Instinctively intrigued by ports, I’d been wanting to visit Sète for a very long time and so was delighted when Canadian friends who live in Narbonne suggested we meet up there for a weekend, because among its other attractions, Sète has recently emerged as a seriously good food town. Arriving by train late in the afternoon, as I stepped down on to the station platform, I immediately had the impression of being somewhere different and far away.
On an overcast spring afternoon, Sète felt pleasantly moody and very Mediterranean as I walked to my room at the Rio, an old cinema converted into a delightful B&B with a winning retro vibe. A sucker for the vinyl jazz records and old-fashioned record player I found in my room, I sat on the balcony overlooking the city’s main canal and took in the briny sensuality of this mysterious place, before nipping out for a quick snack because I was ravenous after missing lunch. I bought a tielle, a sturdy shortcrust hand-pie filled with spicy octopus ragu that’s a local speciality, at the Paradiso bakery and ate it on a café terrace with a glass of flinty Picpoul. The pale orange blazes around the crimping that sealed the tart tipped off its seasonings of smoked paprika and tomato, and it was a perfect gastronomic expression of a city where so many of the locals have southern Italian heritage.
I met my friends for dinner that night at The Marcel, a handsome Michelin-starred restaurant run by young chef Denis Martin, a native of Avignon who has impressively cracked the codes of this clannish port to become its favourite local chef. With a floor of polished cement tiles, exposed stone walls and several metal chandeliers of flea-market provenance, the dining room had a nonchalant sophistication that immediately put us at ease, and the young staff were warm and attentive.