In search of the best little cabanon in the Calanques

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High-concept restaurants can be interesting, and really glitzy places are amusing, but my dream table is at neither. I want a seat by the sea, accessible mainly by speedboat, with a canopy made of some sort of local leaves. The furniture wouldn’t be much to speak of, but the seafood would be stunningly fresh.

I remember seeing this table as a teenager, in magazines and European movies. The beautiful people still hung out on the Cote d’Azur back then, or the Balearics, or the quieter Greek islands, so the informal beachside shack was a happy trope. I grew up in a seaside town and it seemed achievable, to my naive mind, when a more conventionally luxurious venue was not.

For generations, people who lived near the sea or drew their livelihoods from it could put up shacks — the French call them cabanons — and serve what they’d caught to customers lucky enough to find them. The cabanons of southern France were usually tiny, unregulated, not advertised or marketed. An under-the-radar fantasy for food lovers with a romantic streak.

But waterside real estate is unimaginably highly prized and regulation of any public eating establishment is draconian, so most of the cabanons have disappeared. Shut down by government, sold up to developers and, in the case of the many legendary little spots in the Calanques (limestone creeks) to the east of Marseille, entirely erased.

You can’t blame the French for turning such a ridiculously beautiful and wild area into a highly protected reserve, but it meant that, by the time I’d worked out that this was where my dream ­restaurant probably was, most of them had been bulldozed. Except one. Calanque de Morgiou lies between Marseille and Cassis. You could reach it by boat from either, but it’s far enough from both that the tourist boats don’t bother. There’s a tiny fishing community on the edge of the water where, by some arcana of regional legislation, the houses can only be sold to locals. Nautic Bar is not photogenic, not glossy. It’s grubby, “single toilet” authentic. It serves the locals and anyone mad enough to make the journey. It’s not that difficult to get a booking, but phoning ahead (if you can find the number) is important for two reasons. You need to order the bouillabaisse in advance if that’s your fancy, and, if you’re coming by car, they need your registration number at the gates.

To reach the Nautic from land, you need to drive out through the increasingly sparse suburbs of Marseille until you pass the grim concrete bastions of Baumettes, one of the most notorious prisons in France. A couple of kilometres beyond it, you’ll find the gate of a nature reserve. If they don’t have your car registration number, then you’re on foot, down 5km of steep track. That’ll take you about two hours. If they have your reg, they unchain the barrier and the kerbless, rutted, single track fire road is yours for a 20-minute switchback ride that will either give you a tremendous adrenalin-perked appetite, or have the sapeurs-pompiers winching your body back up the cliff.

There are two terraces. Plastic chairs and paper tablecloths clipped down against the wind. Decor is a random spattering of souvenir posters and weapons-grade bric-a-brac. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, naff as hell.

The menu is chalked on a board and brought to your table. It’s short and to the point. Soupe de poisson is the easier version of a bouillabaisse that doesn’t need pre-ordering. It’s not as regulated, so it comes how the cook likes it, with some, maybe all, of the trimmings, but without the great groaning platter of whole seafood served alongside. Bouillabaisse is a performance. Soupe de poisson is actually a reasonable lunch.

Here the soup is beige and unthickened, quite shockingly austere. Clear tastes, modest, gentle spicing, a flavour that makes you wonder if it’s been cooked in seawater. Best of all is the smell. Very fresh fish doesn’t smell “fishy” and indeed the soup doesn’t. Instead it has the much more complex smell of fishing. The smell of sea, weed, crusted salt, the working boats and piles of drying nets below, the hot cliffs soaring above you, the wind off the Mediterranean, the very air around you. Relayed and amplified through soup.

There’s a big bowl of croutons and garlic cloves to grate against them. There’s a mound of cheese that would not legally pass as Gruyère. But the point isn’t to be fussy. The rouille is ravishing. Extremely smooth, fragrant with red pepper and with the gelled texture you get when emulsifying a hyper-authentic aioli from garlic rather than a mayo from egg yolk. The chef might not have a wide repertoire, but he’s got something better — a long lifetime of experience and love of his food. There was wine, plentiful, local and pink, and a grilled Loup-de-mer, yanked straight out of the ocean, with ratatouille that could support an essay all of its own.

It was, as you can imagine, with a weirdly mixed set of emotions that I sat looking out over the little harbour. The food was my favourite kind; made with great ingredients, craft, skill and love. Have I had better? Well, of course, but it was reassuring to realise how little that mattered. There had been a moment, 3km down the fire road, when I found myself whooping like a madman out of the open window. “Hell yes! This is why we do this!”

Was Nautic Bar the beachside joint of my dreams? I’m not sure I can answer. Getting to it had meant me finding out how few of them there are left, and how quickly and how quietly they disappear. If it wasn’t exactly right, it might just have to do. And that is bittersweet.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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