yorkshireman through and through, he’s not exactly profligate with the cash. That’s not me making a hideous generalisation by the way – that's his words precisely. “I can’t help being tight – I’m a Yorkshireman.”

After a shared (ahem) starter of lightly spiced, deep fried aubergine with a tomato and coriander chutney, our mains came. And the portions were a little on the light side. Make that a lot on the light side. Tucking into the crab dish, we found ourselves with precisely two claws each, and, lovely as they were in their onion, mustard seed and green chilli accompaniment, it wouldn’t have been enough to satiate someone with half the gaping stomach capacity of me, and certainly didn’t justify the £12.75 price tag.

Stubborn as I am, I decided to avoid having that 'I-told-you-this-poncey-seafood-place-would-be-a-rip-off' conversation and ignore said small portion. Instead I chowed down on some serious chapatti. Jim, it seems, decided to fill up on Cobra.

What happened next is as predictable as it is absurd. We had a row.

Poor, brow-beaten Jim suddenly started looking a little bit glazed-over. He was drunk.

“It’s too bloody hot in here,” he snarled.

“Well take off your jumper then, you fool,” I hissed back.

“I don’t want to do that. It’s just too hot in here, it’s unacceptable,” he crooned.

“Don’t sit here and complain that you’re hot, when you’re sweltering in that woolly jumper,” I winced.

And so it went on. But what I didn’t realise at the time, when I was deriding Jim for his seemingly idiotic refusal to derobe, was that it wasn’t the jumper making him hot, it was anger. Anger at me, for my censorious way with food, anger at the restaurant for their small portions, and anger at himself, because the thought of a £50+ end-bill was making him sweat.

Le Petit Nice, Marseille

Perched on a rock, rising out of the transparent, turquoise sea on the coast of Marseille is Gerald Passedat’s gleaming white, neo greek villa and three Michelin starred restaurant Le Petit Nice.

The site itself resembles something from a Bond film – its sprawling terrace with pretty white lamp-posts, neat green hedges and sparkling swimming pool overlooking the lapping waves - a place for the ultimate pleasure seeker. On my visit it is, as is surely characteristic of this restaurant with rooms, awash with Marseille’s beautiful people – women with expensive bags, curling cigarette smoke and men in spruce linen suits.



I’m here with Chris Galvin, and his Windows restaurant team - manager Fred and head chef Andre, who are hoping to glean some inspiration from Passedat’s infamous 14 course seafood tasting menu. Earlier in the day we had managed a brief and somewhat frosty meeting with the man himself, who talked of the restaurant’s 90 year heritage. It was opened by his grandfather, and then run by his father before him who won the restaurant its first prize star in 1979 and a second in 1981. Passedat, who was born in the villa, but only took over the kitchen in 1990, this year became the only new three-star chef in the 2008 Michelin Red Guide.

An imposing figure in his crisp, immaculate whites, Passedat spoke of his belief in respecting his staff, his produce and nature – and revealed himself as a reformed traditionalist after years spent over-complicating food, whose strong relationships with local suppliers inspires and informs his cooking. As you’d expect from a restaurant with such a history, he knows everyone on the local food scene, and is happy to trust the local fisherman to bring back produce for him to use.

His menus focus predominantly on fish and seafood from the local vicinity, and he uses what he calls “Forgotten fish,” like denti (a local, fleshy, bass-like fish), tub gurnard and red scorpion fish. His cooking evokes the classicism perfected and passed down through the generations in Le Petit Nice’s 90 year history, but also relies on technical brilliance and progressive flavour combinations pioneered by him.



He tells us that his cooking is "simple, instinctive and classic" and that he does not believe in molecular gastronomy as it interferes too much with the ingredients – pointing out that lots of the protein glues used in this kind of cooking stick to the stomach. He says that his food is "not typical of Provencal Marseille cooking" but that he pays homage to some traditions - something you can see on his menu in his interpretation of the legendary local Bouillabaisse. Passedat's version uses seven fish and shellfish that vary depending on the day's catch, served with a "nectar of rockfish" and a spoonful of rice.

“They’re like film stars, these three star boys,” says Galvin with a slightly deflated sounding awe, after we finish our chat with the chef, whose brilliance and intense focus is, we hope, cause for his seemingly stand-offish demeanour.